[tannhaeuser]

Excuse me, you find it ok that Google et al get all the ad money by republishing and publishers and content creators get nothing? And even go so far as spinning this into an EU corruption story, where the only alternative, and the one we're living through right now, is to rely on a monopolist for news?

[signal11]

Content creators get click throughs. And while I’m not sure if this is specific to me in the UK, news.google.co.uk has no ads.

Google News presents an aggregated view of online news. Because of Google’s reach, news.google gets a lot of page views and results in a lot of click-throughs to the actual publisher. Facebook is a similar source of traffic although that’s driven by social sharing. In both cases, publishers benefit a lot assuming they can monetise those page views.

I’m not a big fan of Google but Google News isn’t the “bad guy” here.

[AnonymousPlanet]

Could you please explain to me how Google is making money from showing a brief excerpt from a linked website. Especially "all the money". Before you answer, please consider where most of Google's revenue comes from. Is it from showing things on their search page or is it from their ad network? Making money from the latter requires people to actually click through to the site.

Maybe I am missing something, so please enlighten us.

[simias]

In order to display ads Google needs users to use its websites. Google being able to offer news snippets on his website is a feature that drives traffic and therefore drives ad impressions and therefore revenue.

It's like saying that Google doesn't benefit from GMail because people reading mail doesn't make them money.

I guess an other way to answer this question would be to say: if Google doesn't care at al about previews, why did they develop the feature in the first place and then fought against these laws instead of just removing it as soon as people started complaining? Clearly they do deem them valuable enough to go through this whole charade.

[AnonymousPlanet]

Those impressions are not from the search site but come into play once people click on a link. Google has an incentive to have people click on links. Including news sites. Especially news sites that come with tons of ads.

Let's say I blog about topics a lot of other people blog about. Let's say there was a Google Blogs. I would want Google to post a relevant snippet of my blog post to help me stand out from all the other links. And Google would happily comply, because this makes those who bought ads that now get displayed on my blog happy, and Google can charge them more money.

I'd say I would have to have a very twisted and self absorbed mindset to believe that Google is stealing from me for posting a relevant excerpt from my blog. But maybe that's just me.

[kd5bjo]

> Google has an incentive to have people click on links.

This is true only insofar as it incentivizes people to come to Google in the first place. If Google can directly provide the information that the user is looking for, then it gains no benefit from sending the user elsewhere instead.

[AnonymousPlanet]

Again: Google's revenue comes from ads. Those ads are not on their search site. They are on the sites people click. How can you still believe, Google has no benefit from sending people to those sites?!

Second, in most cases those previews are too small to provide the information the user was looking for.

Your argument is based on false assumptions.

[tannhaeuser]

Since you're asking so politely: Google is in the business of targetted advertisement. It doesn't matter whether they're sending you to a website; they profit from your attention and the info you give them about yourself. The insane amount of money they extract won't benefit content creators and anyway it ending in the hands of a quasi-monopoly can't be in the public interest.

[AnonymousPlanet]

> It doesn't matter whether they're sending you to a website;

It does matter for this discussion because this is about Google showing two sentences of an article as preview. And the accusation is that Google somehow steals money from publishers by doing so. I don't like Google, but this accusation is just outright nonsense.

> The insane amount of money they extract won't benefit content creators and anyway it ending in the hands of a quasi-monopoly can't be in the public interest.

Ah, so it is a matter of principle to you. Taking away from the beast is a good thing. Off with it's head!

It nearly sounds like you think that no matter the means, it is always good to just hurtle laws at the quasi-monopoly.

That is a dangerous stance, tannhaeuser, because mindlessly throwing stupid laws at the beast might make it stronger, just like it does in this case. And the smaller competition might be crushed before it even existed. But, hey, at least you could take that fork and torch for a spin!

I'm all for cutting down Google, Facebook and Microsoft a couple of notches in favour of smaller competition, but I'm dead against using stupid or even dangerous means. This law was put into place by people who hate the internet, and they would set it all aflame if they could. Don't blindly follow destroyers.

