1. Numbers are cited by sites in question. You are accusing a lot of people of lying on the numbers (notably even google isn't really dimissing their numbers unlike you). 2. You're essentially asking that these sites become google. It's rather impossible to accomplish this feat when you, unlike google, are burdened with task of actually generating content.
This would sound really really nice if not for significant historic precedent to contrary. Unless of course you count only direct and immediate impact on consumers and completely ignore all other forms of impact, which constitute vast majority of the resulting damage. In which case, nice corporate speak usage there.
Consider Google's situation in China. They had ~20% of the market (far from monopoly). They threatened to leave when terms changed and disagreed with new terms. Everyone else agreed. Google made good on their threat and left. Their customers mostly relocated to other competing search engines like Baidu and life moved on.
That is market at work. It won't work in the places where Google is in a monopolist position however, which is why monopolies are legally restricted from attempting to leverage their monopolies like this, while non-monopolies are allowed. If you want to find out why it works like this, look up what happened in early industrial age when monopolies were legal and what they did to the market and society.
If that was his point, he's simply wrong on two levels.
First on absolute level - google's presence has decreased page hits for most media outlets.
Second on revenue level - most profitable customers are the ones who stay on your page and surf through a lot of your content using your page's own navigation. Google does all the navigation and only gives your page one view and then user goes back to google.
Yes, and threatening to remove your pages from the search engine completely is what is called "leveraging of monopolist position". Consider that if there was no such monopoly, such threats would serve no purpose other then force people using the engine to migrate to competing service that kept the listings. This is exactly what anti-monopoly laws are designed to prevent to allow for market to actually function.
Essentially mass media is likely feeling extreme morphing pains from being pressured from multiple directions at once, which is why they address all these issues separately. Crowdsourcing has made many media outlets into "fact checking" (and unfortunately in some cases fact-rewording) rather then "fact producing" sources. But this isn't the change that is being talked about when google is involved. Google's change is the one where they reduce their advertisement flow by collapsing customer retention on their pages. It's a completely separate issue to the point where the issue you're talking about would have occurred even if google didn't exist.
It's worth noting that most people in the West enjoy the lifestyle they currently have because of those few who went against the system and did something about it.
You lack even the most basic understanding of how google works.
To google, losing indexing on a market where they are a de facto monopoly is a devastating blow. Their mission statement and most valuable asset is their ability to collect extreme and individualized amount of information on each user, process it into sellable form and resell it in various shapes and forms.
Adding to that, there is the issue of monopoly leverage. If they were not a monopoly, no one would care. People would just migrate to another engine, google be completely marginalized and no one would care. This is what happened in China, where google was far from being a monopoly, and when it left the market to serve it only from HK, few people really care. Baidu et al just picked up the slack and life went on.
But they are a de facto monopoly in France and much of Western world. As a result, such a move would cause EU regulators to be forced to hammer it down hard if it tried such a blatant monopoly leveraging. In fact there is an issue of even discussing it being severely damaging to google because of the ongoing investigation into google's privacy issues and monopoly leveraging. These kinds of threats are definitely not doing anything positive to further google's cause in those talks.
Traditionally media has been a "fourth pillar" of our division of power, keeping check on corruption and giving people information to use for wielding power in democratic process.
And now comes the billion dollar question. Old system relied on "gatekeeping of the news" to finance this massive task. How do you plan to finance it if this model is defunct, or is your opinion that our governance and awareness of the public good enough completely without non-governmental/interest group funded press?
Media today has obvious problems with collusion and concentration of power in the hands of the few, just like government systems do. This is about entropy in action. But it's still far better then any other alternatives that have been tried so far. Hence, we have severe pains in the industry trying to reinvent its revenue model without sacrificing it's ability to produce content.
Consider why google runs news.google.com. It can't be ad revenue from the site, because that particular google site has no ads.
Answer lies in core function of google's official mission - to index everything as recognisably as possible and sell this information in various forms to its clientele. In this case, they get detailed information on what news its main product follows and how. This will often let them build a very good personal profile on many subjects that its customers would be interested in, such as political orientation and strength of conviction in such orientation, sexual orientation, religion and so on.
Seriously, stop and think for a moment what kind of profile can be built on a person based just on their news.google.com preferences and clickthrough. Now consider that google has unified its recognition algorithms to use all its platforms. You could make a very solid argument that google is basically leveraging its monopoly to collect this data for free, repackage it, and resell it without paying a dime to original producers.
Of course, you could also make a very solid argument against this as well. As I said in the other article about french press, both sides have very compelling arguments to back their cause. To pretend that only the side you support has them and other doesn't is quite ignorant at this point.
