I wonder if we would be having the same conversation if google had charged publishers to add them to the google news product. Even charging $5 a year seems like it could have completely turned this whole situation on its head. For one it would have offered publishers some contractual protections, but mainly it would have changed the publisher's mindset towards google. Now it's a provider of a service they need, and they do need it.<p>The problem is that the internet made the "news" market way to efficient. Competition is incredibly fierce because the cost of distribution has plummeted, and because it turns out that most people don't read news for news, they read it for entertainment. If Google were to go away tomorrow, the publishers would be in the exact same position with Bing, DDG, Baidu, or whoever picks up the pieces. The economics have shifted, 90% of publishers are now offering a very low value product.<p>If governments go out and create this artificial market to prop up the "news" they like, not only will it be prone to corruption (What counts as an eligible publisher? Does Google owe the Daily Sun and the BBC the same amount of money? If it's different, who decides by how much?), but in 30-50 years, we'll be talking about the news subsidies the same way we talk about farm subsidies today; a corrupt and wasteful relic from an era that refused to acknowledge things have changed.<p>All that being said, the sales tax on digital adds is probably the best idea so far, but enforcement is going to be tricky.
Good article and generally agree with the sentiment. Google isn't doing this out of the goodness of its heart. As well as PR generally though, it's as much about owning the consumer. Google and Facebook are increasingly the portals through which the majority of people consume content online. Each wants to protect and grow that - it's central to their business model (and a well-understood strategy generally). The biggest threat to either is disintermediation. That would mean both less eyeballs and reduced ability to profile --> less effective hyper targeting --> reduced attractiveness to advertisers. In that context, $1bn is loose change for keeping the content providers as commodity suppliers behind the Google brand.
I won't pretend to be an expert on big business and the answers to the problems of users expecting free, but I will say that initially Google had a good symbiotic relationship with publishers and that it no longer exists.<p>News publishers, webmasters suffering lower CTR due to G properties in SERPs, ads placing organic results below the fold, rich snippets taking content from pages to prevent a click through to the site. That kind of thing. It is/was all a bit insidious and now time is being called on it, they seem to be relenting, a bit, at least on face value.
I truly don't understand publishers their negative attitude towards Google News. Everything combined, Google News is a net positive for publishers. They weren't as discoverable as they are now and probably see less traffic from any other source. They want to be compensated for being publicly indexed? Google should honestly just remove the complaining publishers from Google News or Google altogether. See how they like that. Let them opt-out if they dislike it that bad. It's like complaining to a phone book it lists phone numbers in an efficient manner.
There's a whole mix of real issues here. Number one for me is that money won't buy quality and its quality we're sorely lacking on "journalism" today.
Companies reigning themselves in under threats of regulation might be better than actually whacking them with the regulation stick. Regulation has its costs too.
This is about Google keeping people on their site and forestalling regulatory fines. The only more aggressive behavior would be to create a non-profit company that distributes the money, then make all payments as donations to that company. Publishers may hardly ever see any money on an individual publisher basis.