The actual PDF of the decision is there: <a href="https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/sites/default/files/integral_texts/2020-04/20mc01.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/sites/default/files/i...</a><p>The arguments are:<p>- Press freedom is a fundamental right<p>- The press is not in its best state right now in France, so hitting them (for example, removing them from the search result from Google, which is in a monopoly position) is dangerous for the press freedom<p>- Google did not try to negotiate a fair price for the news, with the publisher<p>- Google applying a "zero price" for newspaper is not reasonable, as google has an economic incentive (users using its search engine) to display the news paper content in its search engine and in google news<p>- Google is in a monopoly decision, as most of the traffic of the newspapers comes from Google<p>- Google is discriminatory as it applies to newspapers equal treatments, even if they are in different situations (newspaper with protected content, and newspaper without protected content)<p>- Google tries to bypass the spirit of the law, which is for newspapers to get paid for their content by people using their content, and Google can do so because it's in a monopoly position in search<p>- Google does not has objectives explanations regarding its behavior besides « we don't pay for content », but paid for content in the past (for example, the french agency AFP)<p>The decision is manyfold:<p>- Google has to enter negociations, in a fair manner (I think this means no « we will not pay anything » unless they can back it off);<p>- The price decided by the negociations will be applied retroactively, from the date the new law was passed<p>- They have to report to the authority every three months the progress they make on this<p>- Restore the service they provided to newspapers to what was in place before the new law was voted<p>Let's note the court making this decision can not decide what the law is, and applies it as it was voted; even if it thinks some part of the law sucks, they cannot change it, it's not their role in the justice system.
I think this is the actual judgement?<p><a href="https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/fr/communiques-de-presse/droits-voisins-lautorite-fait-droit-aux-demandes-de-mesures-conservatoires" rel="nofollow">https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/fr/communiques-de-pre...</a><p>This techcrunch post has more details than Reuters:<p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/09/frances-competition-watchdog-orders-google-to-pay-for-news-reuse/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/09/frances-competition-watchd...</a><p>Abusive practices the agency says it suspects Google of at this stage of its investigation are:<p>The imposition of unfair trading conditions;
circumvention of the law;
and discrimination (i.e. because of its unilateral policy of zero renumeration for all publishers)
As a European, I have to say: The sooner non-innovative media companies die, the better. Replacing Google is hard, but replacing Google News, really is not. Ignoring reality and trying to lobby the EU to an absert extent will harm their business in the long term.<p>There are organizations with working business models like the German public stations[1] (ARD, ZDF, DW, arte and others), which are publicly funded and thus prepared for the future. These are even trying to innovate, e.g. by providing textual content for the web or by trying for years to create a single unified Netflix competitor for their video content, but they are being shut down with lawsuits from companies like Bertelsmann, too (in a similiar fashion like the story about the public weather data, recently here on HN).<p>I think at this point these companies have to wake up and realize that their old model is lost. I see four options for them:<p>1) Get in line and try to find shelter within those publicly funded systems. Use your lobbying budget to accomplish that.<p>2) Be the best. Find a niche. There will always be room for a few remaining.<p>3) Team up and create your own system.<p>4) Die. But don't slow everyone down endlessly trying to rent seek based on the working competition or the threats form US companies.<p>In the end, I don't see Europe losing anything to the US here, but instead the publicly funded organizations surving. When I look at an other market providing a human right, namely healtcare, I don't see Europe being worse off in the end at all.<p>[1] These stations do have their own problems: Endless layers of management and administration.
I think seeing this as an antagonistic situation between Google and the news sites is less than ideal. Google provides value to the news sites by driving traffic to them, and Publishers provide value to Google by helping provide more complete search results. If we could help the Publishers have more sustainable ways to make meaningful revenues off traffic once it visits the site, they wouldn't be trying to bite the arm that feeds them traffic. But instead of the news industry and the government trying to find ways to sustainably pay for news in an "information abundance" economy, they're turning their sights to a company that happens to have a large wallet but has already demonstrated it would get more value out of simply turning off news (like in Spain) than paying for the content because the fair value of showing the snippets or even the article links is far too low to it.
Are they (news firms) going to charge a fee to access RSS feeds at some point now?<p>That judgment seems to be absurd, especially if they only provided a snippet of the article for data discovery purpose.<p>I'm not sure that would help those news firms if they get blackholed from Google altogether.
