[pavelludiq]

Congratulations to the EU commission and the EU parliament on achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do despite being told this would happen and despite it actually already happening in Spain and Germany. It's not like this is any kind of surprise, it's the only logical thing that could've happened. I am still extremely bitter about the dirty way this law was passed, the lies, the deliberate lies by the commission, the nasty response EU politicians had at protesters and the absolute contempt they had for young people saying they we're entitled children trained by internet giants to expect free things. I watched the debates in parliament and there were MEPs who actually said that. The horsetrading France and Germany did over Russian gas in order to get a deal on this law. That disgusting blog post the EU commission published calling people who disagreed with them bots and brainwashed and positioning themselves literally as knights out to slay the google dragon. It's all horribly corrupt and cynical. I'm sure many young people got the message that their leaders view them with such absolute contempt and open hatred and I fear the consequences for Europe.

[simias]

Your reaction is over the top IMO. I'm quite perplex about this law myself but I think you're missing the point.

You comment reads a bit like "the workers wanted a raise, now they're on strike and they get less money than previously, achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do!" It's technically true of course, but I think they hope that Google will suffer enough from this decision that they'll have to reconsider in the future. Alternatively, they hope that people will still want to get French news and will move to other websites which will accept to give money to the news organizations.

I'm really not sure that it's going to work on either count but on the other hand it's clear that many EU constituents (those who actually pay taxes and employ people in the EU) felt that something had to be done.

>the absolute contempt they had for young people saying they we're entitled children trained by internet giants to expect free things

I mean, if anything I agree with this statement, except I'd put "free" between quotes. The ad-driven business model is a cancer as far as I'm concerned.

[AnonymousPlanet]

> but on the other hand it's clear that many EU constituents (those who actually pay taxes and employ people in the EU) felt that something had to be done.

Why do you think the EU constituents had anything to do with these laws? The laws were incentivised by the publishers. The crux in the EU is that the biggest part of the industry see the internet just as infrastructure and couldn't care less about net neutrality, censorship, equal access, or ad revenues. The only industries affected by those issues are tech companies and publishers.

The tech companies have a pro liberalisation stance while the publishers hate the internet's guts. Now guess where countries with strong and influential publishers and a nearly non existent tech industry are leaning to. That publications like Süddeutsche, Zeit, and FAZ have been portraying the internet as a bad and dangerous thing for decades now, doesn't help.

[tylerl]

> ...they hope that Google will suffer enough from this decision that they'll have to reconsider in the future...

Google loses literally nothing.

Google doesn't make any money off Google news. They make money sending traffic to advertisers, not to news sites. And the Google news page doesn't run ads. It's just a free service.

The only benefit to Google is that it makes their brand better.

This has been the irony all along; Google's been running a 100% free (NOT ad supported) service to help users find news sites, and the news sites demand to be compensated. So OF COURSE this is going to be the response; there was never any money to share.

[cameronbrown]

No. The vast majority of the informed peoples of the EU campaigned and pleaded them not to pass Article 13. The fact they turn around and basically call us too stupid to know what's best is just icing on the cake. They ignored the people.

Honestly, the entire institution gets what it deserves. I've never seen such an utter shambles of democracy as bad as the Article 13 one.

[kiba]

You comment reads a bit like "the workers wanted a raise, now they're on strike and they get less money than previously, achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do!" It's technically true of course, but I think they hope that Google will suffer enough from this decision that they'll have to reconsider in the future. Alternatively, they hope that people will still want to get French news and will move to other websites which will accept to give money to the news organizations.

How exactly google will suffer? It seems to me that Google is the party that can afford to walk away and that the French news media cannot.

[_the_inflator]

Nope. I side with Google. Why should they pay for Agency content brandet as high quality newspaper content? Why only newspapers? This is blackmailing google.

This is using law to grant the lobby of newspapers additional revenue. And blame Google for not abiding.

[graeme]

You're failing to consider that the EU acted utterly irrationally.

