I agree with Google on this one. Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea.
It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing, and there's clearly some sort of spectrum from "just the URL" to "AI synopsis of the entire article". But at the level we see on Google News (headline + maybe a picture), I don't feel there's any good justification for charging.
I actually agree with it too. Google and Facebook aren't the reason news outlets have cash problems and a free teat to latch on to isn't the answer. News is important, but let's fix the problem in a better way.
Just to think about this more, are there any other business types, besides online news, where your success so radically depends on the decisions (read google news ranking and summarization algorithms) of some other business that you have zero relations with.
Google news+facebook+twitter can drastically change the revenue of any online news site with an internal decision. Where else do we see something like this in the economy?
EDIT: the criteria of zero business relationship between your entire product class and the Big Business is critical; otherwise lots of examples exist.
There isn't a single physical product that's not beholden to the Walmarts of the world to stock, market and highlight those products. There isn't a single farmer in this world that isn't dependant on stores buying off their produce and putting it into shelves.
Heck, even in paper era, there wasn't a single paper not beholden to kiosks and other stores to put their papers into racks and into premium places where customers are most likely to pick them up. Do you hink NYTimes demanded that street vendors pay them for the privilege of putting their paper onto a rack?!
Having fully vertically integrated bussiness (like you're mentioning) is a very modern development of monopolies.
Virtually every product and service with a website and social media presence? If you get banned from Google, your visibility online pretty much falls off a cliff and your sales will likely never recover. So anyone making money from a website is dependent on Google and other search engines... well mostly Google indexing said site.
Also, any business whose livelihood depends on a large company's platform. Businesses and entrepreneurs selling their work on Amazon and eBay, YouTubers and Twitch streamers making content for those platforms, influencers in general given their reliance on social media services...
Going back a few decades, newspapers were dependent on the newsstands they were sold out of. They could put your paper higher or lower on the stand (ranking).
Going back not as far, CNN was dependent on your local cable company to deliver their signal to homes. Charter or Comcast could choose to stop carrying a channel altogether.
No matter how hard you try to avoid it, some asshole will always post any video you make to YouTube immediately and probably try to monetize it.
Given how much money Google collects for YouTube, they should get fined through the roof when they allow somebody to upload something they don't have the rights to.
The porn companies showed that you solve this technically. However, Google will fight this to the very end.
There are lots of examples of people who produce things being beholden to a few companies that controls the distribution channels.
A more interesting one is small businesses and payment processors which don't control the distribution but rather keep them operationally dependant on a product they control a monopoly over.
Does it? If I summarize a book, do I need to pay a fee? News (much like recipes) is not directly covered by copyright (facts cannot be copyrighted). Only the expression (exact wording) is (which is one reason why recipes are usually accompanied by a personal story).
> which is one reason why recipes are usually accompanied by a personal story
I see this claimed often but it doesn't make any sense - anyone can still copy the recipe without the story and then the copy would even provide more value than the original.
Seems to me padding recipes with fluff is mostly about SEO and maximizing ad impressions.
Legality aside, I can understand how reading a short news article (especially when paying only via ad views) and then summarizing information that lots of people are probably interested in right at this moment is likely to be more detrimental to a writer's business model than reading an entire book (possibly after purchasing a copy) and then summarizing information that's likely to be less timely.
I worked at Google until October 2023, the blog post is in bad faith.
This is a good comment that gets at why[1], TL;DR: the hedge fund thing is a complete nonsequitur. The programs are the equivalent of Google Cloud grants, and Google actively disinvested from News[2] just because that was an easy place to get your mandated Sundar cuts for Wall Street.
They're not a good steward of anything other than their stock price.
I don't like the idea of a link tax but I do know, 100%, that blog post is slanted and mealy-mouthed on everything I know first-hand about.
The link tax is a red herring and a poor understanding on the part of legislators. The real issue is pre-adtech publishers kept 100% of ad revenue and double click now takes a massive cut (which they briefly touch on).
