google news – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Dear Google: If You’re Going To Let Google News Suck, Just Let It Die Instead

from the if-it-dies,-it-dies dept

Depending on just how often you use Google News, you may have noticed that Google News was down recently. Down hard.

No, it wasn’t just you; Google News suffered a pretty sizable outage this morning, impacting the service on desktop and mobile. Impacted users took to Downdetector and social media to note the issues and that no stories were being populated on the site.

Instead, Google News showed an upside-down ice cream cone with the tagline, “Uh-oh, something went wrong. Please try again.” I confirmed the issue myself and am based in New Jersey, United States, but my TechRadar colleagues experienced the same issues worldwide. Users on Downdetector also noted a spike in outage reports as of 8 AM ET on May 31, 2024.

Now, outages happen, and it wouldn’t make a ton of sense to write a post about this were it all to have happened in a vacuum. But that simply isn’t the case. Google’s news feature has been in steady decline for at least a year or so. Many have predicted the eventual demise of Google News, noticing a trend towards uselessness, with our own Karl Bode pointing out just how much the dumpster fire has become enflamed once generative AI allowed for quick plagiarism to game Google’s search returns.

But it’s not just those larger, macro-level problems at work here. The basic micro upkeep of Google News has been a goddamned dumpster fire as of late. For example, one of the most important features of Google News for many people, myself included, is the filtering functionality, specifically when it comes to date ranges for news items. If I’m looking to write about a particular topic, or find more information to research, I very often limit the range of articles to the past week, or past 24 hours.

Unfortunately, off and on over the past several months, that filter button just, you know, disa-fucking-pears. Poof, the drop down is gone. There are ways to work around it, which makes the whole thing even more infuriating. In its absence, if you do a base Google search for a term, set a date range there, and then click into the News tab, suddenly the filter button is back! Which means it’s all still there, but the UI for the News tab is apparently horribly broken.

As has become the filter generally. No less than 20 times in the past month or so alone, I have personally done a Google News search with a filter set for either the past week or day, only to find that many of the search returns that come back, and show within the date range in the search results, are actually from months or years ago.

Some, but not all, of these cases appear to be a function of how some news sites list their “read next” content on older articles, where the next article is much more recent. Here’s an example of a Google News search I did for this post, where one of the returns shows a post that lists the headline and date in the search results:

And here’s the date on the actual byline for that search-listed article:

And the “Up Next” article at that site is an entirely unrelated post dated May, 31 2024.

But none of that is any sort of excuse. Google owns this product and it used to work just fine. The steady decline of the platform into the realm of malfunction, nevermind full or partial outages, is a problem that Google is simply failing to address or communicate about.

So, Google: if you no longer care enough about Google News to support it so that it actually works, then say so and let it die so we can all go find a different resource for what is absolutely a need.

Filed Under: enshittification, google news
Companies: google

Blame Silly Politicians For Google Starting To Block News Sites In California

from the the-law-is-bad dept

That thing is happening again, where politicians are pushing a bad law that will benefit Rupert Murdoch, while harming the public. Rather than blaming Murdoch or the politicians pushing the law, they’re blaming “big tech” for actually responding to the law accordingly. Because that’s easier. But it’s wrong.

In this case, it’s California’s terrible attempt at a link tax, pushed for by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks. Google is experimenting with removing links to California news publications for California news users, which is exactly what the law demands. But, lots of people are getting mad at Google, when they should be mad at Wicks.

Let’s take a step back to the beginning.

Link taxes are bad, mmkay?

The entire concept is broken and represents an attack on the open internet. They have not worked, contrary to what supporters will tell you. In Australia, often held up as the shining example of link taxes working, smaller publications are laying off journalists and shutting down at a faster pace than before.

If you don’t follow this closely, link taxes are a horrible idea. They were cooked up by Rupert Murdoch because he was mad that his internet ventures were flopping, while Google and Facebook were thriving. The famed faux-free market supporter insisted that if Google and Facebook were making money while he was struggling, it must be because of something “unfair” that they had done: namely become a source that people go to to find links to news stories.

Somehow, Murdoch and friends spun this as “stealing” the news. Except, it’s not. It’s literally linking to news sites and sending traffic to them. And the news orgs clearly value that traffic, because they not only do not block such traffic (which would be easy to do with robots.txt and referral blockers), they actually hire “search engine optimization” and “social media marketing” teams to make sure they appear more often on Google and Facebook.

So, what Murdoch wants is not just for Google and Facebook to send free traffic his way, but actually for them to pay to send him traffic. That is literally all that these “news bargaining codes” are. They are direct wealth transfers, facilitated by politicians, from internet companies that are making money (Google/Meta) to media companies that are also (mostly) making money, but are mad that Google and Meta are successful.