The news isn't an important business for google and it doesn't get its revenue from their.

In a strike, the employer has pressure to relent because workers have a thing the employer values.

But what does Google have at stake in this situation? Why on earth would they pay to link to news? Why are news links special?

[gmueckl]

No, a lot of politicians amd lobbyists in favor of that reform had arguments that were maybe relevant 30 years ago, completely missing how media consumption has changed. And when called out, their response was deliberately hurtful, full of contempt and belittling those who - in their view - had no effin idea what this was about when in truth, even Axel Voss, the architect of the copyright reform gave factually wrong explanations of the contents of the regulation.

The politicians who were pushing this through were deliberately breaking just about every rule of civil political discourse. This is all on the record. Such behaviour it is completely out of line, but I don't know how to counter it effectively when those responsible for it have more political power and have better contacts in the media to have their views (and, in this case, lies) reported.

[Kiro]

> but I think they hope that Google will suffer enough from this decision that they'll have to reconsider in the future.

Reconsider what? What is Google doing wrong here exactly?

[MrBuddyCasino]

> but on the other hand it's clear that many EU constituents (those who actually pay taxes and employ people in the EU) felt that something had to be done

This is exactly the problem. X was something, therefore it had to be done, although it was utterly pointless.

This is everything that’s wrong with politics.

[Mirioron]

>but on the other hand it's clear that many EU constituents (those who actually pay taxes and employ people in the EU) felt that something had to be done.

Really? Because only the Commission can propose laws and the Commission is not elected. Even MEPs get really low voter turnouts in many EU countries, because people feel that MEPs don't mean anything. I can understand it too, because MEPs seem to vote in blocs and what the people want seems to be entirely irrelevant.

[donohoe]

I agreed with EU on GDPR but I have to agree with @pavelludiq here.

It’s an understandable move by google to a short-sighted law.

I’m VERY sympathetic to publishers - I work for them but this is a BS move

[dmitrygr]

Why would Google suffer? Google News runs no ads and makes no money.

[the_mitsuhiko]

> Congratulations to the EU commission and the EU parliament on achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do despite being told this would happen and despite it actually already happening in Spain and Germany.

I don’t follow: what is happening is exactly what the EU wants. I fail to understand the comment here entirely. Until all countries are executing this law this is exactly what the commission predicted is going to happen.

[ekianjo]

> what is happening is exactly what the EU wants.

No, they wanted Google to pay licensing fees and all for showing snippets. That did not happen.

[Semaphor]

No, not even close. Just like in Spain, where they passed a law forbidding publishers to allow google to show snippets for free.

[kd5bjo]

We don’t know how this plays out yet. This first step was quite predictable, but its effects on the overall news media landscape will take months to unwind. Will this increase the ad revenue for news sites because of increased clickthrough rates? Will it push them towards obscurity because their reporting is less available? Will it make no meaningful difference whatsoever?

[sbx320]

Google did the same thing in Germany after a similar national version was introduced. News sites quickly noticed a significant decrease in visitors coming from Google. They then attempted to sue Google to force them to list results with snippets AND also pay for it. Courts quickly ruled against that, so news sites just decided to allow Google to list the full results again.

The end result is that the law meant to work against Google actually benefited them. News sites cannot afford to not give Google a free license, but smaller search engines face a big issue.

I highly expect it to pan out the same way again.

[makomk]

It's not just the EU and its institutions pushing that narrative either. For example, before the European elections the BBC ran an article about all the great things the European Parliament has done which gave it credit for this and described the controversy as follows: "Supporters say the rule helps to ensure that artists, musicians and other creators are fairly compensated. But tech companies say it will destroy user-generated content." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48024400

No mention of the fact that MEPs had very little to do with the contents of the law, which was mostly shaped by shady back-room dealings between the French and German government, or of the concerns non-corporate-affiliated artists and content creators had about it screwing them over, or the bizarre voting fiasco.

[raverbashing]

While the BBC is certainly decaying in quality and balance with each passing day, I think those deals might have surfaced after the vote happened.

