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SquashedKiwifruit t1_j9xkcxv wrote

Reply to comment by IMind in Google making ‘terrible mistake’ in blocking Canadian news: Trudeau by Defiant_Race_7544

I don't understand this law really.

Where sites like Facebook are taking elements of the content, and displaying it to users, in a manner which means they won't go to the news website (so the news website has no chance of making revenue / displaying an ad / getting a new sign up. For example, a post which contains a headline and a summary of its content (not just the first line). Then yes Facebook/Google/Whoever should pay.

But if the site is doing nothing more than showing a link to the news article in search results, with perhaps at most one sentence which is just the first few words of the article. That encourages users to access the website to read more, and is favourable to the news site. Google should not pay for that. That is driving people to the news website, where they can show ads to users.

Reading this article - it sounds like they are wanting them to pay for search results (correct me if I am wrong?). If that is the case I don't blame google, that seems ridiculous.

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yxull t1_j9xnuc9 wrote

The modern equivalent of making the Yellow Pages pay you for the privilege of printing your ad in their phone book.

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neutrilreddit t1_j9y61tb wrote

Yea. Google isn't the reason why these news organizations are losing money.

I can't speak for the role of facebook and other social media, but another major culprit would be the thousands of low effort click-bait ad-driven blogs and news aggregators on the other hand, that do zero original reporting but just repaste the same stuff from the original news websites, which also junk up the google search results even worse.

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michaelrulaz t1_j9yft2b wrote

Or the fact that you have to pay money to see most of these sites. I’m not interested in reading an article on the New York Times for $10.99 or whatever. I’ll just look elsewhere if I care or more than likely, I won’t look at all

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spellbanisher t1_ja0lgxc wrote

Just add the site to your Javascript exceptions

Edit: if you use Chrome. I don't know if Firefox and edge allow you to disable Javascript for individual websites

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Kyouhen t1_j9zzbfo wrote

Posting here for future reference. I do breakdowns on Bills to see what they actually do versus what everyone's saying they do. Considering the nature of this Bill I'm skeptical of anything Google/Facebook/etc and most new agencies say about it. The big companies declaring they're going to stop offering news services are only concerned with money, so one way or the other the Bill is affecting their income and I don't quite trust them to be honest about why.

I'll see about doing a writeup on this one in the next few days and will get back to you once I've gone through just what it does.

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[deleted] t1_ja0r4ov wrote

[deleted]

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SquashedKiwifruit t1_ja0s255 wrote

That response doesn’t really make sense to me because a person using a search engine is searching for something.

To the extent they are looking for news, they just already know about it so it suggests they are looking for further reading. You wouldn’t search for headlines about something you already know of surely?

If they don’t click through it must not have been of interest?

It seems to me that if they were going to have to pay for the item merely being listed, irrespective of if someone interacted with it, then if I was google I simply wouldn’t show that content in search results either.

Now if google was summarising the content beyond just the headline - I would agree with you. They should pay because they are taking the content and summarising it so a person wouldnt need to read it. But that doesn’t seem to be the case?

Facebook and reddit is a little different because unlike google there is an interactive forum. So the comments usually do summarise the content.

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