By giving news company far less hits, and as a result, far less ad impressions than in situation where user would come from it's own main page rather then google's.
This is a blatant misrepresentation of the situation through omission of key facts, aka lie of omission. Google's core operating principle is to define each person and his/her interests and then serve ads based on these interests.
The amount of information they get from knowing what news each person follows and in what way is enormously valuable to google.
Terrible argument which, among other things, would suggest that microsoft isn't monopoly either as there are "shed-load of operating systems and productivity suites out there". It is, a convicted one at that, because monopoly isn't about not having competition. It's about dominating all competition to the point where you can dictate the rules of the market regardless of other competitors, which is exactly what google is doing.
You're making a major error in listing the basics of your reasoning. Very few large content creators offer content for free on the web. Most of it is paid by advertisers.
Just because you're not the one paying doesn't make it free.
Personally I'm on the fence with this one. On one hand, if there was functional competition in searching market, and one company delisted sites hence reducing quality of service, people would flock to competitors and site would lose. Unfortunately google does in fact have a de facto (and at least according to some EU organs de jure) monopoly on search.
On the other hand, while being a monopoly isn't illegal, it does apply heavy limits to what you can do. For example, leveraging your monopoly to get better terms is often illegal. This is a clear-cut case of monopoly leveraging to strong-arm the media outlets. Granted, google is making a killing from its business model and is unlikely to be willing to part with a cut of a cake, especially considering that if it gives cut to one party, it will likely end up having to give such a cut to everyone. This would demolish google.
Either way, this is a very difficult case to call either way, there's far more to it then meets the eye on the first glance. Both sides have very compelling arguments to bring to the table.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Numbers are cited by sites in question. You are accusing a lot of people of lying on the numbers (notably even google isn't really dimissing their numbers unlike you).
2. You're essentially asking that these sites become google. It's rather impossible to accomplish this feat when you, unlike google, are burdened with task of actually generating content.
This would sound really really nice if not for significant historic precedent to contrary. Unless of course you count only direct and immediate impact on consumers and completely ignore all other forms of impact, which constitute vast majority of the resulting damage. In which case, nice corporate speak usage there.
Being "less something" doesn't make you "not something".
Example: Mussolini was less evil then Hitler.
(I had to invoke Godwin's law in an actually proper context).
And then there's the issue of being evil having nothing to do with being a monopoly or leveraging it.
Entropy at work. You build a good system and then forget that you need to defend it against those who will bury it for quick profit.
I'm not entirely sure how consistent ignorance of reality is better then occasional ignorance of reality. But whatever rocks your boat.
Consider Google's situation in China. They had ~20% of the market (far from monopoly). They threatened to leave when terms changed and disagreed with new terms. Everyone else agreed. Google made good on their threat and left. Their customers mostly relocated to other competing search engines like Baidu and life moved on.
That is market at work. It won't work in the places where Google is in a monopolist position however, which is why monopolies are legally restricted from attempting to leverage their monopolies like this, while non-monopolies are allowed. If you want to find out why it works like this, look up what happened in early industrial age when monopolies were legal and what they did to the market and society.
News selling market is a separate market from search. You're running "browser is part of OS" argument here.
If that was his point, he's simply wrong on two levels.
First on absolute level - google's presence has decreased page hits for most media outlets.
Second on revenue level - most profitable customers are the ones who stay on your page and surf through a lot of your content using your page's own navigation. Google does all the navigation and only gives your page one view and then user goes back to google.
Yes, and threatening to remove your pages from the search engine completely is what is called "leveraging of monopolist position". Consider that if there was no such monopoly, such threats would serve no purpose other then force people using the engine to migrate to competing service that kept the listings. This is exactly what anti-monopoly laws are designed to prevent to allow for market to actually function.
Essentially mass media is likely feeling extreme morphing pains from being pressured from multiple directions at once, which is why they address all these issues separately. Crowdsourcing has made many media outlets into "fact checking" (and unfortunately in some cases fact-rewording) rather then "fact producing" sources. But this isn't the change that is being talked about when google is involved. Google's change is the one where they reduce their advertisement flow by collapsing customer retention on their pages. It's a completely separate issue to the point where the issue you're talking about would have occurred even if google didn't exist.
Just like those hypothetical operating systems like linux and osx, right? I wonder why microsoft is a convicted monopolist?
It's worth noting that most people in the West enjoy the lifestyle they currently have because of those few who went against the system and did something about it.
