Google rejects Australia’s revised pay-for-news plan, proposes its own plan instead Google has rejected Australia’s plan to force it to pay local news publishers for the right to index their output and present it in search results. The search and ad giant’s rejection came in a post penned by Google’s veep for Australia and New Zealand Mel Silva, who argued that Australia’s proposal “has serious problems that …
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(interestingly, per the original TTP, companies also had more *legal* power than countries. Yes, any signatory country (EU was in there for a while; Not sure what the final situation was) could get rolled by McDonalds.
To be clear: a complete redefinition of the concept of Sovereignty.
Not sure what the situation is with the current version.)
@IGotOut: We need to be careful about unintended consequences. Headlines have turned to clickbait to tempt readers to click and hence increase ad revenues. The RSS feed for my local press is full of "A shocking thing has happened in a town" type headlines. Also, new songs are forsaking long intros because artists don't get paid for streamed songs unless punters listen past 30 seconds, so they want to get the hook in early. I think papers will find an annoying way to game the system.
When you bought a newspaper, the headlines were informative. "Thing explodes near place" or "Minister fucks kangaroo". Because you'd already paid in advance, and so it didn't matter what you read - as long as you were reading enough to still want to keep buying it. There were adverts, but they couldn't know who was reading what.
The traditional newspapers still mostly do this, partly because of habit. And because they still have many customers who come to their home page and scan through the front page looking for stuff, rather than coming in via links. Headlines might be a bit more sensationalist in the traditional "broadsheets" - but the tabloids were always like that anyway.
If you take the Guardian for example, I'm not sure their news headlines have changed all that much. They still pretty much play it straight - maybe with a few more "Experts say governemt are shit" headlines - where you find that when you read the article they've taken a press release from a political campaigning organisation or think tank - replace their name with "experts" and then run it with very little work because editorially they agree with it. If they even bothered to cover one from a campaign group they disagreed with it, they'd run the same story but say "Campaign group calls for x policy".
Where the Guardian seems to do clickbait is in its opinion pieces. Where they might take a reasonably well balanced piece about how a particular Labour commentator prefers Starmer to Corbyn, but would like to keep some of his policies - and they'll take the most extreme criticism in that and run it as the headline. This gets a nice rumpus going in the comments, and then they can sell adverts. on the engagement with those pages. Sadly for them they've seemingly enraged their own readers so much that the cost of moderating their own comments sections is so high that they now ruin this business model by not being able to run comments on as many pieces as they used to. Although it's possible that this is simply because they can't stand being disagreed with on their most cherished beliefs...
Under Corbyn I was interested in the new media types further to the left of the Guardian. So the Canary was interesting, as an example. In a not very socialist manner, writers were paid purely on number of clicks / revenue generated on their pieces. I don't know who was doing the headlines, but all information entirely disappeared. So you'd get headlines like, "See Tory minister destroyed/owned/schooled by caller" or "Minister is proved to be uncaring evil bastard". But you don't know which one or over which policy. So if you're engaged by thinking all Tories, or often insufficiently leftwing Labour politicians (red Tory scum), are horrible, then you might click it. But if you're say not interested in the intricacies of housing policy you may not have otherwise read that piece - if the headline had said that was the subject.
This is what all those rubbish bottom-of-the-internet sites like Outbrain do too. Although they're even worse in that their headlines are often anti-informative. So they'll have a headline on "You'll never guess which celebrity died of x disease" with a picture of the very-much-alive Harrison Ford. And no, it's not the shock news of his death - but a story about someone you've never heard of who died 2 years ago.
In The Guardian about the only place where CiF (Comment is Free) happens is in the food section, bits of "Lifestyle" and occassional comment piece.
The last time I remember comments being allowed on a News story (girl that stole money to run off and join ISIS that campaigners wanted to "bring home" - despite her showing during a video interview she was totally unrepentant and didn't agree that she'd done anything wrong), the CiF was shut down pretty damn quick when about 95% of the comments didn't go along with the Guardian view.
To be fair to the Guardian, moderation is expensive. Particularly as they get a lot of commnents - and being a lot more high profile than El Reg they're part of the political argy-bargy of people sending their friends of to troll on the commnents of stuff they dislike on Facebook/Twitter.
Plus the Guardian are pretty partisan themselves - so attract a lot of it. And they were the victim/beneficiary/battleground of the whole internal strife over Corbyn in the Labour Party as well.
They've had to make a lot of cuts, like the rest of the media. And moderation is a much easier thing to cut than sacking journalists - who generate content for you. Even though a lot of the success of their site was the lively comment that it used to have - because despite the loonies there used to be a lot more actual discussion going on there. Pretty much every Brexit or Corbyn thread I've looked at there was toxic though.
Personally I think that the editorial stance has changed under Viner. And they're much more of a campaign-focused site than an (at least nominally) impartial newspaper now. So allowing comments on certain articles only brings the editorial staff up against the fact that even their own readership don't buy their particular brand of bullshit. So I don't think comments are allowed on certain subjects or columnists.
But even there I'd defend them a bit. Some writers become the issue even more than what they're saying. At which point anything they write attracts such a toxic wave of crap personal attacks in the comments that it's not worth bothering to try and moderate. El Reg used to not allow comments on most Andrew Orlowski pieces, because they used to get abuse or even death-threats. Of course El Reg have never had full-time moderators, they only have the subbies look over them a bit and rely on reports from their commentards. But then they also post some pretty provocative pieces under even more provocative headlines, so at least some of it is their own choice, and that does make them look cowardly when they refuse to engage with the inevitable backlash.
Google would probably take that deal in a heartbeat, but from the negotiations so far, I don't think the publishers have anything mind that doesn't include receiving money from Google, even for just displaying a link. The fact that the government is forcing both parties to make a deal, and will impose a deal if they can't manage on their own, seems to indicate it has the same opinion.
Silva also objects to the compulsory arbitration model Australia proposes, as it "incentivises publishers to make ambit claims and resort to arbitration rather than good-faith negotiations; assumes that the internet has never required payments for links because of ‘bargaining imbalance’; and requires the decision-maker to choose a single ‘final offer’".
So the Google guy means Google doesn't like the exact same model US tech companies force on users with the EULA which some less enlightened counties (i.e. the US) treats as legally binding?
He's not (just) complaining about arbitration, although that is bad. He's complaining about "requires the decision-maker to choose a single ‘final offer’" - i.e. the arbitrator can choose to accept Google's proposal or the newsies proposal, the arbitrator can't decide on a compromise between the two.
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> Silva also argues that no search engine anywhere pays to generate links and that Australia’s plan could therefore “unravel the key principles of the open internet people use every day”.
Most websites pay for their content, whether or not they charge consumers.
On the other hand, search engines bring in a wider audience, so I'm not sure what is "fair".
Google is probably better than at least half the governments on this planet!!!
It at least delivers some things of value (eg Google Maps) - most governments just try to transfer as much of their countries wealth to the politicians and their friends as possible while doing very little (if anything) to help the populations that they rule.
I'm in a quandary with this. I trust neither party.
Instead, I'll just say this: Dear Google, your shitty business model is not my problem. If you want to play in this country, we will dictate the rules. If that's not profitable enough for you, well, that's your problem.
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