While I an not a fan of google for a lot reasons this decision is pretty wacky.<p>This ruling says google must provide a service, but they must also pay those who use it... How does this make any sense. It’s akin to the government forcing someone to stand at a street corner shouting and advertising for someone. However, every-time a persons goes into the business because your advertising you must pay that business...<p>Like can google just pull out France? I don't see how anyone could negotiate under such insanity?<p>Like the bigger issue is BS like AMP that will take traffic away from the sites. Why is that not a concern... Where as indexing things is an old idea. Like if you applied this to card catalogs, phone books, and heck references in papers this ruling makes no sense.
What happens if you make cost an inverse ranking factor?<p>Structure your ranking algorithm to allocate a proportionate share of traffic to french news sites, given relevancy to a query topic, and rank order publishers by negotiated cost?<p>Given there is SUBSTANTIAL value in a news publisher being sent traffic, in terms of advertising and circulation, the power law in search engine clicks should keep cost paid to a bare minimum.<p>Unless the French are going full dystopia and picking the winners within their own markets?
Website monetization
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_monetization" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_monetization</a><p>Web Monetization API (ILP: Interledger Protocol)<p>> <i>A JavaScript browser API which allows the creation of a payment stream from the user agent to the website.</i><p>> <i>Web Monetization is being proposed as a #W3C standard at the Web Platform Incubator Community Group.</i><p><a href="https://webmonetization.org/" rel="nofollow">https://webmonetization.org/</a><p>Interledger: Web Monetization API
<a href="https://interledger.org/rfcs/0028-web-monetization/" rel="nofollow">https://interledger.org/rfcs/0028-web-monetization/</a><p>Khan Academy, for example, accepts
BAT (Basic Attention Token) micropayments/microdonations that e.g. Brave browser users can opt to share with the content producers and indexers.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Basic_Attention_Token" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Basic_Atte...</a><p>Web Monetization w/ Interledger should enable any payments system with low enough transaction costs ("ledger-agnostic, currency agnostic") to be used to pay/tip/donate to content producers who are producing unsensational, unbiased content that people want to pay for.<p>Paywalls/subscriptions and ads are two other approaches to funding quality journalism.<p>Should journalists pay ScholarlyArticle authors whose studies they publish summaries of <i>without even citing the DOI/URL and Title</i>; or the journals said ScholarlyArticles are published in?
<a href="https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle" rel="nofollow">https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle</a>
I work for a popular web portal in my country and we also have news aggregator. There are revenue sharing deals with quite a few news providers where we share ad revenue when we show those snippets. Both portal and news providers win...
What is to stop someone from starting a "newspaper" in France, hiring the cheapest freelancers possible to write whatever (or generating stories with AI) and collecting free money from Google?
I wonder if France ultimately wants Google to pay for the content and the News sites to pay Google for listing them, reaching a net of zero for both sides, other than the taxes that France banks from both sides.
The problem is that "press freedom" as a right should not mean "The press MUST receive leads through all search engines and the search engines MUST pay for doing so".<p>"Press freedom" historically means that the press can publish anything factual, artistic, or opinion based without fear of government censorship or retribution.<p>We are seeing the EU and various EU countries redefine fundamental terms for entirely different things, to the point where the original rights are completely eroded, and instead we have a system that effectively serves special interest groups in Europe.<p>An infamous example of this is the "right to be forgotten". In Europe there is now a process where individuals can effectively censor the internet/press from publishing factual information about their past transgressions. Ostensibly this is to allow the individual to move on with their life. For example, someone convicted of murder has successfully removed articles related to his murder from the internet (in Europe). This is incredibly dangerous. Why should the government get to decide what fact based censorship is irrelevant or not? I certainly think it is pertinent for society to know about past murders.<p>The EU is slowly eroding all individual liberties, while its markets are becoming less competitive and its welfare state expands to unprecedented levels. Free speech and freedom or religion are much worse in Europe. Germany is run by a Christian political party. In addition to no longer being able to advocate for Nazi politics in Germany, now you cannot speak about certain facts that have occurred in the past. Now France is attempting this novel "shake down of tech giants we cannot compete with" strategy, which is frankly a strategy that was until recently more likely to be seen in an Authoritarian country like China than the country that was the inspiration for the US independence.
I get that HN hates journalists, but other than that I don’t see why people are on google’s side here. Is it about personal convenience?<p>If you want to scrape someone else’s work and display it next to your own ads, it doesn’t seem crazy to ask you to pay up.
Google needs to finally stop being a parasite - both on the economy and other people's work.
The content is not theirs. Pay up and support the ecosystem, if you want to use it.
While this is a complicated situation, it's clear that Google is profiting greatly off of journalistic works while these same organizations are struggling to survive.