> Of course, the change could reduce traffic to French news sites. Google says that if news sites want Google to start showing snippets again, they just have to give Google permission to do so.<p>> This isn't what advocates of the law had in mind.<p>Yeah... I think a bunch of us here expected exactly this outcome. Warned about it, even.<p>> Their goal wasn't to make European news sites less prominent in search results—it was to convince Google to start paying licensing fees. But Google is signaling that it has no intention of doing that.<p>Good for Google.
Highly tangential comment:<p>> every ad on Google is clearly marked<p>Personally, the few times I use a browser without an ad blocker lately I find myself confused about what is an ad until I go hunting for text to indicate it. I click links in YouTube for channels I don’t follow thinking I may have followed them at some point too, since they appear in my sub feed. This “clearly marked” point is not true in any but the most technical sense
When you put something out in the world for free, the expectation is that it is free. Trying to charge selectively to only certain companies is discrimination and violates the spirit of net neutrality.