[tannhaeuser]

Respectfully, I disagree with the rhetoric that this law takes away from the "internet" when the situation is that a handful of oligopolies extract all economic value, while content creation has become a race to the bottom. US antitrust enforcement has had their chance for upholding an "ordoliberal" stance like you're expressing here, but they let Google buy DoubleClick and YouTube, and let Facebook buy Whatsapp to form monopolies instead, and I don't think the rest of the world has to standby and watch their publishing industries being destroyed.

[AnonymousPlanet]

The publishing industries are not being destroyed by what you think. Your comment implies that the old publishing industries would be okay if Google or Facebook did not exist. That is not true.

There is a much deeper issue at hand here. The publishing industries make money off of information. Information has decisively different properties from physical objects. I have an apple. I give it to you, I don't have it anymore. You give it back, now you don't have the apple. I can hand out apples from my box and count how many I had, how many I have left. That gives me the exact amount of my apples out there. You can use these properties as the basis of a business model.

Information does not have the properties of physical objects. And therefore you shouldn't be able to use the same business model for selling apples for selling information. Yet throughout most of the 20th century exactly this was done. It was possible because the information was mostly stuck to the media it was sold on. It was hard to get the information off that medium and copy it to another without losing something. This made it possible to use physical object business models with information.

But that was all a fantasy. And this fantasy collapsed when the media moved to computers. For music, e.g., that was about 25 years ago. Half a century ago.

However, a huge chunk of the publishers and artists are still living in their fantasy. They don't see that they are deluding themselves when they demand their old business models to still work. For them, its the internet that is at fault, not their incomplete grasp of reality. And the big scapegoat is the internet.

If those publishers could, they would burn down the internet in a second and replace it with something they control in order to rise again as the oligopolies they once were. They yearn to remove the ability from small content creators to independently publish. They would like to build their old schemes like GEMA and VG-Wort into the internet. This is at the core of why these laws have been put into place. And that is why I believe my rhetoric is well placed.

If you look closely, you will see that those publishers and artist who moved on, beyond the fantasy, are not the ones endorsing these laws. Because they know that they are not under threat by the internet or by how Google shapes their Search site. The adversaries here are Facebook or Spotify, or the way Youtube is starting to cater towards big publishers over small content creators. But this is a different battle.

I believe that if we let the old publishers control the fight against oligopolies, we will just have the old ones back in the end, and the internet will be poorer for it. I have the feeling, the press has pulled people like you already to their side with their constant barrage of negativity on everything internet.

I don't want to discourage you from taking up arms, but please be more careful with whom you are standing on the barricades.

[shkkmo]

Let's say Google has a user on the Google News page and has a couple of levers they can pull to control if that User clicks through to read the content or only skims headlines and some snippets.

Given that there are no ads on Google News and Google makes money from most online ad sales, what reason would Google have to limit click throughs?

Clicking on am article gives Google more data and increases the chances that Google will make some money from ad sales.

Google definitely wants Google News to be the starting point for news reading habbits, but Google definitely also wants it's readers to click through and view news articles.

There are plenty of anti-competitive practices by Google to address. This simply is not one of them and arguably does more to shore up Google against competitors given that Google has a stronger ability to force publishers to grant Google access. Publishers already had full opt-out control over how Google uses their content and smaller aggregators were free to ignore those meta headers. Now smaller aggregators must convince publishers to opt-in or face legal consequences.

This law is just simply idiotic unless your only goal was to help Google News compete in Europe.

[Kiro]

> and content creators get nothing?

Axel Springer had to revert because their traffic and revenues plummeted. With your logic it wouldn't even have affected them.

[sacado2]

Strange to hold such a position on a news aggregator like HN.

[PyroLagus]

Well, to be fair. Everyone on here just reads the headlines and then the comments.

[tannhaeuser]

Except there are no snippets on HN, just a title and a link.