It would be worthless if there was an alternative to google. Because then users would switch to this alternative and see all their old sites.
The concept you're missing here is known as "leveraging a monopoly".
You lack even the most basic understanding of how google works.
To google, losing indexing on a market where they are a de facto monopoly is a devastating blow. Their mission statement and most valuable asset is their ability to collect extreme and individualized amount of information on each user, process it into sellable form and resell it in various shapes and forms.
Adding to that, there is the issue of monopoly leverage. If they were not a monopoly, no one would care. People would just migrate to another engine, google be completely marginalized and no one would care. This is what happened in China, where google was far from being a monopoly, and when it left the market to serve it only from HK, few people really care. Baidu et al just picked up the slack and life went on.
But they are a de facto monopoly in France and much of Western world. As a result, such a move would cause EU regulators to be forced to hammer it down hard if it tried such a blatant monopoly leveraging. In fact there is an issue of even discussing it being severely damaging to google because of the ongoing investigation into google's privacy issues and monopoly leveraging. These kinds of threats are definitely not doing anything positive to further google's cause in those talks.
You have just argued successfully that microsoft is not a monopoly because it has strong credible competition. Congratulations.
In the real world on the other hand, both are monopolies in their respective fields.
The answer to your question is "Yes".
Traditionally media has been a "fourth pillar" of our division of power, keeping check on corruption and giving people information to use for wielding power in democratic process.
And now comes the billion dollar question. Old system relied on "gatekeeping of the news" to finance this massive task. How do you plan to finance it if this model is defunct, or is your opinion that our governance and awareness of the public good enough completely without non-governmental/interest group funded press?
Media today has obvious problems with collusion and concentration of power in the hands of the few, just like government systems do. This is about entropy in action. But it's still far better then any other alternatives that have been tried so far. Hence, we have severe pains in the industry trying to reinvent its revenue model without sacrificing it's ability to produce content.
Consider why google runs news.google.com. It can't be ad revenue from the site, because that particular google site has no ads.
Answer lies in core function of google's official mission - to index everything as recognisably as possible and sell this information in various forms to its clientele. In this case, they get detailed information on what news its main product follows and how. This will often let them build a very good personal profile on many subjects that its customers would be interested in, such as political orientation and strength of conviction in such orientation, sexual orientation, religion and so on.
Seriously, stop and think for a moment what kind of profile can be built on a person based just on their news.google.com preferences and clickthrough. Now consider that google has unified its recognition algorithms to use all its platforms. You could make a very solid argument that google is basically leveraging its monopoly to collect this data for free, repackage it, and resell it without paying a dime to original producers.
Of course, you could also make a very solid argument against this as well. As I said in the other article about french press, both sides have very compelling arguments to back their cause. To pretend that only the side you support has them and other doesn't is quite ignorant at this point.
By giving news company far less hits, and as a result, far less ad impressions than in situation where user would come from it's own main page rather then google's.
This is a blatant misrepresentation of the situation through omission of key facts, aka lie of omission. Google's core operating principle is to define each person and his/her interests and then serve ads based on these interests.
The amount of information they get from knowing what news each person follows and in what way is enormously valuable to google.
Terrible argument which, among other things, would suggest that microsoft isn't monopoly either as there are "shed-load of operating systems and productivity suites out there". It is, a convicted one at that, because monopoly isn't about not having competition. It's about dominating all competition to the point where you can dictate the rules of the market regardless of other competitors, which is exactly what google is doing.
Correct. There are significant pros and cons here on both sides. This is just one of them.
You're making a major error in listing the basics of your reasoning. Very few large content creators offer content for free on the web. Most of it is paid by advertisers.
Just because you're not the one paying doesn't make it free.
Personally I'm on the fence with this one. On one hand, if there was functional competition in searching market, and one company delisted sites hence reducing quality of service, people would flock to competitors and site would lose. Unfortunately google does in fact have a de facto (and at least according to some EU organs de jure) monopoly on search.
On the other hand, while being a monopoly isn't illegal, it does apply heavy limits to what you can do. For example, leveraging your monopoly to get better terms is often illegal. This is a clear-cut case of monopoly leveraging to strong-arm the media outlets. Granted, google is making a killing from its business model and is unlikely to be willing to part with a cut of a cake, especially considering that if it gives cut to one party, it will likely end up having to give such a cut to everyone. This would demolish google.
Either way, this is a very difficult case to call either way, there's far more to it then meets the eye on the first glance. Both sides have very compelling arguments to bring to the table.
"The following is an awful lot of spin" would have been a much better preface for your post.