Even if you believe that we need more sustainable options for journalism (and, as a journalist, I believe that very strongly), everything about link taxes is corrupt. It’s a direct, government-mandated, wealth transfer from one industry to another industry. It’s an out-and-out favor to the news industry (which the political class often relies on for election endorsements). It effectively takes money from one industry and hands it to another for doing nothing more than helping news sites get more traffic and distribution for free.

Meta has been much stronger than Google in standing up to these nonsense laws. Unfortunately, Google has caved in both Australia and Canada, while Meta has been more willing to push back.

However, last week, Google announced that it has begun experimenting with removing links to California news publishers with California’s link tax, the California Journalism Preservation Act by Buffy Wicks back on the legislative docket.

As we’ve shared when other countries have considered similar proposals, the uncapped financial exposure created by CJPA would be unworkable. If enacted, CJPA in its current form would create a level of business uncertainty that no company could accept. To prepare for possible CJPA implications, we are beginning a short-term test for a small percentage of California users. The testing process involves removing links to California news websites, potentially covered by CJPA, to measure the impact of the legislation on our product experience. Until there’s clarity on California’s regulatory environment, we’re also pausing further investments in the California news ecosystem, including new partnerships through Google News Showcase, our product and licensing program for news organizations, and planned expansions of the Google News Initiative.

I’ve seen some people get mad at Google about this, just as people were mad at Meta when they did a similar thing in both Australia and Canada.

But that anger is misplaced: be mad at Rupert Murdoch, who would be the largest single beneficiary of the law by far. Be mad at California Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who would be orchestrating this wealth transfer from companies that have employees in her district to Rupert Murdoch, and pretending this attack on the open web is somehow good for journalism.

Be mad at all the media companies that won’t report accurately on the problems of such a law because they so want in on this wealth transfer.

In the end, Google is doing exactly what the law suggests it should do. If the government taxes something, you get less of that thing. That’s a fairly fundamental economic concept. Here, the tax is ridiculously problematic because it’s (1) taxing something that should never be taxed: links on the open web, and (2) not a typical tax, but one where the monetary transfer goes directly from one industry to another. Either way, it remains a tax. And the end result of a tax is: less of what is being taxed. So, yes, if those links are taxed, there will be less links on Google and Meta to news sites.

And, obviously, this sucks for me as a California-based publication. But I don’t blame Google for doing what the law directly incentivizes. I blame Buffy Wicks for pushing an obviously flawed law, on a topic she clearly doesn’t understand, to please the local newspaper that endorsed her.

As we discussed last year, there’s historical precedent here. Richard Nixon passed a similar law in the 1970s, in exchange for newspaper endorsements. It hastened the collapse of local newspapers, but Nixon got his endorsements. Wicks seems similarly willing to sell out journalism in her state in order to get an endorsement. It won’t be good for smaller news publishers like ours. It won’t be good for the public. It won’t be good for the internet. But it will be good for Buffy Wicks and Rupert Murdoch.

Filed Under: buffy wicks, california, cjpa, google news, link tax, news links
Companies: google

‘AI’ Exposes Google News Quality Control Issues, Making Our Clickbait, Plagiarism, And Propaganda Problem Worse

from the broken-signal-to-noise-ratio dept

Mon, Jan 22nd 2024 11:56am - Karl Bode

Journalists have long used Google News to track news cycles. But for years users have documented a steady decline in product quality parallel to similar complaints about the quality of Google’s broader search technology. Many stories and outlets are often no longer indexed, low quality clickbait and garbage are everywhere, and customization seems broken as Google shifted its priorities elsewhere.

Now the broader problem with Google News quality control seems to have gotten worse with the rise of “generative AI” (half baked language learning models). AI-crafted clickbait, garbage, and plagiarized articles are now dominating the Google News feed, reducing the already shaky service’s utility even further:

“Google News is boosting sites that rip-off other outlets by using AI to rapidly churn out content, 404 Media has found. Google told 404 Media that although it tries to address spam on Google News, the company ultimately does not focus on whether a news article was written by an AI or a human, opening the way for more AI-generated content making its way onto Google News.”

As we’ve seen in the broader field of content moderation, moderating these massive systems at scale is no easy feat. Compounded by the fact that companies like Google (which feebly justified more layoffs last week despite sitting on mountains of cash) would much rather be spending time and resources on things that make them more money, instead of ensuring that existing programs and systems actually work as advertised.