All that cash flowing into MTV is real people’s jobs and livelihood being drained away - it’s also the reason search is entering a utility collapse curve since AI can generate unlimited click bait.
Double click will end up killing google, it’s already too late to go back.
Google has single-handely ruined the internet, and absolutely warped our expectations around what the economics of content creation looks like online. Google earns money from that content. Why wouldn’t the content creators be entitled to a cut?
Oh please, most content online was shared freely long before google came along.
On the contrary, it's the for-profit content creators and to a much bigger extend the monetizing platforms that have latched on to the open web and are now trying to redefine it. Meanwhile, most content is still created by users like you and me who are not going to get any of the ad profits these platforms are crying about.
Why? What moral or legal principle entitles someone to compensation for linking to their website whether or not you're profiting from that?
It's a different question when there's an excerpt or machine-generated summary. In that case, copyright applies, and in most jurisdictions it may or may not be fair use depending on what is copied and how it is presented.
Aren’t you providing marketing to the newspaper? Isn’t that what these news agencies pay google billions for? There’s a whole industry (seo) designed around getting your site linked.
This looks like a money grab to me. What am I missing?
Well, yeah it is a bad idea. Because if you tax links to your content Google will just stop linking to your content. Which is exactly what they're poised to do, as per TFA.
I have sympathy for news publishers but I worry a lot about the principle of asserting that linking to something is an act that the link target has proprietary rights to over. At some level, it is almost a free speech issue. If I can't refer to what you are saying, without owing you something, you have power over not just my speech, but a power to limit how your work is subjected to criticism and debate. It's effectively an extension of copyright law to expand copyright holder's rights.
Obviously all this is hyperbolic based the actual text of the law. The law doesn't directly apply any sort of link tax, and it is shamelessly targeted only at Google and Facebook (to the point that they wrote Facebook in there by name, which is kind of stupid if you ask me). But if you drill into the reasoning it hits at the foundational level on this basic logic, and it's pretty concerning if we assume then that this will be significantly extrapolated and expanded - as has been the history with all other aspects of copyright in the past.
Honestly I would rather that governments come clean and just admit that the problem they are trying to solve is actually a "social good" outcome, and therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves. Trying to artificially construct that through introduction of significant new precedents in copyright law engenders huge risks of unintended consequences and potential future extrapolation and abuse of this principle.
i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossible to read an article around the ads, login prompts, and chumboxes. News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault. Giving them more money to do the thing they've spent so long failing at isn't going to solve this problem.
>directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves
yes. and specifically, make sure the fund is actually funding journalism. a link tax that gets paid out to news sites only incentivizes them to do the bare minimum amount of journalism to still qualify as a news site, and then fill up the rest of the site with SEO clickbait to maximize their clicks for the link tax.
> news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable
To appease Google…
Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam. The games have no ads and there’s nothing pushing you to read more. No feed. No algorithm. NYT got the hell away from SEO and focus on the customers, who decide with their wallets
> News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault.
To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play.
> make sure the fund is actually funding journalism
I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts is beyond me.
Let alone.. do we want "clicks" to substitute for editorial process?
The deeply sad part about all of this is News and Broadcast have traditionally had very strong commission based internal sales operations. They have the people to go out, get advertisers, take their money, and then just /inline/ all the advertisements. They spent decades refusing to retrain or retarget this staff for the new market place.
Out of all industries that _didn't_ have to make a deal with Google Ads, it was theirs, and they just completely blew it.
As a developer who works for one of these news publishers you have little sympathy for, what I can tell you is that:
1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high.
2) Ad CPMs are low—especially on iOS thanks to Apple's ATT—so we need more ads to make the same amount of revenue.
3) "SEO clickbait" (especially Taboola) helps keep the lights on. Click at your own peril.
4) If governments pay news outlets, we're trading one captured entity for another. Sure, you might get less ads about singles in your area looking meet up, paywalls, and login prompts, but also might get less news critical to the government funding that news.
The people in the trenches building the product and writing the news don't want these things you mention, and we understand when we're building anti-patterns, but the bottom line demands it.
>yes. and specifically, make sure the fund is actually funding journalism
The problem with this is the problem with every scheme I have seen so far alongb these lines.It gives the government more control over what is and isn't "journalism." Either you give money to spam farms and watch dogs equally, or you wind up with cronyism.
If it was just plain hyperlinks, I would agree with you.
Google is scraping metadata and articles, and summarizing them so that most people never even need to click the link. Google is getting most of the value from the articles written while not doing the actual work to make them.
The whole thing could have been avoided if Google and social media stopped embedding previews and summaries everywhere.
It's worse in places like Facebook where they actively don't want you to actually follow the link. Facebook wants you to leave a like or a comment right there under the preview, then keep scrolling.
I don't think the law (from what I read of it) actually does target that though. Might as well cite it rather than refer to it in the abstract:
> The total number of the covered platform’s internet web
pages displayed or presented to California residents during the
month that link to, display, or present the eligible digital journalism
provider’s news articles, works of journalism, or other content, or
portions thereof.
Google can remove all the summaries and the law will apply just as much. In fact, from my reading of it, in other parts they are actually referring to "impressions" as the driver; that is it's explicitly the click through that they are asserting provides the value to Google, not the prevention of click through.
I get that emotionally, it's the prevention of click through that feels injurious, but it doesn't read as the spirit of this to me. I think possibly they know that if they didn't fully scope in links here Google would immediately just reduce it to raw links and this would reduce click through and it would hurt the intended beneficiaries of this more than it helps them.
> The whole thing could have been avoided if Google and social media stopped embedding previews and summaries everywhere.
This is so backwards. This is a terrible experience. Embedded summaries are great, they make everyone's life easier. If embedded summaries are killing journalism, then journalism is already dead.
I see a parallel between the news linking case and AI training on copyrighted content (without regurgitating it back later). If AI can't use ideas from copyrighted works, then nobody can. Because anyone could be secretly using AI we have to apply the same strict standards of attribution to all human works. And that would lead to a chilling effect, any creative act takes the risk of incidental infringement.
Should copyright owners control the external discourse about their work, or own the ideas in their works? Should we upgrade AI from protected expression to protected ideas?
> If AI can't use ideas from copyrighted works, then nobody can. Because anyone could be secretly using AI we have to apply the same strict standards of attribution to all human works.
Yes, we should be applying strict standards of attribution to all works, human or otherwise.
IMO one of the biggest defects of language models currently is lack of attribution; if sources are not properly cited, there is no way to verify the veracity of what is written. Unfortunately, apart from the technical difficulty of implementing attribution, the exact combination of sources is part of a model's "secret sauce", so there is an economic incentive to not cite.
> the problem they are trying to solve is actually a "social good" outcome, and therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves
This generalizes to copyright and patent IP in general; we want to encourage the creation of valuable art, inventions, and other cultural artifacts, but instead of rewarding their production in a more direct manner we instead imposed a huge restriction on the behavior of all people when interacting with media or technology in order to carve out a reward for the creator. And now this law once again restricts the freedom of others to use or share information in order to carve out a reward by way of exception to those restrictions. Creating rewards by removing freedoms from the majority of people is extremely backwards.
> and therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves
Having any government fund news journalism is a bad idea. In any event, you can be certain the revenue will be redistributed to fund the war machine in another country.
Surely you're speaking about your own country of residence here?
In Estonia for example (which tangentially has one of the highest press freedom rankings in the world), ERR ("Estonian Public Broadcasting") is widely considered to be one of the most trustworthy news platforms in the country. The reason for this is simple: there is no incentive to pump out journalistic sludge for clicks, or to prey on the public's collective anxieties for larger quarterly profits.
