[mhomde]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Hacker News would technically be affected by the same Link tax. It would probably not be enforced but still.

It's such a stupid idea and I really lose hope about the future of a free internet when I see stuff like this. Hopefully saner minds will prevail

[merijnv]

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but Hacker News would technically be affected by the same Link tax. It would probably not be enforced but still.

The "link tax" isn't a tax on actual links. That name is a misnomer, it applies to links that reproduce key parts of the linked content inline.

So, for example, Google News links duplicating the headline and providing a summary. Because, in essence, Google News is copying content from news organisations/sites reducing their traffic (usually skimming headlines is enough to cherry-pick the few things you care about) while themselves profiting (keeping people on Google sites and around Google ads longer).

Whether this "link tax" is the right solution is debatable, but I hope we can agree that Google and Facebook abusing their dominant position this way isn't health for the world.

This does not apply to HN, because HN isn't reproducing any of the linked content inline.

[exodust]

> Google News links duplicating the headline and providing a summary.

What summary? I only see headlines on Google news. Where is the summary?

Often there's long headlines, but that's just writers trying to get good at SEO. Not that I mind long-ish descriptive headlines, but it's not content, it's still just link text, and an editorial choice to cram it with an entire paragraph.

[dalf]

What about RSS ? Many news sites have a RSS feed : * http://www.spiegel.de/schlagzeilen/tops/index.rss * https://www.lemonde.fr/rss/une.xml

So as an individual I can use them, but the dead Google Reader would have meet the same issue than Google News ?

[Kiro]

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/10/eus-link-tax-will-kill...

> The Directive is extremely vague on what defines a "link" or a "news story" and implies that an "excerpt" consists of more than one single word from a news-story (many URLs contain more than a single word from the headline).

[thrower123]

So it is a quote tax. That's really not any less stupid.

Almost every thread on HN has somebody quote part of the article inline.

[Jaruzel]

What about Graph tags, or the tags that do the Twitter cards? I'm guessing that an aggregation site that just uses those, would be fine?

This can all be easily fixed with a robots.txt entry and specific bot name for the Google News bot, or a special noindex meta-tag just for news aggregators.

[mhomde]

Are you sure? I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure they won't argue that applies links without summaries as well. And what about thumbnails?

I mean the "fair use" laws weren't exactly clear cut either but seemed generally sane

[mike22223333]

Headlines are exempted from link tax. Any part of body text is not.

[rawTruthHurts]

Correct me as well; but if memory serves right the issue was that google news did not display just a link, but also a two liner bit or so, giving a glimpse of the article and driving away people who were content just with reading that couple of lines. HN just gives you a link, it does not disclose any article content before you click the link.

[LolNoGenerics]

People pay to promote their links on google search. Why can't it be the other way around?

[knorker]

How can search engines exist in a capitalist system, then?

Because you don't propose a world without search engines, right?

Google tried for a long time to not have ads, but could not come up with an alternative revenue model and eventually had to.

[Double_a_92]

Hacker News doesn't leech the content of the linked site. At most some posts take the title 1:1.

[Brotkrumen]

There is no lower limit on what constitutes copyrighted material and what isnt in article 11. A headline would also be copyrighted material, so subject to a license fee. HN would have to pay for a license if it wanted to operate in EU.

[mnx]

Taking the title 1:1 is the policy, unless the title is bad. Also, what about those tl;dr comments people often post? Would that mean HN should pay?

[nkkollaw]

> It's such a stupid idea and I really lose hope about the future of a free internet

I really lose hope for the EU, not a free internet.

[laumars]

There EU is generally a force for good. Please don't let a couple of bad policies cloud your judgement against all of the good work that the wider organisation does.

[mcv]

The EU used to be a major champion for internet freedom, though.