But the impact of Google’s cheap laziness is multi-fold. One, sloppy moderation of Google News only helps contribute to an increasingly lopsided signal to noise ratio as a dwindling number of under-funded actual journalists try to out-compete automated bullshit and well-funded propaganda mills across a broken infotainment and engagement economy. It’s already not a fair fight, and when a company like Google fails to invest in functional quality control, it actively makes the problem worse.

For example, many of automated clickbait plagiarism mills are getting the attention and funding that should be going to real journalism operating on shoestring budgets, as the gents at 404 Media (whose quality work ironically isn’t even making it to the Google News feed) explore in detail. For its part, Google reps had this to say:

“Our focus when ranking content is on the quality of the content, rather than how it was produced. Automatically-generated content produced primarily for ranking purposes is considered spam, and we take action as appropriate under our policies.”

Except they’re clearly not doing a good job at any part of that. And they’re not doing a good job at that because the financial incentives of the engagement economy are broadly perverse; aligned toward cranking out as much bullshit as possible to maximize impressions and end user engagement at scale, and against spending the money and time to ensure quality control at that same scale.

It’s not entirely unlike problems we saw when AT&T would actively support (or turn a blind eye to) scammers and crammers on its telecom networks. AT&T made money from the volume of traffic regardless of whether the traffic was harmful, muting any financial incentive to do anything about it.

This isn’t exclusively an AI problem (LLMs could be used to improve quality control). And it certainly isn’t exclusively a Google problem. But it sure would be nice if Google took a more responsible lead on the issue before what’s left of U.S. journalism drowns in a sea of automated garbage and engagement bait.

Filed Under: ai, content moderation, google news, journalism, language learning models, media, news, plagiarism, reporting, spam
Companies: google

This isn’t a huge surprise, as they’d already suggested they would do this, but Google has announced officially that it will block news links in Canada to avoid having to pay to send traffic to Canadian news sources.

We have now informed the Government that when the law takes effect, we unfortunately will have to remove links to Canadian news from our Search, News and Discover products in Canada, and that C-18 will also make it untenable for us to continue offering our Google News Showcase product in Canada.

The company goes on to note all the ways in which it had been supporting journalism in Canada, nearly all of which it will now stop because of the pure stupidity and open internet-breaking nature of the bill, which demands payments for linking to news, going against the fundamental principle of the web.

We already pay to support Canadian journalism through our programs and partnerships – and we’ve been clear we’re prepared to do more. As part of our Google News Showcase program, we have negotiated agreements covering over 150 news publications across Canada. Last year alone, we linked to Canadian news publications more than 3.6 billion times — at no charge — helping publishers make money through ads and new subscriptions. This referral traffic from links has been valued at $250 million CAD annually. We’re willing to do more; we just can’t do it in a way that breaks the way that the web and search engines are designed to work, and that creates untenable product and financial uncertainty.

Ever since the Government introduced C-18 last year, we have shared our experiences in other countries and been clear that unworkable legislation could lead to changes that affect the availability of news on Google’s products in Canada.

We have successfully collaborated with Governments and news publishers around the world on the shared goal of strengthening the news industry, and we currently have thousands of mutually beneficial agreements with news publications around the world.

We tried to take this same approach with Bill C-18. We repeatedly offered constructive feedback and recommended solutions that would have made it more workable for both platforms and publishers, unlocking further financial support for Canadian journalism. We also endorsed the alternative model of an independent fund for Canadian journalism supported by both platforms and the Government, an approach that’s worked elsewhere. We appeared several times before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications and submitted detailed recommendations to both committees.

We advocated for reasonable and balanced amendments to the legislation for over a year. None of our suggestions for changes to C-18 were accepted.

This news follows on Meta making a similar announcement a week earlier. For what it’s worth, Meta has also announced that it will be ending the program it had to fund journalism in Canada.

As the fallout from the federal government’s Online News Act continues, Facebook parent Meta is terminating a contract with The Canadian Press that saw the digital giant support the hiring of a limited number of emerging journalists at the national newswire service.

The newswire agency was informed Wednesday that Meta will end the contract, which has funded roughly 30 reporting fellowship positions for early-career journalists at CP since the program’s inception in 2020.

Canadian Press executive editor Gerry Arnold said that in its letter informing the media company of its decision, Meta clearly linked its termination of the program to Canada’s Online News Act, which became law last week.

With all of this going on, even as the Canadian government was very clearly warned about just how damaging C-18 would be, Drew Wilson at Freezenet reported that the government is now scrambling to negotiate (after the bill was passed) on ways to keep Meta and Google allowing news links in Canada.

