[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.