> No mention of the fact that MEPs had very little to do with the contents of the law, which was mostly shaped by shady back-room dealings between the French and German government

Actually a lot of MEPs participated in the discussions and their contents (which doesn't mean what you're mention didn't happen, of course it did)

[pas]

Could you please elaborate on the voting fiasco thing?

[timwaagh]

It may be counterproductive but in a way those publishers always held the rights to their own work. Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to. But maybe that should be opt out, rather than opt in. I expect most of them to request Google to use snippets again before very long in any case.

[zmix]

> Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to.

They were!

From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en

  <meta name="googlebot" content="..., ..." /> 
  These meta tags control the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing.
  
  nosnippet - Don't show a text snippet or video preview from being shown in 
  the search results. For video, a static image will be shown instead, if 
  possible. Example: <meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">
  
  max-snippet:[number] - Limit the text snippet length for this page to [number] 
  characters; specify 0 for no snippet or -1 to allow any snippet length.

[realusername]

They already can, they just leave the meta tags with an empty string and nothing will show up.

[kozhevnikov]

It should be a simple robots.txt setting (i.e. indexed but without snippets) available to any publisher and content creator in any country.

[pteraspidomorph]

There's been legislative elections since and not only was turnout a little better than usual, the major traditional alliances lost a lot of seats in the european parliament to the smaller less conventional ones on both sides of the spectrum. Still a long way to go but baby steps.

[jorvi]

I mean, let's not pretend this only happens in Europe. Pinterest sued Google and got the amazing 'view image' button taken away. Didn't even take something as mighty as federal government interference.

[kinkrtyavimoodh]

It was Getty Images that sued Google.

Otoh Pinterest taking over Google Image search results with useless results is nothing short of malware.

[bsaul]

I'm really on your side. However, note that we (assuming you're european too) are in such a shity place because we've got 0 internet giants in Europe, and so we have really no good option between tax or laissez-faire

[threatofrain]

A large portion of savvy web users are ready to switch search engines on a snap if a superior value proposition comes along; if you build it (well) they will come. The same is 10x as true for news sources.

[buboard]

Its not like the alternative is better. They have the choice of slowly bleeding to death vs severing the hand. Its not clear which is best.

There are upsides, eg google news will stop being an option for news

[workaway]

Having fewer options for getting news is an upside?

[thunderbong]

I'm sorry, I don't have a clue what you're talking about.

[lumberjack]

Why is this bad? The further away Google is from news coverage, the better. They have the power to be extremely manipulative.

[easytiger]

This. The EU proxy war against Ireland thrown in with this utterly corrupt approach to information companies is an utter embarrassment and fully demonstrative of the complete lack of oversight of a tiny handful of people.

[tannhaeuser]

Excuse me, you find it ok that Google et al get all the ad money by republishing and publishers and content creators get nothing? And even go so far as spinning this into an EU corruption story, where the only alternative, and the one we're living through right now, is to rely on a monopolist for news?

[signal11]

Content creators get click throughs. And while I’m not sure if this is specific to me in the UK, news.google.co.uk has no ads.

Google News presents an aggregated view of online news. Because of Google’s reach, news.google gets a lot of page views and results in a lot of click-throughs to the actual publisher. Facebook is a similar source of traffic although that’s driven by social sharing. In both cases, publishers benefit a lot assuming they can monetise those page views.

I’m not a big fan of Google but Google News isn’t the “bad guy” here.

[AnonymousPlanet]

Could you please explain to me how Google is making money from showing a brief excerpt from a linked website. Especially "all the money". Before you answer, please consider where most of Google's revenue comes from. Is it from showing things on their search page or is it from their ad network? Making money from the latter requires people to actually click through to the site.

Maybe I am missing something, so please enlighten us.

[Kiro]

> and content creators get nothing?

Axel Springer had to revert because their traffic and revenues plummeted. With your logic it wouldn't even have affected them.

[sacado2]

Strange to hold such a position on a news aggregator like HN.