Of course, that quoted some Google folks saying that they were hopeful for an agreement — and that was before this announcement from Google, so it sounds like the negotiations failed.

Meanwhile, two of Canada’s biggest newspapers, Postmedia (owners of the National Post) and Nordstar (owners of the Toronto Star), are apparently in talks to merge, meaning there would be even less competition and fewer major news orgs in Canada. I’m sure that some would argue that this is why the internet companies need to pay for links, but it actually just reinforces how terribly traditional news orgs have been run in the internet age, where they’ve consistently failed to adapt or figure out how to actually embrace the internet.

And now they want to be paid for their own failures. But, instead, the end result may be that they’re in more trouble because Google and Facebook take away all the benefits they’ve been providing them already.

Filed Under: c-18, canada, google news, journalism, link tax, news, news links, news search
Companies: google, meta, nordstar, postmedia

from the what's-the-point? dept

Back in 2014, Spain brought in a Google tax. It was even worse than Germany’s, which was so unworkable that it was never applied fully. Spain’s law was worse because it created a right for publishers to be paid by “news aggregators” that was “inalienable”. That is, publishers could not waive that right — they had to charge. That negated the point of Creative Commons licenses, which are designed to allow people to use material without paying. Subsequent research showed that Spain’s snippet tax was a disaster for publishers, especially the smaller ones.

Unsurprisingly, in response Google went for the nuclear option, and shut down Google News in Spain at the end of 2014. Seven years later — a lifetime on the Internet — Google News is returning to Spain:

In 2014, we closed Google News in Spain due to local legislation. Today, we’re announcing that Google News will soon be available once again in Spain. We made this decision as a result of a new Royal Decree implementing the European Copyright Directive, introduced today by the Spanish government.

Google News is coming back because the EU’s Copyright Directive has now been implemented by national legislation in Spain, superseding the older snippet tax. Crucially, the inalienable right to charge for snippets has gone:

the new copyright law allows Spanish media outlets — big and small — to make their own decisions about how their content can be discovered and how they want to make money with that content. Over the coming months, we will be working with publishers to reach agreements which cover their rights under the new law.

As Techdirt has emphasized for years, the relevant section of the EU Copyright Directive, originally called Article 11, but now renumbered as Article 15, is dreadful, because it gives publishers the ability to demand payment from Google and others for sending them traffic. But at least under the EU law that is optional, not compulsory. Google says it has no problem with paying money to publishers in a variety of ways:

we will work towards bringing Google News Showcase to Spain, a licensing program and new product experience which pays publishers to curate content for story panels across Google News and Discover.

That’s a reminder that whatever form the ridiculous snippet tax takes, for Google it’s just a tiny bump in the road. At most, it requires the company to spend a little small change it found down the back of the sofa.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright directive, eu, google news, snippet tax, spain
Companies: google

Snippet Taxes Not Only Violate The Berne Convention, But Also Betray The Deepest Roots Of Newspaper Culture

from the won't-someone-think-of-the-poor-Rupert-Murdochs? dept

Last week Techdirt wrote about Australia’s proposed News Media Bargaining Code. This is much worse than the already awful Article 15 of the EU Copyright Directive (formerly Article 11), which similarly proposes to force Internet companies to pay for the privilege of sending traffic to traditional news sites. A post on Infojustice has a good summary of the ways in which the Australians aim to do more harm to the online world than the Europeans:

1) The protection for press publications provided by [the EU’s] DSM Article 15 does not apply to linking or the use of “very short extracts.” The Code explicitly applies to linking and the use of extracts of any length. Accordingly, the Code applies to search engines and social media feeds, not just news aggregation services.

2) The Code forces Internet platforms to bargain collectively with news publishers or to be forced into rate setting through binding arbitration. DSM Article 15 does not require any similar rate-setting mechanism.

3) The Code imposes burdensome obligations on the platforms, some of which directly implicate free expression. For example, platforms would need to provide news businesses with ability to “turn off” comments on individual stories they post to digital platforms. DSM Article 15 imposes none of these obligations.

4) The Code prohibits the platforms from differentiating between an Australian news business and a foreign news business. This provision prevents platforms from exiting the market by taking care not to link to Australian news content. If the platform links to international news content, e.g., articles from the New York Times, it must also link to (and therefor pay for) Australian news content. DSM Article 15 does not contain a non-differentiation provision.

The same blog post points out that these elements are so bad they probably violate the Berne Convention — the foundational text for modern copyright law. Article 10(1) of the Berne Convention provides that:

it shall be permissible to make quotations from a work which already has been lawfully made available to the public, provided that their making is compatible with fair practice, and their extent does not exceed that justified by the purpose, including quotations from newspaper articles and periodicals in the form of press summaries.

