Slashdot Mirror
Google Considering Pulling News Service From Europe (bloomberg.com)
Google is considering pulling its Google News service from Europe as regulators work toward a controversial copyright law. From a report: The European Union's Copyright Directive will give publishers the right to demand money from Alphabet, Facebook and other web platforms when fragments of their articles show up in news search results, or are shared by users. The law was supposed to be finalized this week but was delayed by disagreement among member states.
Google News might quit the continent in response to the directive, said Jennifer Bernal, Google's public policy manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The internet company has various options, and a decision to pull out would be based on a close reading of the rules and taken reluctantly, she said. "The council needs more time to reflect in order to reach a solid position" on the directive, said a representative of Romania, current head of the European Council, which represents the 28 member nations.
Google News might quit the continent in response to the directive, said Jennifer Bernal, Google's public policy manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The internet company has various options, and a decision to pull out would be based on a close reading of the rules and taken reluctantly, she said. "The council needs more time to reflect in order to reach a solid position" on the directive, said a representative of Romania, current head of the European Council, which represents the 28 member nations.
Where will Europeans get their news from? Maybe Slashdot?
I presume the fuss is over the supposed "hyper-link tax" which has to be one the most idiotic ideas I've come across in my adult life. This is not how the web is supposed to work. There is no way that paying one site to provide a link to site makes any sense in any rational being's mind.
If there's going to be *ANY* exchange of cash for hyperlinks, it totally should be the opposite direction. Site A pays Site B to entice Site B to link to Site A's pages. Paid promotion of your content. This sort of makes sense, I can tolerate it at least. But Site A paying Site B for the "privilege" of linking to pages on Site B. STUPID BEYOND BELIEF.
If anything shackles the internet in the EU, this is it right here. Proceed with caution, you're going to basically crack the internet's entire foundation of sharing information.
... the Powers That Be (tm) are intent on returning to single source fount of information.
This whole internet thing threw a spanner in the works for a few years, but looks like it's being reigned in.
Back to business as usual.
Check your premises.
The EU is your God. Thou shalt have no other gods before the EU.
I think we'll manage just fine without Slashdot. They are, after all, nothing more than a parasitical aggregator in any case. I generally read several news websites directly (as well as printed copy), it's not like Slashdot was adding a lot of value on top of that.
Not even Google?
Well gosh, I guess it's wonderful that you'll be comfortably inside your cocoon, safe from anything your particular sources don't want you to hear.
Aren't most of the google servers the server news in the United states? I guess if they want to agrigate European news they will need to do it from a domain that says .us ? .
Exactly how does EU copyright law apply to an american company? Can't they simply claim they are not doing business in the EU and that anyone accessing their site is importing content ?
As a further thought is Google liable for content they provide if I obscure my location? ( incognito mode? )
Or is the idea just that they are not allowed to provide the service to anyone anywhere in the world ever, regardless of local laws?
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Google news ist quite bad in Germany. Not all mayor media are listed. You still have to visit some media websites like "Frankfurter Allgemeine" separately.
Health topic is very bad with just one outlet posting questionable news and spamming the news system by posting one story under several different titles.
Keep going, nothing to see here...
All your .eu are belong to yahoo now!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This "link tax" is about the same as saying: I have to pay an author of a book royalties if I suggest to others that they read it, perhaps quoting a passage or paragraph from that book in my effort to get you to read it.
Does this make sense to anyone? Of course it doesn't. The world doesn't work like that.
But in the magical fairy land of the EU, this is precise what they want to do. You pay the author if you even want to suggest others read the author's content. STUPID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There's not enough exclamation points in the universe to properly emphasize this!
Quite a bit is lost, actually. The media is loosing credibility, and this accelerates their loss of credibility.
The law is a proposal which has been rejected so often that it entered the last and final chance a proposal gets in EU legislature. However the article here makes it sound like it was to be ratified this week. There was even a different article on /. about this a few days ago. https://slashdot.org/story/19/...
Most likely the Parliament and Council would disagree again, won't find a compromise both are happy with and the proposal fails. Then it'd be off the tables for some time, because the Council most certainly will be back at it with a slightly differently worded proposal.
Anyway, the Parliament listening to public opinion once in a while is being attributed to the stink caused by EU citizens, who generally dislike the idea. So keep it up.
So some webs lost my visits.
