[yurisokolov]

There is a dark side to this story. With Burda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Burda_Media, the same people who are behind the Cliqz search engine were originally also behind the German Leistungsschutzrecht. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_... This law, heavily lobbied for by publishers, forces every search engine and everybody else using content from the internet to pay a private tax of 6% of the revenue (not from profit!). https://www.vg-media.de/de/digitale-verlegerische-angebote/f... As the profit of most internet companies is below this margin, it is essentially forcing many companies out of business.

This tax is enforced and collected by VG Media, the German collecting society representing rights of a group of German publishers. https://www.vg-media.de Between 2013 and 2016 Burda was a shareholder of VG Media, which was commissioned to enforce the tax in its name.

The evil thing of this law is, that the publishers are not required to mark their content in machine-readable form as paid content. And a manual selection is infeasible for internet-scale with billions of pages. So a search engine has no means to bypass the paid content and indexing only free content, e.g. like Wikipedia which makes the majority of the internet content. Essentially the "Leistungsschutzrecht" takes the free content hostage to extort money for using the internet, even if you don't use paid content of the publishers (the just 200 publications the VG Media represents).

So while Burda's Cliqz write on their blog "The world needs more search engines" https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-01/the-world-needs-cliqz-t... they supported a law that made it impossible for many search engines to operate in Germany (and in the EU via the similar EU law "Extra copyright for news sites" (“Link tax”) https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/extra-copyright-for... And while today they are not anymore shareholder of the VG Media, they still benefit from the suppressive legal environment they helped to create, as it prevents any new independent competition to enter the search market

[solso]

[Disclaimer: I work at Cliqz]

Sorry for taking so long to reply, I was personally trying to dig some information about this. An additional disclaimer: not a lawyer either.

Honestly, I have little idea of how this law affects search engines. What I can say is that we are no paying anything, as AFAIK we do not know anyone who is. Moreover, if some publisher would complain, even one in Burda, we would stop crawling by domain, there is no technical issue here, properties are known by the imprint. We have no say on what the investors do but I can assure you that we have no pressure. For instance, our ad-blocker works everywhere, regardless if the sites are from Burda or not.

On a general level, assuming that what you say is factually correct, I must personally agree that regulation is a bitch. It's typically designed fro big companies to control other big companies, but small ones get negatively affected if only because of the lack of resources. We recently had to suffer all the overhead of GDPR, which consumed a fair amount of our time, relatively we paid a higher price that Google.

Personally, I cannot respond for all the decisions made by the people funding Cliqz, I do not even think I can judge it either. They might be complaining and lobbying, no idea. But they are also putting good money to build a privacy-preserving search engine and a browser, something that no-one else is doing, so on my account they are on the positive side.