Although the Berne Convention doesn’t have any mechanism for dealing with violations, Berne obligations are incorporated in the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and in the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement. Both of those offer dispute resolution that the US could use to challenge the Australian Code if and when it comes into effect. The proposed schemes to force Internet companies to pay even for quoting snippets of news not only violate the Berne Convention: they are also a betrayal of the deepest roots of newspaper culture. That emerges from a fascinating post by Jeff Jarvis, a professor at CUNY’s Newmark J-school. He writes:

For about the first century, starting in 1605, newspapers were composed almost entirely of reports copied from mailed newsletters, called avvisi, which publishers promised not to change as they printed excerpts; the value was in the selecting, cutting, and pasting. Before them the avvisi copied each other by hand. These were the first news networks.

In the United States, the Post Office Act of 1792 allowed newspapers to exchange copies in the mail for free with the clear intent of helping them copy and publish each others? news. In fact, newspapers employed “scissors editors” to compile columns of news from other papers.

In other words, these new snippet taxes are wrong at every level: practical, legal and cultural. And yet gullible lawmakers still want to pass them, apparently to protect defenseless publishers like Rupert Murdoch against the evil lords of the mighty Information Superhighway.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: australia, berne convention, copyright, google news, history, journalism, link tax, news, rupert murdoch, snippet tax
Companies: facebook, google

Google Threatens To Pull Out Of Australia Entirely; Australians Demand That It Both Stay And Pay News Orgs For Giving Them Traffic

from the how-does-this-make-any-sense dept

For the last year, we’ve been highlighting how Australia’s rush to create a Google News tax is so stupid. It follows similar efforts in Europe and a few other places, where newspapers that spent years dismissing the internet and doing little to adapt, are now whining that Google is… sending them free traffic and not paying them for it.

It’s truly bizarre. Google sends lots of traffic to news organizations. Tons of news organizations employ search engine optimization experts who work hard to get even more traffic from Google. But… around the globe, many of them are demanding that Google also pay them for sending them traffic. Back in 2014, Google shut down its Google News offering in Spain when that country passed a similar law. Over the past few months, Google has tried to explain to Australian officials just how incredibly stupid this plan is, but Australian officials (and the newspaper lobbyists down under) don’t seem to care.

Last week, Google finally pulled out the nuclear option, saying that it might just pull out of Australia entirely if the law passes. That’s an even bigger threat than the one Facebook made a few months back, when it claimed it would likely block the ability of anyone in Australia to share news on Facebook. But Google says it may shut down entirely in Australia:

?If this version of the code were to become law, it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google search available in Australia,? Silva told senators. ?And that would be a bad outcome not only for us, but also for the Australian people, media diversity, and the small businesses who use our products every day.?

Australian officials flipped out that a private company that they’re looking to tax at ridiculous levels might… no longer want to do business in their country. The country’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, claimed that the country won’t “respond to threats,” but his administration seems to have no problem issuing more threats. Australia’s Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, said that it’s “inevitable” that Google and Facebook will have to pay news organizations for daring to send them free traffic.

Frydenberg also claims that Australia can be a “world leader” in passing such legislation, apparently totally ignorant of how many times other countries have already passed similar legislation, and how poorly it’s gone. The Bloomberg article there mentions that pulling out of Australia would open up the market to competitors, but that assumes any of them would want to pay the pointless news tax as well.

The hubris level here remains astounding. Google and Facebook send these companies traffic. For free. It’s free advertising. These news orgs hire experts to help them perform better on Google and Facebook. And now they want to be paid for it too? While politicians are pulling out the fainting couch in saying “how dare” Google and Facebook threaten to block the entire country, perhaps they might want to look more closely at why they’re driving away these successful companies that their citizens (and constituents) clearly like using.

Filed Under: australia, google news, google tax, link tax, news, news tax
Companies: facebook, google

Canadian Publishing Group Says France Has The Right Idea, Presses For Its Own Google Tax

from the dividing-by-almost-zero dept

Canada is more than just a calmer, more apologetic version of the United States. It’s its own thing. But, more accurately, it’s a Britain + France thing. While Canada shares a common border with us, it’s still more Europe than US of A.

Every so often we’re reminded of its ties with the other side of the pond. This is one of those times.

French regulators recently decided Google owed French news sites for all the traffic it sends to them. It mandated “negotiations” between Google and French newspapers, but insisted the negotiations begin with Google getting out its wallet.

It appears Canadian lobbyists agree with France: Google owes them money.

