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Google and Facebook 'Must Pay For News' From Which They Make Billions (yahoo.com)
Internet giants such as Google and Facebook must pay copyright charges for using news content on their platforms, nine European press agencies said. These giant platforms, news agencies said, make vast profits from news content on their platforms. The call comes at a time when the EU is debating a directive to make Facebook, Google, Twitter and other major players pay for the millions of news articles they use or link to. From a report: "Facebook has become the biggest media in the world," the agencies said in a plea published in the French daily Le Monde. "Yet neither Facebook nor Google have a newsroom... They do not have journalists in Syria risking their lives, nor a bureau in Zimbabwe investigating Mugabe's departure, nor editors to check and verify information sent in by reporters on the ground." The agencies argued, "access to free information is supposedly one of the great victories of the internet. But it is a myth."
Let those new outlets get their own clicks the hard way, instead of having FB and Google funnel people straight to them. Spoiler alert: I won't see their articles anymore.
Is it good for healthy societies to have one or two giant for-profit companies controlling most of the news people see? There are three forseeable outcomes-
1. The aggregator manipulates which stories are shown based on payments by the news organizations, or by 3rd parties
2. The aggregator tries to show the user exactly what they want to see, and hides articles they do not want to see
3. Combination of the above
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Right. But isn't this was robots.txt is for? Perhaps we need to update the RFC to indicate that the page(s) are okay for search results, but not okay for aggregators? Seems like a simple fix that doesn't involve lawyers.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.