I suppose you could argue that it indirectly supports the "war machine" in Ukraine, but I don't really consider it unethical to fund wars of self-defense, especially given the national security implications at home.
Why? They are the most spoiled, privileged and entitled group out there. Not only did they force google, facebook, etc to give them preferential treatment in search/algorithm/etc, now they want google, facebook, etc to pay them for the 'privilege' of giving them preferential treatment. Not only do they want google/facebook to send users to their sites, they want google/facebook to pay them for that privilege. The shameless hubris.
> therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves.
No. That's for authoritarian countries like britain and china.
> huge risks of unintended consequence
But government funded news has no risks?
What we need is to break up google/facebook/etc. We need competition in the search, smartphone, social media, etc space. The fundamental problem is that two companies control so much of american mindshare.
That's an extremely narrow view. Federal copyright law is Federal jurisdiction. States have the power to make their own non-conflicting copyright laws.
People were predicting this would happen when Google caved and started paying "link tax" to Australia and Canada and other jurisdictions with similar laws. Now – to no surprise – every government (really every media conglomerate lobbying arm) around the world wants the free money and so more such laws are popping up.
Dunno about Australia but Google ‘won’ in Canada, where the government agreed to accept what Google had originally offered, and make it up to their corporate media buddies in the following budget.
It ended with a negotiation and Google agreeing to pay $100M+ annually to Canadian news organizations, so I wouldn't exactly call that a "win" for them.
In Australia there were concessions where the Australian gov of the time thought that having Google negotiate an agreement only with the major outlets (Rupert Murdoch) was acceptable so they don't pay every paper, just the ones that agree with the Liberal party (a right wing party) viewpoints.
The liberal party is now out of power but the labor party has no courage to stand up to Murdoch to repeal this.
It was all very clever and basically a way to fund right wing media in Australia via big tech. Blatantly corrupt as fuck and people need to be arrested for what went on to create this law but definitely clever.
Seems weird that if someone links to a news site, that the news site gets to double-dip advertising revenue, since it gets to advertise on its own site, and also get a cut of the advertising revenue of someone that linked to them. It will either mean everyone will want to classify themselves as news sites, or, people that link to them will no longer want to drive revenue via ads.
The issue is that most of the time the link doesnt get clicked on because the aggregators have summarized the content. facebook especially disincentivizes clicking the link.
Reminds me of this "Report: We Don’t Make Any Money If You Don’t Click The Fucking Link". The aggregators sucked a lot of the juice out from the properties themselves.
They reopened in Spain now that they can _"reach individual or group agreements with publishers"_, which makes sense if you believe that asking the publisher before summarizing their content is the right thing to do.
Although facebook/insta did refuse to be blackmailed, and many canadian news orgs are actually harmed by this sort of bullshit link taxing because their media can't be shared on facebook anymore, where a lot of older news watchers get their news
That's reverse advertising. Instead of paying Google to display links to their sites where everybody looks (Google News) they want to be paid to be where everybody looks.
I work in news technology, including with many local news organizations, both corporate and independent, including in California. Google does not support all news organizations equally, and this seems designed to gain some leverage over organizations that do get a lot from Google. Their Google News Initiative is on its surface just a training platform for publishers to learn how to use Google’s tools but they’ve done quite a bit more for some publishers. This feels like an attempt to gain the vocal support of publishers who have been blessed by Google’s beneficence, many of which are earnest non-profit organizations who might take the bait about big bad hedge funds. I don’t know how they select who to help and who to ignore and our attempts to engage with them on behalf of publishers have had mixed results.
But publishers’ collective frustration with Google is quite high. Given the implications that “it would be a shame if something happened to your nice journalism website” coupled with the appeal against the big bad hedge funds and ghost papers, it’s sort of a clever position but I’m not sure it will work.
I wonder if these media conglomerates think the same laws should apply to them. If your news article has any linked information in it, you need to pay money to the owner of that link every time your article is opened. Seems only fair.