A Canadian news industry advocacy group says that Canada would do well to follow France’s example in forcing internet search giant Google Inc. to pay news publishers for their content.

I guess this depends on how you define “do well.” This could backfire severely, resulting in no new revenue streams and fewer site visitors. Just ask Spain. That’s not “doing well.” If this means the group thinks it’s advisable to follow France’s example, it’s also wrong. But that’s the direction journalists are being steered by their advocates.

News Media Canada chief executive John Hinds said Thursday that the federal government will need to take a leadership role if the power dynamic between Google and publishers is to be changed.

This isn’t the first time Canadian journalists have demanded tech companies pay them for the traffic they send them. Three years ago, a Google tax was pitched to the Canadian government — one that included Facebook and Netflix in a proposal to tax companies who helped bring Canadian content to site users around the world.

Things are tough all over, thanks to a radical shift in, well… everything… since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Hinds somehow believes an advertising giant will provide for everyone during a time when everyone’s advertising revenues are down.

Hinds said the collapse of advertising rates in the face of the COVID-10 global pandemic, at a time when people are reading news sites at higher rates than ever, highlights the problem.

“I think it’s a fundamental thing: We need to be paid for our content. We need to be compensated,” Hinds said.

Fair enough. Let your readers do that. If they’re not interested, it’s really not up to a bunch of other companies located elsewhere in the world to make up the perceived difference. Everything sucks everywhere at the moment. Wringing a few bucks out of Google isn’t going to reverse anyone’s fortunes. And the more newspapers that convince governments Google should pay for sending them traffic, the less they’ll all be making individually.

A Google tax isn’t a revenue stream. It’s not even a trickle. Here’s Nate Hoffelder’s estimate of how Google’s “billions” in profit would actually pay out for rent-seeking newspapers:

Google is making under 4 cents per search, and turning a profit of around a half a cent per search.

Of course, that is an average across all of Google’s search results, and it includes search terms and even whole verticals which are not monetized (Google News, for example). And that is also a global average and not based on EU revenues, so it is not 100% applicable. (And those calculations are based on a bunch of unsupported assumptions.)

Leaving those caveats aside, the point that matters is that news publishers want Google to pay for the use of their links and snippets. This means that Google would need to take that 3.7 cents and divide it between all of the relevant links returned with each click of the search button (after taking a cut for itself).]

Efforts like this are counterproductive. They’re unlikely to reverse the fortunes of failing news concerns and far more likely to convince US tech companies to avoid providing specific services for certain countries. If Canadian publishers want what France has, they’re only going to end up splitting the disappointment.

Filed Under: aggregators, canada, france, google news, google tax, john hinds, news aggregators, news publishers, snippets, traffic
Companies: news media canada

French Government Says Google Must Pay French News Agencies For Sending Traffic Their Way

from the local-news-concerns-demand-the-right-to-fuck-themselves dept

European publishers just can’t punish themselves enough, apparently. News agencies experiencing downturns related to their inability to take advantage of the miraculous communications platform that is the internet are turning to their governments, demanding something be done about Google and its [checks notes] insistence on sending search traffic their way.

Building off the dubious assertion of “neighbouring rights,” the French government is now demanding Google pay French newspapers for the privilege of supplying them with additional readers.

In its latest crackdown on big tech, today the French Competition Authority has ordered Google to negotiate with French news organizations within the next three months to pay to reuse excerpts of news stories. That means Google will have to pay publishers for the headlines and snippets of stories that appear in Google News and even Google searches.

Note that it’s an “order to negotiate,” rather than the imposition of a tax. This is obviously in hopes of avoiding a repeat of Google’s response to the snippet tax imposed in Spain. When the Spanish government declared local news agencies had an “inalienable right” to be paid by Google for snippets and headlines showing up in Google searches, the company shut down its news service in Spain. This resulted in news agencies asking for the thing they had just asked for to be rolled back. Losing Google’s referral traffic obviously hurt them more than Google’s previous uncompensated “use” of their headlines and content snippets.

Of course, Google still has the nuclear option available, negotiation orders notwithstanding. A negotiation can open with Google offering to shut things down completely if French news agencies aren’t happy with the traffic Google’s sending them. And it’s a lot. The French Competition Authority knows this. And it knows its demands are placing a gun to news agencies’ heads, rather than Google’s. But it’s making these demands anyway.