Same as everyone else
The relationship is much more symbiotic than parasitical; Google News pulled out of Spain at the end of 2014 for a similar link tax, and the publishers floundered:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/...
[the] 'substitution effect' is very small in comparison to the 'market expansion effect' that aggregators cause.
This just in ..... BBC, CNN, Al Jazerra, Fox, Infowars, RT News and all other reputable and swivel eyed news channels not pulling out of Europe.
they should just shut it down for a few days and see how quickly all those news outlets complain to their MEPs about lost ad revenue.
I can see blocking service from pinhead weasels like the EU. they don't want any accidental usage, shut 'em down. Google News is not free... it's ad-driven. and even use of a US trademark legally in an ad that might be otherwise registered in the EU, like, say, Budweiser, is cause for big-ass unrelated fines. fsck 'em.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
If news companies don't want Google indexing their content, they should just say so in their robots.txt file. There's no reason for Google to completely abandon the EU, and there's no reason for content owners to complain that others are indexing their content when they have a perfectly functionality way of controlling whether or not the content is indexed.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
now can they please pull it from this continent too?
Google is a search engine, it shouldn't show the texts of the news articles, etc. lately it has also been vampirizing Wikipedia and others. The web works when everybody respects everybody else.
Along with all Android phones from Europe. See how long it takes for the EU to change it's tune.
This. As a European I say: good on Google for pulling out if this dumb law gets passed.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Put a token, few lines of free news on your approved EU nation "news" sites.
When the users click, find, links all they get is the login in paywall.
The branding is kept online.
People can still find the magazine, newspaper brand online.
The content has to be paid for. By the day, week, month, year.
No new EU laws and taxes needed.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It's funny because in french, "EU" ~ "É.U." = the acronym for "États-Unis" (United States).
#DeleteFacebook
If Google, Bing, et. al. just stop serving the EU entirely rather than comply, I'm imagining people all over the continent shambling around outside in the rain and looking for that "library" their parents told them about so they can reacquaint themselves with encyclopedias and microfilmed copies of old newspapers whenever they need to look something up.
Hopefully not all of those old libraries will have been converted into mosques by now.
The last time google pulled news from Germany, the news paper websites lost 70% traffic redirects....
So suck on that looser.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I see you really like Star Wars.
just put a technology tax on all invoices to news media outlets who are your clients, and government agenies to reciprocate what they are doing to everyone else without cause. it took me a while to figure that out.. don't hate the game, just play it on their terms. i call it the ticky tax legislation work around for government they use at will and just continually increase with or without notice and then takes years to remove. alas, i squander more of my minutes on slash. ;-) grin.
As Google fully relies on third parties for all news news they share, thatâ(TM)s no loss. Even worse, Google has a history in sharing articles from known fake sites, so Europeans are better off.
i.e. Search engine crawlers should not index the site, unless the site owner explicitly allows it in the robots.txt file.
I mean I completely understand why it's set up the way it is. Setting the robots.txt to disallow crawling doesn't actually disallow crawling. It's just that the services which respect the file won't crawl your site if you have it set to disallow them. Inverting it gives the false sense that unless you explicitly allow crawlers, it is somehow impossible for them to index your site.
But that seems to be what the EU legal system wants. So maybe that's the way it should work, despite the false sense of security it may give the more clueless people.
Come on, Google.
Your threat is really meaningless. Just do it. Bar all of Europe from all google services for two days prior to the vote.
Or for ever, but google doesn't have the balls to do that.
aaaaaaa
This is the sort of anti-US-company BS that Trump should and could take on if he were not so distracted by "scary brown people". There are a lot of annoying visa- and trade-related practices that a majority of Americans would stand behind; he could have become a popular "populist". Opportunity wasted.
Table-ized A.I.
We don't need no stinking First Amendment!
2nd tier ones are dirt cheap. Then they can link to those as much as they want to.
Maybe that is the plan. Pull out now, depress the market, and then buy.
Currently, Europe is the only place willing to hold them accountable. Google are slime, if you haven't caught on to that, you are slow. Very.
Continue google news with french articles from canada or africa
As noted in the article you linked. Aggregators drive traffic that wouldn't exist otherwise. When google left the spanish market there was a drop in 6-12% of visitors to previously linked sites.
