[Transfinity]

This feels fair to me. The news agencies spend time and money to research, verify and publish the news. If Google wants to use that content to sell ads, then they should pay for it.

I don't understand the negative comments here, and I'm not seeing an explanation for the disappointment. Maybe I've missed part of the story here?

[jsnell]

Because the French courts will not allow for Google to choose the "we won't use the content" option, let alone "we'll use the content but not sell ads for it". They must show the news content whether they want to or not. That's a tough system to make work.

[kodah]

This does seem problematic. I guess we're in that state where we go from one end of the spectrum to the other.

[CountSessine]

It doesn’t even seem like Google’s approach was one end of the spectrum - it was a very workable and equitable arrangement. Google provided links to the news websites and a title+first sentence blurb, and then presented their own ads on the aggregation page.

They didn’t steal or reprint the full text of the article, they didn’t crawl the site and use a GAN to summarize it (and remember - this is half of what modern journalists do anyways) - they provided a useful service that drove traffic and clicks to these ingrates.

But they wanted more and petitioned the courts to give it to them. This doesn’t seem like much of anything other than gatekeeping the established news media.

[kodah]

Is not fairly well established that tech and social media have already upended the news industry in terms of revenue streams? Revenue streams which arguably flow through tech now? I have a hard time with that being true and also telling them that they're gate keeping.

[lowdose]

Google can treat other news agencies as preferred suppliers by giving them a higher ranking in the graph. France should have done this with a European initiative because they are to small to do this.

[JCharante]

iirc punishing the French news agencies by messing with their rankings like that also incurs penalties for Google.

[LatteLazy]

I'll have a stab, 2 things:

First, Google is now the largest customer of these papers. That makes it very hard for them to be critical of Google or its allies and very easy for them to be critical of Google competitiors or detractors. This is at exactly the time when there is a public debate over big tech.

Second, Google isn't paying these papers for news, it's paying them for content/clicks. The core issue with the pay per click model is that it incentivises BS, baseless pieces and it punishes actual investigaive journalism. Everything becomes a "buzzfeed top ten things you already agree with" article. That is a massive problem already, and this change reinforces it and makes it worse. I'd actually like to see this sort of thing banned, not extended.

[chrisseaton]

Do the newspapers have to pay to quote their sources?

So why should Google have to pay to quote a newspaper?

The inherent nature of news is that you're always re-selling someone else's story.

[octokatt]

1) Sometimes yes, especially to be able to pull down large banks of data and sort through it. [1]

2) Besides "Google can afford it", Google is making money off of the snippets they're displaying along side ads in searches. Given a lot of people read the first two lines and move on, the effort of writing those two lines is not awarded money to the writer before this deal, only to Google.

3) The best thing news can be is the fourth estate that prevents disinformation and provides a means for honest discourse. They've gotten chopped up from disruptive business models. We need to reverse that if we like having nice things like democracy and facts.

[1] There are practical reasons not to pay for information, mainly to prevent "witnesses" from making up stories that will be interesting and bring fame. A huge amount of journalism is sorting through claims, which is a major investment of money and time. Coincidentally... that's something not happening in Google results a ton, with terrible results (pun intended).

[trevyn]

Explanation: I believe copyright law is harmful to human creativity and should be repealed.

[coldtea]

Hasn't the 20th century explosion of books, music, movies, etc, coincided with copyright law?

[edumucelli]

It coincided also with several other things such as mass access do information, literacy increase. What you mention is definitely a spurious correlation such as money spent on pets vs death by stairs.

[Aerroon]

Not to mention the massive increase in population. It went from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6.1 billion in 2000.

[jollofricepeas]

Most people (read “devs”) don’t understand the problem.

Google benefits financially even if they don’t place ads next to the content.

Amazon saw the benefit of this when they added “free” content to Prime and Netflix also sees the value though they don’t sell ads.

Great content largely attracts and retains users. Once you have those users, you have their data and can sell other things to them or...

...prevent those users from using and establishing brand loyalty to a competitors products.

Nike for the last 30 years has actively bought up the rights to promising yet mediocre athletes just to avoid them going to Adidas and potentially becoming stars.

[easytiger]

So do you think a news outlet quoting a person in an article should have to pay to contain the quote?

[pkaye]

Do Google News have ads?

[boomboomsubban]

I don't see any, but personally every Google news query starts with a regular Google search that would show ads. I would guess that's common, as Google will highlight news results if you search a newsworthy term.