Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

IMind t1_j9wiuur wrote

Google should not be paying for news aggregation.

I'm a huge fan of paying for work. But headline aggregation LINKING to the source should not be paid for UNLESS that site is paying google for the click through PROMOTION of their link.

326

FreekFrealy t1_j9x0jow wrote

This is a perfect example of politicians legislating on things they clearly don't understand

>“It really surprises me that Google has decided that they’d rather prevent Canadians from accessing news than actually paying journalists for the work they do,” Trudeau said.

Really? He's surprised a company isn't willing to pay to provide a service to another?

Every website on the internet has the power to not be listed on search engines, hell as a redditor you can even flag your account to not be listed on search engines, and yet all of these news orgs still choose to be listed without needing to be paid for the privilege. Because it benefits them.

187

nicuramar t1_j9z0hsm wrote

> This is a perfect example of politicians legislating on things they clearly don’t understand

Or do understand but don’t agree with you on, is also possible. It can sometimes be easy to confuse those two.

−9

FreekFrealy t1_j9zhqu7 wrote

If he understood it he wouldn't have been surprised by the result.

4

nicuramar t1_j9zyj36 wrote

That’s just a polemic remark, as I read it. You’re assuming too much.

0

FreekFrealy t1_j9zzb0p wrote

Did he or did he not understand when crafting this legislation that Google would never agree to pay to list a site and as a result would de list sites subject to this legislation?

And I'm assuming too much by taking him at his word that he didn't understand this would happen?

2

nicuramar t1_j9zznrs wrote

> Did he or did he not understand when crafting this legislation that Google would never agree to pay to list a site and as a result would de list sites subject to this legislation?

I’m sure he had considered that possibility. But when communicating politically, things tend to get angled a bit.

> And I’m assuming too much by taking him at his word that he didn’t understand this would happen?

Well, it’s politics :p. But I also don’t agree that he couldn’t be surprised even if he understands the issue.

0

FreekFrealy t1_ja046rq wrote

He certainly had access to experts who understood that I have no doubt tried to impress on him the reality of what would happen.

But he saw his problem "Journalists need money" and tried to find a way to treat a foreign company as a cash pinata for that need even though they had neither the justification or even the necessary leverage to do it.

He's a smart guy and definitely had the matter explained to him. Problem is you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. There's another saying that doesn't perfectly apply in this situation but is definitely in the same vein: "Don't bother trying to make a man understand something that his paycheck depends on not understanding".

1

SquashedKiwifruit t1_j9xkcxv wrote

I don't understand this law really.

Where sites like Facebook are taking elements of the content, and displaying it to users, in a manner which means they won't go to the news website (so the news website has no chance of making revenue / displaying an ad / getting a new sign up. For example, a post which contains a headline and a summary of its content (not just the first line). Then yes Facebook/Google/Whoever should pay.

But if the site is doing nothing more than showing a link to the news article in search results, with perhaps at most one sentence which is just the first few words of the article. That encourages users to access the website to read more, and is favourable to the news site. Google should not pay for that. That is driving people to the news website, where they can show ads to users.

Reading this article - it sounds like they are wanting them to pay for search results (correct me if I am wrong?). If that is the case I don't blame google, that seems ridiculous.

43

yxull t1_j9xnuc9 wrote

The modern equivalent of making the Yellow Pages pay you for the privilege of printing your ad in their phone book.

41

neutrilreddit t1_j9y61tb wrote

Yea. Google isn't the reason why these news organizations are losing money.

I can't speak for the role of facebook and other social media, but another major culprit would be the thousands of low effort click-bait ad-driven blogs and news aggregators on the other hand, that do zero original reporting but just repaste the same stuff from the original news websites, which also junk up the google search results even worse.

27

michaelrulaz t1_j9yft2b wrote

Or the fact that you have to pay money to see most of these sites. I’m not interested in reading an article on the New York Times for $10.99 or whatever. I’ll just look elsewhere if I care or more than likely, I won’t look at all

17

spellbanisher t1_ja0lgxc wrote

Just add the site to your Javascript exceptions

Edit: if you use Chrome. I don't know if Firefox and edge allow you to disable Javascript for individual websites

2

Kyouhen t1_j9zzbfo wrote

Posting here for future reference. I do breakdowns on Bills to see what they actually do versus what everyone's saying they do. Considering the nature of this Bill I'm skeptical of anything Google/Facebook/etc and most new agencies say about it. The big companies declaring they're going to stop offering news services are only concerned with money, so one way or the other the Bill is affecting their income and I don't quite trust them to be honest about why.

I'll see about doing a writeup on this one in the next few days and will get back to you once I've gone through just what it does.

8

[deleted] t1_ja0r4ov wrote

[deleted]

0

SquashedKiwifruit t1_ja0s255 wrote

That response doesn’t really make sense to me because a person using a search engine is searching for something.

To the extent they are looking for news, they just already know about it so it suggests they are looking for further reading. You wouldn’t search for headlines about something you already know of surely?

If they don’t click through it must not have been of interest?

It seems to me that if they were going to have to pay for the item merely being listed, irrespective of if someone interacted with it, then if I was google I simply wouldn’t show that content in search results either.

Now if google was summarising the content beyond just the headline - I would agree with you. They should pay because they are taking the content and summarising it so a person wouldnt need to read it. But that doesn’t seem to be the case?

Facebook and reddit is a little different because unlike google there is an interactive forum. So the comments usually do summarise the content.

4

vuxanov t1_j9xncoo wrote

That is not the issue here. Google steals the traffic of websites by embedding their content into google home page.

−21

nerfyies t1_j9xuuaf wrote

You are actually a bit wrong, I actually worked in this space on the technical side, google has a system called rich results, you basically provide Google with a schema that they use to show a summary on the search result. A rich result is for example adding the image of news article directly on the search page but other types of data like faq (some of those drop down questions you see in results are provided by websites) . This mostly benefits the news website as they get free clicks since google promotes this content an places it at the top for free.

25

vuxanov t1_j9xv4gt wrote

If it’s such a great deal for newspapers why are they against it?

−26

leopard_tights t1_j9xx5jz wrote

Because they think they can "double dip".

21

vuxanov t1_j9xxoom wrote

Or maybe it’s because google is actually stealing their traffic.

−27

leopard_tights t1_j9xy5kl wrote

If you search for something do you usually read the title of article linked in google and are satisfied with that? No, you click it.

21

vuxanov t1_j9xyb5g wrote

Lol are you seriously saying this on Reddit? Nobody reads anything except titles.

−16

leopard_tights t1_j9y0xma wrote

I'm starting to understand why this is so complicated for you.

25

CatastrophicLeaker t1_j9xywvb wrote

When you google youre looking for more info, Reddit is for passive scrolling

19