That's also absurd that modern news sites think they are so trustworthy that they don't even bother to cite or link to the studies or subjects they're talking about. Sometimes it's a bit insane when wikipedia only requires a link to a news site to consider something verified.
They sometimes do. And even otherwise, most "news" these days is snippets and summarization of existing online content, the exact thing they are complaining about.
Readit News
It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing, and there's clearly some sort of spectrum from "just the URL" to "AI synopsis of the entire article". But at the level we see on Google News (headline + maybe a picture), I don't feel there's any good justification for charging.
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It's the news sites' content that Google is scraping and monetizing. How is it not Google that's latched on to a "free teat"?
Serious question. What am I missing?
EDIT: Thanks for the downvotes everyone. I need 'em from time-to-time to ensure I've not succumbed to The Matrix.
Of course, you're all wrong. But, keep 'em coming!
Google news+facebook+twitter can drastically change the revenue of any online news site with an internal decision. Where else do we see something like this in the economy?
EDIT: the criteria of zero business relationship between your entire product class and the Big Business is critical; otherwise lots of examples exist.
There isn't a single physical product that's not beholden to the Walmarts of the world to stock, market and highlight those products. There isn't a single farmer in this world that isn't dependant on stores buying off their produce and putting it into shelves.
Heck, even in paper era, there wasn't a single paper not beholden to kiosks and other stores to put their papers into racks and into premium places where customers are most likely to pick them up. Do you hink NYTimes demanded that street vendors pay them for the privilege of putting their paper onto a rack?!
Having fully vertically integrated bussiness (like you're mentioning) is a very modern development of monopolies.
Also, any business whose livelihood depends on a large company's platform. Businesses and entrepreneurs selling their work on Amazon and eBay, YouTubers and Twitch streamers making content for those platforms, influencers in general given their reliance on social media services...
Going back not as far, CNN was dependent on your local cable company to deliver their signal to homes. Charter or Comcast could choose to stop carrying a channel altogether.
Yelp.
TripAdvisor.
No matter how hard you try to avoid it, some asshole will always post any video you make to YouTube immediately and probably try to monetize it.
Given how much money Google collects for YouTube, they should get fined through the roof when they allow somebody to upload something they don't have the rights to.
The porn companies showed that you solve this technically. However, Google will fight this to the very end.
Manufacturers and Retailers
There are lots of examples of people who produce things being beholden to a few companies that controls the distribution channels.
A more interesting one is small businesses and payment processors which don't control the distribution but rather keep them operationally dependant on a product they control a monopoly over.
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Does it? If I summarize a book, do I need to pay a fee? News (much like recipes) is not directly covered by copyright (facts cannot be copyrighted). Only the expression (exact wording) is (which is one reason why recipes are usually accompanied by a personal story).
I see this claimed often but it doesn't make any sense - anyone can still copy the recipe without the story and then the copy would even provide more value than the original.
Seems to me padding recipes with fluff is mostly about SEO and maximizing ad impressions.
This is a good comment that gets at why[1], TL;DR: the hedge fund thing is a complete nonsequitur. The programs are the equivalent of Google Cloud grants, and Google actively disinvested from News[2] just because that was an easy place to get your mandated Sundar cuts for Wall Street.
They're not a good steward of anything other than their stock price.
I don't like the idea of a link tax but I do know, 100%, that blog post is slanted and mealy-mouthed on everything I know first-hand about.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40015572
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/technology/google-layoffs...
All that cash flowing into MTV is real people’s jobs and livelihood being drained away - it’s also the reason search is entering a utility collapse curve since AI can generate unlimited click bait.
Double click will end up killing google, it’s already too late to go back.
Deleted Comment
On the contrary, it's the for-profit content creators and to a much bigger extend the monetizing platforms that have latched on to the open web and are now trying to redefine it. Meanwhile, most content is still created by users like you and me who are not going to get any of the ad profits these platforms are crying about.