These practices are made possible by the dominant position that Google is likely to hold in the market of general search services. This position leads Google to bring significant traffic to the websites of publishers and news agencies. Thus, according to the data provided by the complainants relating to 32 press titles, and not disputed by Google, the search engines — and therefore Google for a large part — represent, according to the sites, between 26% and 90% of the redirected traffic to their pages. This traffic is also very important and crucial for publishers and news agencies who cannot afford to lose any share of their digital readership due to their economic difficulties.

This is the Competition Authority stating that it thinks Google shouldn’t be able to pull the plug on local news services in response to snippet taxes. This condemnation of Google’s actions in Spain comes bundled with some inadvertent transparency about the importance of Google’s search engine to news agencies — the same ones who believe it’s Google that owes them money, rather than the other way around.

So, to avoid being nuked, the Competition Authority has laid down ground rules for “negotiations” that it hopes will keep Google from saying au revoir to its French Google News service.

Google must conduct negotiations within 3 months from the request to open negotiations from a press publisher or a news agency.

Neither the indexing, nor the classification, nor the presentation of the protected content taken up by Google on its services should in particular be affected by the negotiations.

Google will have to provide the Autorité with monthly reports on how it is complying with the decision.

But it won’t really be a negotiation. The Competition Authority says there’s only one acceptable outcome.

This injunction requires that the negotiations effectively result in a proposal for remuneration from Google.

This is dumb and highly unlikely to result in anything that makes French news agencies happy. They may be able to wrestle some money out of the company currently sending them traffic for free, but it’s not going to turn their fortunes around. Nor is it likely to result in more traffic being sent their way.

Filed Under: aggregation, copyright directive, eu copyright directive, france, google news, google tax, neighboring rights, traffic
Companies: google

US Newspapers Now Salivating Over Bringing A Google Snippet Tax Stateside

from the it's-spreading... dept

As the EU is still trying to figure out what it’s going to do about the highly contested EU Copyright Directive, it appears that at least one of the controversial parts, the ridiculous Article 11 link tax, is spreading to the US. David Chavern, the CEO of the News Media Alliance (a trade group representing legacy news publishers), is agitating in the NY Times for a US version of Article 11. The article if is so chock full of “wrong” that it’s embarrassing. Let’s dig in.

Facebook and Google have been brutal to the news business.

Citation needed. Seriously. Nothing in this piece explains how this is true. I know that lots of journalists claim it to be true, but they are lacking in evidence. The truth is Facebook and Google have been very good for some news operations, very bad for others, and all over the spectrum for others. It kinda depends on the news organization and the choices of those news organizations specifically. In other words: it’s the news organizations’ fault if they’re suddenly having trouble because their traffic has dried up.

But this primarily reflects a failure of imagination. The tech giants are the world?s best distribution platforms and could be an answer for journalism instead of a grave threat.

Again, for many news organizations, these platforms are an answer: an answer that drives traffic.

As readers have shifted to digital sources, the two companies have taken a large majority of online advertising revenue.

Note the verb choice: “taken.” As if it was snatched away from the rightful owners: the legacy news business who did fuck all to adapt to the internet. No, the large majority of online advertising went to those platforms because those platforms provided a better result for advertisers. We can discuss whether or not that’s a good thing, and whether or not advertisers are silly to focus on those platforms (indeed, I’d argue, they are!). But to blame Facebook and Google for making advertisers happier seems weird.

More important, the platforms now act as ?regulators? of the news business ? determining what information gets delivered to whom, and when. With the flick of an algorithmic finger, those two companies decide what news you see and whether a publisher lives or dies.

They only do that if the news publications focused solely on chasing traffic, rather than building up loyal audiences who come directly to their sites. Nothing Google or Facebook do really has that much of an impact on our traffic. Because we don’t rely on them for traffic. They send us some — which is great — but our strategy has always focused on loyal readers, not drive by traffic. So, no, Techdirt readers don’t rely on those platforms to get our content. Nor should they.

If your entire business strategy is based on some third party you can’t control, it seems a little, well, dubious, for you to whine that they don’t act the way you want them to.

The impact on journalism has been clear. Just within the past week, we have seen over 1,000 planned layoffs at Gannett, BuzzFeed and HuffPost, and no one thinks we are anywhere near the end.

This is also misleading. While, yes, there were some high profile layoffs that included a bunch of journalists — and that sucks — the 1,000 number is greatly exaggerated. As Peter Sterne pointed out, the vast majority of that 1,000 number (~800) came from “Oath” the Verizon-owned Frankenstein’s monster made up of various properties from HuffPost to Yahoo to AOL — and the majority of them were not journalists. So, yes, it’s still bad to see these layoffs. But using this 1,000 number to imply that that many journalists lost their job is highly misleading, and pretty shameful for a guy who represents news publishers.

