[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.