If you're profiting from it, it's not a bad idea.
If they don't want a Google to index them they can use robots.txt to prevent it.
It's a different question when there's an excerpt or machine-generated summary. In that case, copyright applies, and in most jurisdictions it may or may not be fair use depending on what is copied and how it is presented.
This looks like a money grab to me. What am I missing?
Obviously all this is hyperbolic based the actual text of the law. The law doesn't directly apply any sort of link tax, and it is shamelessly targeted only at Google and Facebook (to the point that they wrote Facebook in there by name, which is kind of stupid if you ask me). But if you drill into the reasoning it hits at the foundational level on this basic logic, and it's pretty concerning if we assume then that this will be significantly extrapolated and expanded - as has been the history with all other aspects of copyright in the past.
Honestly I would rather that governments come clean and just admit that the problem they are trying to solve is actually a "social good" outcome, and therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves. Trying to artificially construct that through introduction of significant new precedents in copyright law engenders huge risks of unintended consequences and potential future extrapolation and abuse of this principle.
i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossible to read an article around the ads, login prompts, and chumboxes. News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault. Giving them more money to do the thing they've spent so long failing at isn't going to solve this problem.
>directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves
yes. and specifically, make sure the fund is actually funding journalism. a link tax that gets paid out to news sites only incentivizes them to do the bare minimum amount of journalism to still qualify as a news site, and then fill up the rest of the site with SEO clickbait to maximize their clicks for the link tax.
To appease Google…
Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam. The games have no ads and there’s nothing pushing you to read more. No feed. No algorithm. NYT got the hell away from SEO and focus on the customers, who decide with their wallets
To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play.
> make sure the fund is actually funding journalism
I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts is beyond me.
Let alone.. do we want "clicks" to substitute for editorial process?
The deeply sad part about all of this is News and Broadcast have traditionally had very strong commission based internal sales operations. They have the people to go out, get advertisers, take their money, and then just /inline/ all the advertisements. They spent decades refusing to retrain or retarget this staff for the new market place.
Out of all industries that _didn't_ have to make a deal with Google Ads, it was theirs, and they just completely blew it.
1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high.
2) Ad CPMs are low—especially on iOS thanks to Apple's ATT—so we need more ads to make the same amount of revenue.
3) "SEO clickbait" (especially Taboola) helps keep the lights on. Click at your own peril.
4) If governments pay news outlets, we're trading one captured entity for another. Sure, you might get less ads about singles in your area looking meet up, paywalls, and login prompts, but also might get less news critical to the government funding that news.
The people in the trenches building the product and writing the news don't want these things you mention, and we understand when we're building anti-patterns, but the bottom line demands it.
The problem with this is the problem with every scheme I have seen so far alongb these lines.It gives the government more control over what is and isn't "journalism." Either you give money to spam farms and watch dogs equally, or you wind up with cronyism.
You know that with Substack all these actual journalists are having no issue getting paid very well.
I'm not sure why we'd want to expand NPR or make more NPR's. We need less of their low-quality and biased journalism IMO, not more.
Google is scraping metadata and articles, and summarizing them so that most people never even need to click the link. Google is getting most of the value from the articles written while not doing the actual work to make them.
The whole thing could have been avoided if Google and social media stopped embedding previews and summaries everywhere.
It's worse in places like Facebook where they actively don't want you to actually follow the link. Facebook wants you to leave a like or a comment right there under the preview, then keep scrolling.
> The total number of the covered platform’s internet web pages displayed or presented to California residents during the month that link to, display, or present the eligible digital journalism provider’s news articles, works of journalism, or other content, or portions thereof.
Google can remove all the summaries and the law will apply just as much. In fact, from my reading of it, in other parts they are actually referring to "impressions" as the driver; that is it's explicitly the click through that they are asserting provides the value to Google, not the prevention of click through.