We can start with the fact that ?free? isn?t a good business model for quality journalism.

Free is not the fucking business model. Free has never been a business model. However, free can very often be a key part of a very compelling business model.

Facebook and Google flatly refuse to pay for news even though they license many other types of content. Both companies have deals to pay music publishers when copyrighted songs play on their platforms. And the companies also aggressively bid to stream live sports and entertainment content to run on Facebook Watch and YouTube. These deals are varied and often secret, but none of them are based on ?free.?

And this may be the dumbest thing that Chavern has written in this entire article full of bad ideas. Google and Facebook pay licenses for that other content because they host that content full on their sites. They don’t pay for news because they’re not hosting the news, but rather sending traffic to those news sites. For free.

Why are the platforms so unwilling to pay news publishers for access to the quality journalism that users need and value?

Again, because you’re comparing apples to oranges. This is comparing totally different situations in a way that makes no sense.

There?s no reason those who produce the news shouldn?t enjoy the same intellectual property protections as songwriters and producers (regulators in Europe are looking at replicating some of these safeguards for journalism).

These are not “the same intellectual property protections as songwriters and producers.” News already has the same “intellectual property protections as songwriters and producers.” It’s called copyright and it applies to news as well as songs. The issue is that what’s happening here is entirely different. Google and Facebook pay for hosting music. They’re not hosting news (other than in very minor ways where news orgs choose to host on their platforms for specific purposes). Instead, Google and Facebook are sending people off to the news sites themselves, which should be a better deal, because then you have those people on your own damn site where you can offer all sorts of other things — some of which might even make the publishers some money. Or, build a loyal fan base who won’t need to go through those dastardly platforms in the future.

And, yes, it’s blatantly misleading to claim that the EU’s ridiculous Article 11 is the EU “replicating some of these safeguards for journalism.” Hell, this is close to journalistic malpractice from a guy who pretends to represent journalism. Remember, we already know what happens with an Article 11 type setup: it didn’t magically lead to the big platforms paying news publishers, and it actually did significant harm to news publishers, in particular the smaller ones.

The tech giants are also run as ?walled gardens? that minimize brands and separate publishers from their readers ? even while hoarding information about those same readers.

I don’t think he knows what a “walled garden” means. And, again, these services work by sending readers to the news publication sites themselves. That’s not “separating publishers from readers” unless the publishers are so clueless they do nothing to build a loyal community.

Imagine trying to build a trusted relationship with an audience when you can?t even know who they are.

That’s how every community works. You don’t know who they are at first. You build up trust and maybe they tell you. But you need to work on building a direct relationship yourself. You don’t sit there and just wait for the audience to magically find you and then blame Google when they don’t.

Publishers need new economic terms that include more revenue and more information about our readers.

So, uh, build the new revenue models that involve building up a loyal community who chooses to share info and you get that. And Google and Facebook don’t.

Facebook and Google also need to be willing to acknowledge investments in quality journalism through their algorithms. They are constantly on the defensive about spreading false and misleading ?news? that hurts people. They could start to address the problem by simply recognizing that The Miami Herald is a much better news source than Russian bots or Macedonian teenagers ? and highlighting original, quality content accordingly.

Um, both Facebook and (especially) Google already do that. How does he not know this. Indeed, the entire point of Google is to promote the more trustworthy content. It fails sometimes, but this paragraph misleadingly suggests that Google treats Macedonian teens at the same level as it treats the Miami Herald and that’s laughably wrong. You can’t make good policy decisions if you simply are spouting off nonsense.

Recognizing and promoting publishers that have consistently delivered quality news content can?t be that difficult for sophisticated tech companies. And there are a range of qualified independent ratings organizations, such as NewsGuard, that could help them separate the wheat from the chaff.

Again, that’s exactly what Google already does.

Whether they like to admit it or not, Facebook and Google are at real risk when it comes to the news business. Under the adage ?You break it, you buy it,? the platforms now own what happens when quality journalism goes away.

Facebook and Google didn’t break news. Newspapers failed to adapt and now they’re whining about it.

A true leader for the news publishers wouldn’t be begging platforms like Google and Facebook for money like that. He’d be helping those platforms adapt and build more loyal audiences, and experiment with more sophisticated business models. And, really, the most incredible part of this strategy from Chavern and the News Media Alliance is that it would only serve to do one thing: making those news publishers more reliant on Google and Facebook, giving them even more power.

News organizations deserve better than to have a trade organization spewing such utter nonsense.

Filed Under: article 11, david chavern, google news, google tax, journalism, news, newspapers, platforms
Companies: facebook, google, news media alliance