[kmlx]

i still can’t believe facebook and alphabet folded when it came to news in australia. they should have stayed the course. and predictably they opened up a can of worms: https://www.euronews.com/2022/03/03/neighbouring-rights-goog...

the best way forward is to go back and ban news orgs from google, facebook, etc in countries where governments are captured by these media conglomerates. if the laws forbid this course of action then these companies should close down their local offices. google/fb can afford to make less money, and in this case they should.

[chownie]

Google displaying story snippets on the search pages obviate the need to actually visit the site itself (and load ads, content, etc) and by doing so materially harm news sites. If Google want to use the content rather than just link to it then I think compensation is fair.

[kmlx]

> Google displaying story snippets on the search pages obviate the need to actually visit the site itself (and load ads, content, etc) and by doing so materially harm news sites.

no, the real issue here is that news sites had their business model broken for the past 20 years. they don’t know how to fix it. they are now click baiting machines. which is deepening their broken business models as trust in them is gone. this new scheme is them gasping for revenue.

[bcrl]

Maybe you missed out on all the concentration of media assets that has happened over the past 40 years. We went from every small town having their own newspaper and small cities having their own TV stations to having moguls like Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch buying up newpapers and TV stations to form giant empires. Naturally, one of the first steps in making your empire scale is to start cutting the excess "fat" in the form of local reporters, as your media empire can use reporters in the bigger cities to cover the entire region. Then your regions start getting bigger and bigger. All the local content is now gone. This process was mostly complete by the end of the 1990s.

Then advertising on the internet took off in the 2000s, further depleting the pool of local advertising dollars available to many media organizations. Today most media organizations are a hollow shell of what they once were.

Without local news, democracy can't work, and it's sad that many places no longer have it. And quality reporting takes time and money, exactly what we don't have in today's internet. Sure, plenty of niches previously ignored are now well served, but there's a glaring gap in quality local news these days in most places.

[chownie]

Did you respond to another comment by mistake? The section you quoted doesn't make mention of the quality of news, that's entirely orthogonal

[djbebs]

The content is uncopyrightable...

[chownie]

No, the facts aren't copyrightable, the literal text is absolutely copyrightable.

[mccorrinall]

If they don’t want to be spidered maybe just use robots.txt

They can’t have both: exposure AND content only available on their platform

[chownie]

Can you expand on that? Should Google have rights to use any of your content if you allow spidering? Including for commercial gain?

[mccorrinall]

Yes and yes. It’s okay to crawl a site and show the meta tags like short description, title, author etc. Why should it be illegal?

[braingenious]

I don’t follow what you’re saying. Can you elaborate on the “shoulds” here? What principles are so important that giant corporations should leave money on the table to rightfully uphold them?

[kmlx]

links and the nature of the internet.

if i post a link to a news site on this forum, should the forum pay the news site for the traffic the news site gets? of course not.

[braingenious]

I wasn’t aware that every news article in the Facebook news feed was user submitted content. I for some reason was under the impression that there was some degree of automated aggregation involved.

[seanhunter]

Who would be banning the news orgs in countries where the government is captured by them? That captive government?

Why is the public interest best served by the government siding with google/facebook etc over the news orgs themselves?

[kmlx]

> Who would be banning the news orgs in countries where the government is captured by them? That captive government?

google and fb should be banning their news sites in countries where governments are captured.

> Why is the public interest best served by the government siding with google/facebook etc over the news orgs themselves?

the governments would not be siding with google/facebook but with the public. there is no public interest best served by breaking the nature of linking on the internet.