[sbx320]

> They were showing enough information no one was clicking the links.

Were they? From the data I found for a very similar law in Germany the opposite seems to be true.

Axel Springer AG (biggest publisher, also primary lobbyist for the law) gave Google a free license two weeks after Google removed the snippets for all their sites. They noted a 40% drop in clicks coming from Google and an 80% drop from Google News. With estimates from statistics collectors putting users coming from Google anywhere between 15% and 35% (depending on the individual site) that's a massive reduction in users and ad revenue.

[lettergram]

I mean, those claims are anecdotal at best and more importantly Google controls what people see, which is kind of my point. You can’t validate Google isn’t manipulating results. They have every incentive to manipulate them.

I don’t know the specifics though and there was no link provided. However, in any case I think my point remains - assuming that’s true, why was it the case?

[repolfx]

I'm not sure you fully follow what's happened here, as the post you're replying to is comprehensive. Here's a history of this whole sordid affair.

Publishers have always been able to control their appearance in Google and Google News, using robots.txt and meta tags. If they thought Google was 'stealing' they could prevent it by just ... asking them not to.

They (Axel Springer and other EU publishers) didn't do this, because they make a lot of money out of Google sending them traffic which they can then monetise by running ads on the resulting page loads, ads that Google will also help provide if they want, but doesn't insist on. Instead they quite happily let Google index and send them traffic completely gratis.

At some point some newspaper barons noticed that the EU was very much in hock to them because it relied for its own ideological and political goals on lots of positive press coverage and more importantly, no digging for dirt. Also the only tech firms that existed were all foreign and publishers are bleeding money, so, they decided there should be a "new deal" in which Google not only paid lots of money to index their website and serve a Google News index (in return for nothing), but should also pay them for the privilege! And because this made absolutely no sense for Google at all, they decided the only way to make Google do it was to enforce that Google News couldn't exist in Europe without these huge payments.

Google said that they weren't going to pay firms for the privilege of linking to them and if they weren't happy they were welcome to take themselves out of Google using robots.txt. So the battlefield was laid out.

First was Germany. The publishers bet Google would pay them rather than lose Google News. Google called their bluff and refused, with the result that the publishers caved and basically voided the law they'd lobbied to pass by granting Google a free license.

Next up was Spain. Spanish publishers looked at what happened in Germany and decided the problem was that the German publishers had been able to chicken out. Because the sort of news sites that get a lot of traffic from Google are largely interchangeable there was a prisoners dilemma in which whichever publisher folded first would take all the traffic and earn lots more money than their competitors. So in the Spanish law, publishers weren't allowed to give Google a free license.

The result was Google shut down Google News in Spain entirely. Also local competitors to Google News shut down too because the prices were calibrated to suck money out of a rich tech giant and small firms couldn't pay. Once again, Google called their bluff but this time, nobody won, the Spanish people just lost everything.

France and Germany looked at this and decided the problem was that individual countries were too small. If the same thing was done at the EU level then this time surely Google would be defeated and give them a free firehose of money, as they so desired.

Fortunately for them the EU Commission long since gave up on its people ever creating a tech firm, and the EU is very pliant to the wishes of German publishers. Note how Juncker and other top EU functionaries always write their op-eds in German newspapers. So the Commission was quite keen. Popular outcry doesn't matter because the EU is not democratic, it just resulted in this amazing response from the Commission:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190215/18005841607/eu-co...

So now the EU has passed the same law and round three begins. Will Google give in and pay the publishers lots of money? Or will it just shut down Google News in all of Europe?

So far we seem to be in the middle of this engagement, with France losing snippets. Maybe other countries will soon too. In the end Google News may vanish entirely in the EU. I am very skeptical Google will pay because after all, once the principle has been established that they'll pay to link to content, where does it end? That's all the company does: they could open themselves to arbitrary payments to anyone, anywhere, until they have no profit left at all.

[lettergram]

I'm fully following what's going on and I think it's a bit more nuanced than your comment. Many many of the arguments i've seen have not to do with linking, but with the preview. The preview is Google automatically pulling answers to questions from their site. They wanted that to end, because they wanted actual visitors OR they wanted Google to pay for that information.

Google can and could always link to the website. What they were doing was a bit more than that. Google is now trying to strong arm them to let them pull data from their sites. Literally, everything you describe above is what occurs when someone has a monopoly.

[shkkmo]

There are two different things you are conflating, the quick answer thing to the right of the search results is different from the snippet shown below the item in search and news.

The quick answer area has a different set of issues and I think there is a stronger argument to be made for it reducing click through rates (though I always click through when the quick answers my question to verify there isn't additional relevant context that is not included.)

Publishers already had the ability to block Google's indexing, image indexing, news indexing and snippet creation and even snippet length using meta headers.

It is unclear to me how this actually gives publishers any more control over how Google uses their content. It seems to have much larger impacts on smaller aggregators. It does put legal weight behind that control, but it seems to me that a much better law would have standardized these meta-headers and put the force of law behind them, perhaps creating a header that notifies crawlers that they must have a license to display snippets of text over a certain length from a site. As it is, is there any way for a publisher to automatically grant all agregators rights to display snippets of their content or does the law forcibly opt all publishers into content restrictions?

[PyroLagus]

But they were always able to opt-out of the snippets quite easily. What they wanted was to have the snippets AND to get paid on top of that.

[repolfx]

There's no way to link to a news story without at least excerpting the headline, as otherwise you'd not know what you were clicking on. And snippets have always been a part of search engines, which is why I didn't separate them.

Regardless, Google allows you to request links but no snippets for your content, again, it's all possible with pre-existing protocols and standards.

Really, Google is trying to strong-arm nobody. I don't see how anyone could conclude that. Google offer publishers a range of reasonable options from full cooperation to partial indexing to non-inclusion, always has, and those publishers have repeatedly refused to take advantage of any of these features.

What they want isn't control over linking or snippeting. That is obvious. What they want is the status quo, plus lots of money.

[pas]

If the issue is the automatically extracted answer, does this new change solves that? Is there any meta tag to control that?

[pb7]

For someone completely out of the loop, this was a terrific summary. Thank you.