Aggregation is a symbiotic relationship in that it allows news consumers to view snippets and consume more news and to selectively pair out stories or biased content. This empowers viewers and forces publishers to bring more relevant news articles that will draw clicks. But it also draws more visitors to those articles that can better draw viewers.
The bad side effect is it causes clickbait headlines and snippets. But European publishers are idiots if they think Google is a parasite in this relationship, Google is probably the only thing keeping them in business at this point. If they force Google News out of Europe they'll be sending lots of European news customers outside the block.
Correction re: "There are a lot of annoying visa- and trade-related practices that a majority of Americans would stand behind..."
Reworked version: There are a lot of annoying visa- and trade-related practices for which a majority of Americans would stand behind efforts to resolve.
(It's still awkward. Possible mod-points for the best fixer suggestion...)
I shall also add that even if such practices are arguably "fair" from Europe's standpoint, having somebody working to get better terms and deals would still be satisfying to most Americans, if done in a tasteful way.
Table-ized A.I.
They threaten to quit, without having the cost analysis of the new law? Who can believe the threat is serious?
why shut down news?
just delete those sites from the ENTIRE FUCKING INDEX.
(not just on the news page, *everywhere*).
google complies, the fuckers that thought they could extort money from them get NOTHING, not even a single SERP referral.
there's enough non-EU sources to use; and the BBC, one of the best global news sources available, will fall out of EU's jurisdiction with brexit.
"Your hearing is important. Click OK to be able to turn the volume up"
"This website uses cookies. Click OK so we won't badger you again until you visit
this web site next time."
All thanks to the EU, and we Americans must put up with this shit as does the rest of the world.
But that's OK, because there is nothing more important going on such as Islamic extremism infesting more and more parts of European cities /s
Peppi Le Pew will poo-poo his pantaloons when he hears "Ahllu Akbar" right outside his window, and he will call up
the Americans (yes, the same Americans Europeans spit on and try to feel superior to during peacetime) to save his little sweet ass from getting chopped into kibble. Hopefully this time, my country will tell Europe to go fuck themselves, and leave the phone off the hook. The little shrill girlish screams of Peppi getting massacred in a jihad will be quite entertaining.
Reichwingers are faggots, all talk and squawk. Lefties don't cry about not getting laid and feel the need to lash out, because lefties can get laid lol. Reichtards will never know what that's like, getting laid without paying.
... put "User-agent: googlebot-news Disallow: /" into robots.txt.
But no. What publishers want is the same amount of traffic and some extra monies... Well, they tried that in Spain, so Google just shut it down in Spain.
Is a good thing!
I'm European. Google fucking off would be the perfect end-game. Getting all american/jewish surveillance "tech" out of my country would be perfect.
The parasite is now so big, you've mistaken the parasite for the host.
Google is the parasite. It's "services" are nothing but surveillance. It's search results are now pure commercial garbage..
Fuck google, and fuck bootlicking cucks like you.
You're not white, you're not Aryan, and you never will be, filthy american mutt.
Don't think you get to speak for privacy-loving Europeans, just because your mother is 1/32 German or whatever.
It's more subtle than that. The big sites saw a modest drop, which in time they recovered from. Smaller sites saw a larger drop.
That was probably their intent. Google News tends to help smaller sites get traffic, and they felt it was traffic that was drawn away from the big players. In reality it was extra traffic as people consumed more news.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If they have the same apparent bias as in US reporting and selection of news then it would not be a loss if they left...
Newsagencies.
And in Spanish it's EEUU (Estados Unidos -- since both are plurals, the initials are doubled).
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Good for Google, taking a stand. The European Union is for the most part a good thing. But sometimes the EU does really stupid things. Articles 11 and 13 are recent propositions that if the EU adopts will be harmful to the Internet.
The EU needs to listen to the people it represents. The EU needs to abandon Articles 11 and 13, and stop trying to ruin the Internet.
does google always have to pay all news sites that it links to or only those that want to be paid.
if it's not mandatory i don't have an issue perce with link tax, it's up to the news provider to decide if they want less traffic to their site or not.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I'd like to see all the 'tech' companies exit the news business. Not just Google, but also Microsoft (both for Newsguard as well as their News app), Facebook and Twitter. Just leave it to the Huffposts, Buzzfeeds and Breitbarts to carry the news.
What about allah? Since the EU puts Islam above everyone else?