I get that emotionally, it's the prevention of click through that feels injurious, but it doesn't read as the spirit of this to me. I think possibly they know that if they didn't fully scope in links here Google would immediately just reduce it to raw links and this would reduce click through and it would hurt the intended beneficiaries of this more than it helps them.
Its hard to claim google is in the wrong for doing to news sites what news sites have been doing to other people since forever.
Those should be brought back and applied to content moderation platforms.
This is so backwards. This is a terrible experience. Embedded summaries are great, they make everyone's life easier. If embedded summaries are killing journalism, then journalism is already dead.
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Should copyright owners control the external discourse about their work, or own the ideas in their works? Should we upgrade AI from protected expression to protected ideas?
Yes, we should be applying strict standards of attribution to all works, human or otherwise.
IMO one of the biggest defects of language models currently is lack of attribution; if sources are not properly cited, there is no way to verify the veracity of what is written. Unfortunately, apart from the technical difficulty of implementing attribution, the exact combination of sources is part of a model's "secret sauce", so there is an economic incentive to not cite.
This generalizes to copyright and patent IP in general; we want to encourage the creation of valuable art, inventions, and other cultural artifacts, but instead of rewarding their production in a more direct manner we instead imposed a huge restriction on the behavior of all people when interacting with media or technology in order to carve out a reward for the creator. And now this law once again restricts the freedom of others to use or share information in order to carve out a reward by way of exception to those restrictions. Creating rewards by removing freedoms from the majority of people is extremely backwards.
Having any government fund news journalism is a bad idea. In any event, you can be certain the revenue will be redistributed to fund the war machine in another country.
In Estonia for example (which tangentially has one of the highest press freedom rankings in the world), ERR ("Estonian Public Broadcasting") is widely considered to be one of the most trustworthy news platforms in the country. The reason for this is simple: there is no incentive to pump out journalistic sludge for clicks, or to prey on the public's collective anxieties for larger quarterly profits.
I suppose you could argue that it indirectly supports the "war machine" in Ukraine, but I don't really consider it unethical to fund wars of self-defense, especially given the national security implications at home.
Deleted Comment
Why? They are the most spoiled, privileged and entitled group out there. Not only did they force google, facebook, etc to give them preferential treatment in search/algorithm/etc, now they want google, facebook, etc to pay them for the 'privilege' of giving them preferential treatment. Not only do they want google/facebook to send users to their sites, they want google/facebook to pay them for that privilege. The shameless hubris.
> therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves.
No. That's for authoritarian countries like britain and china.
> huge risks of unintended consequence
But government funded news has no risks?
What we need is to break up google/facebook/etc. We need competition in the search, smartphone, social media, etc space. The fundamental problem is that two companies control so much of american mindshare.
The liberal party is now out of power but the labor party has no courage to stand up to Murdoch to repeal this.
It was all very clever and basically a way to fund right wing media in Australia via big tech. Blatantly corrupt as fuck and people need to be arrested for what went on to create this law but definitely clever.
If google decides to delist, forcing them to list news sites would constitute compelled speech, would it not?
https://www.theonion.com/report-we-don-t-make-any-money-if-y...
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-news-re-opens-spai...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/29/google-ca...
Although facebook/insta did refuse to be blackmailed, and many canadian news orgs are actually harmed by this sort of bullshit link taxing because their media can't be shared on facebook anymore, where a lot of older news watchers get their news
https://about.fb.com/news/2023/06/changes-to-news-availabili...
No link tax, just a tax for news.
Sounds... reasonable?
Anyway, Google News has been off in Spain for 8 years. News sites didn't disappear. It reopened in 2022 when the law was changed https://blog.google/products/news/google-news-returns-spain/
But publishers’ collective frustration with Google is quite high. Given the implications that “it would be a shame if something happened to your nice journalism website” coupled with the appeal against the big bad hedge funds and ghost papers, it’s sort of a clever position but I’m not sure it will work.