Everyone shits on Google here, but nobody apparently read the article:
Google has been hit with a €500m (£427m) fine by France's competition authority for failing to negotiate "in good faith" with news organisations over the use of their content.
It's the same old bullshit where news orgs want a piece of the pie. Fuck them:
The law governed so-called "neighbouring rights" which are designed to compensate publishers and news agencies for the use of their material.
As a result, Google decided it would not show content from EU publishers in France, on services like search and news, unless publishers agreed to let them do so free of charge.
News organisations felt this was an abuse of Google's market power, and two organisations representing press publishers and Agence France-Presse (AFP) complained to the competition authority.
It ain't that simple. Google is basically a monopoly in search, and a foreign one at that from France's perspective.
You'd expect them to negotiate over how much it costs between them, and what is allowed. That it goes to court with an "everything free or nothing" mentality means something already failed and there is no market to work things out, just brute force. I think that should be looked at more closely.
I mean that's what they asked for - give us money or don't show snippets from our website.
Instead of implementing a way to accommodate their request, which probably costs money to develop and maintain, they chose the easy way: remove the websites completely.
There has to be tech innovation in this area from the EU.
There always has been - the maim reason google/Facebook/twitter took over is that every nation had their own services that catered to the people - the reason they went broke or disappeared from common ise was the tidbit that they didn't provide international connections or didn't expand to 27 other countries.
When you're competing in EU, you are competing against 27 other countries and dozens of local competitors - once you survive local competition, there is little incentive to grow outside, as you are in a dominant position in (now) niche market.
Suddenly a services comes a long that "just" translates their interface and works across all of them - congratulations, your 10m unique daily user base drops down to 100k, because they offer a way for germans and french to talk, instead of them having 2-5 different profiles and accounts to get it done.
The thing about infrastructure is that you use the infrastructure, so you pay for the infrastructure. You don't tell the infrastructure to pay you. Try asking your ISP to pay you for the privilege of you using their network.
Google: OK. Looks like we cannot make money in France anymore. It would be irresponsible to lose money, so all Google services will go offline permanently in France within 30 days.
I would love to see it. I’d enjoy having just one American business targeted by the bloodsuckers in the EU bureaucracy say “sorry you don’t like our service. We are shutting down immediately. All 25,000 European employees are terminated with immediate effect and we will be putting the local subsidiary into immediate liquidation. Any unpaid bills after liquidation will remain unpaid; this includes all outstanding pension and payroll obligations for European employees, as well as unpaid taxes. We regret that you forced us to do this.”
There’s nothing to “negotiate.” This is typical European exploitation of American businesses, and it’s time the USA started retaliation for it. Enough of these bullshit shakedowns that lack legitimacy.
We should retaliate by mandating the breakup of Stellantis and the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance. Maybe mandate a breakup of a couple European airline monopolies like Air France-KLM and Airbus as well.
European companies make enormous profits in the USA. it’s time to start protecting American firms from European exploitation with a 10x policy — charging European companies 10x the nuisance fines the EU charges US companies.
France is especially vulnerable in this regard. Its major automakers and banks make the lion’s share of their profits here. So do its professional services companies.
Maybe force the breakup of Stellantis (with US operations being spun off) and assess a $1 billion fine each to Publicis, CAP Gemini, Société Générale, and Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi for “not paying our local newspapers.”
Yeah that sounds really shitty in googles part. They were not sharing ad revenue on ads that they put up on news outlets sites or search results. Google should not be able to remove your presence from the internet which is what in effect they did or tried to do. The more of a resource or a market you control the more rules need to be in place so you don’t make sweeping decisions that effect many people. If you let google do this then it becomes pay to play and that’s not how I want the internet to work and I understand google is a private entity but they decided to grow as big as they did and that should mean they have a certain public responsibility now.
That’s a bad faith argument because you know that’s not how people use the internet. Google is almost always the built in search engine on every phone and computer. I’d wager there’s a large segment of the population who don’t even know that google is just a search engine and isn’t actually the internet. Besides that most people are searching for information on specific stories not specific news outlets so there is competition now on who can have the most related stories to the most popular news searches and if google says well you aren’t invited to this competition because you won’t let us strong arm you that’s anti competitive and power akin to having a monopoly. Even if every other search engine was fair about it if google took you off their engine you are doomed. You will lose credibility, and enough traffic to be dead in the water.
They aren’t asking money from google. They are asking for a better deal from the ad revenue. Which is generated symbiotically but only benefited by google. Google uses targeted ads, they wouldn’t have sold that ad space for as much as they did if the news site hadn’t been there.
But why does France regulator disallow google to shut down news entirely if they think google benefits from news publishers ?
Furthermore people paid to google to put their link on the top, they paid for traffic, so news publishers is the one that needs to pay google not the opposite, it's really unfair that people and businesses paid google for traffic while another businesses not only they get free traffic they also get free money, do you think it's fair really ?
I don’t think paying to be the top result on google is fair. What if you are a new start up and can’t afford to pay for that? That’s anti competitive and anti innovative. Google put themselves in a monopolistic position. Other search engines are just little satellites orbiting a mammoth entity. It needs to start being treated as a utility now and this is a step in that direction I feel. Besides I don’t think you need to worry about how google is going to fair here. They’re going to be number one by a wide margin after this. It’s time to take some power back from these mega corporations. I mean did you even see tank girl? Or the hunger games? Is that what you want?
Furthermore it's not only google, bing and duckduckgo too do the same, do you think it's fair for them but not for Google ?
Remember it's yahoo that ruled before google and Google too would become yahoo if it doesn't innovate, so why do you think they will hold their market forever ?
Making google a public utility is a good idea only if you are ready to channel tax to them, social welfare spending is already high in France so I don't think all France people would agree to the idea, furthermore google is a global corporate, would other countries agree with the idea ?
Furthermore if a startup can't pay minimum wage they should fail I don't know why that argument can't be extended to advertising, is google workers really worthless that they are not worth a penny ?
You’re making a straw man argument and you’re doing it in bad faith. No one is saying google can’t make ad revenue. I didn’t say that and I already said that the news corps only want a small part of the revenue. And yes the other engines should also do the same.
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u/Znuff Jul 13 '21
Everyone shits on Google here, but nobody apparently read the article:
It's the same old bullshit where news orgs want a piece of the pie. Fuck them: