
France rules Google must pay news firms for content - us0r
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-france/france-rules-google-must-pay-news-firms-for-content-idUSKCN21R14X
======
Reventlov
The actual PDF of the decision is there:
[https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/sites/default/files/i...](https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/sites/default/files/integral_texts/2020-04/20mc01.pdf)

The arguments are:

\- Press freedom is a fundamental right

\- 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

\- Google did not try to negotiate a fair price for the news, with the
publisher

\- 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

\- Google is in a monopoly decision, as most of the traffic of the newspapers
comes from Google

\- 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)

\- 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

\- 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)

The decision is manyfold:

\- 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);

\- The price decided by the negociations will be applied retroactively, from
the date the new law was passed

\- They have to report to the authority every three months the progress they
make on this

\- Restore the service they provided to newspapers to what was in place before
the new law was voted

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.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Google is discriminatory as it applies to newspapers equal treatments, even
> if they are in different situations

This would appear to be the opposite of what "discriminatory" means.

~~~
anoncake
Maybe not in French legalese.

~~~
thaumasiotes
That could certainly be the case, but...

(1) It would still be disturbing if the meaning of "discrimination" in French
legalese was the exact opposite of its meaning everywhere else including
vernacular French. War is peace.

(2) I have a sneaking suspicion that the meaning of "discrimination" in French
law is _sometimes_ this and _sometimes_ the ordinary meaning, and if that's
true it's a much worse state of affairs than just the legal meaning being
opposed to the ordinary meaning.

------
Sujan
I wish Google would finally go with the kneejerk reaction of just unlisting
all these sites from Google Search and News.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Essentially France has said Google, being a monopoly, is not allowed to refuse
to provide this service. They must do it, they must pay for it.

~~~
Udik
Solution: keep running google news, but without the snippets. You search for
news, you get a set of mute links to articles from various sources.

~~~
georgyo
The ruling states they _must_ index, provide snippets, and pay.

Google did remove the snippets, which hurt the news sites traffic, such is
mostly Google referrals. This ruling makes it so they must index and pay.

------
blakesterz
I think this is the actual judgement?

[https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/fr/communiques-de-
pre...](https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/fr/communiques-de-
presse/droits-voisins-lautorite-fait-droit-aux-demandes-de-mesures-
conservatoires)

This techcrunch post has more details than Reuters:

[https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/09/frances-competition-
watchd...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/09/frances-competition-watchdog-
orders-google-to-pay-for-news-reuse/)

Abusive practices the agency says it suspects Google of at this stage of its
investigation are:

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)

~~~
Multicomp
> discrimination (i.e. because of its unilateral policy of zero renumeration
> for all publishers)

Umm ianal but isn't saying all publishers don't get paid the opposite of
discrimination?

If they said some American companies get paid but not french etc I would
totally get it.

~~~
fllsdf
Inal either but the way the court phrases it in the press release is that
google negociated a free use licence with everyone, regardless of their
financial situations, using their dominant position on the market to "force"
everyone.

A way of seeing this is that it might be fine for the big players for national
and international news (Le monde, Le figaro ...) , but probably has a much
bigger impact on small news outlet, because if they dont agree they are at a
disadvatage obviously, so they cannot afford to say no, but at the same time
they might already be in a difficult financial position, and that revenu might
have helped.

The key part is that google had no real justification according to the court
to treat everyone the same way, and that consitutes discrimination.

It seems a bit weird to me too but you could make a parallel to a school that
has a set meal price for every student, regardless of parent income.This would
obviously be discriminating towards the poorer students.

Now whether google is a public service the way school lunches are is up for
debate but i think it basically comes down to equality vs equity

~~~
curryst
The justification for the remuneration agreement would seem to me to be that
each individual news outlet is worth nothing, or very close to nothing, to
Google. What provides value to Google is having quality search results about a
particular topic in the native language. This is satisfied by some portion of
news outlets allowing themselves to be indexed, foreign news sources, and
independent sources (i.e. blogs and Twitter).

And my suspicion is that the value to Google is likely inversely proportional
to the size of the news source, and I think the smaller publishers are hurting
the most. I care to some degree that the NYT shows up in Google (but not much,
really) whereas I couldn't care in the least about whether a local news paper
in West Virginia is indexed.

------
allendoerfer
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.

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).

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:

1) Get in line and try to find shelter within those publicly funded systems.
Use your lobbying budget to accomplish that.

2) Be the best. Find a niche. There will always be room for a few remaining.

3) Team up and create your own system.

4) Die. But don't slow everyone down endlessly trying to rent seek based on
the working competition or the threats form US companies.

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.

[1] These stations do have their own problems: Endless layers of management
and administration.

------
neil_s
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.

~~~
curryst
User generated content has vastly decreased the value proposition of
newspapers. Looking at sites like Reddit, a lot of users read the headline,
maybe skim the first paragraph or two of the article, and then go straight to
the comments. Where people would once have read articles from multiple view
points about a particular issue, they now read the headline and get opposing
views in the comments.

This is exacerbated by the fact that there are hundreds or thousands of news
sources all paying someone to write an article about the same bit of
information.

The industry is going to end up collapsing to a much smaller number of
organizations and they'll likely become profitable as the user views aren't
split among so many sources.

------
m-p-3
Are they (news firms) going to charge a fee to access RSS feeds at some point
now?

That judgment seems to be absurd, especially if they only provided a snippet
of the article for data discovery purpose.

I'm not sure that would help those news firms if they get blackholed from
Google altogether.

------
anfilt
While I an not a fan of google for a lot reasons this decision is pretty
wacky.

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...

Like can google just pull out France? I don't see how anyone could negotiate
under such insanity?

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.

------
datingscientist
What happens if you make cost an inverse ranking factor?

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?

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.

Unless the French are going full dystopia and picking the winners within their
own markets?

------
hartator
So I have to pay if I want to make my own news site that have links to French
news website?

Best way to ensure that Google stay super dominant.

------
westurner
Website monetization
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_monetization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_monetization)

Web Monetization API (ILP: Interledger Protocol)

> _A JavaScript browser API which allows the creation of a payment stream from
> the user agent to the website._

> _Web Monetization is being proposed as a #W3C standard at the Web Platform
> Incubator Community Group._

[https://webmonetization.org/](https://webmonetization.org/)

Interledger: Web Monetization API [https://interledger.org/rfcs/0028-web-
monetization/](https://interledger.org/rfcs/0028-web-monetization/)

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.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Basic_Atte...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_\(web_browser\)#Basic_Attention_Token)

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.

Paywalls/subscriptions and ads are two other approaches to funding quality
journalism.

Should journalists pay ScholarlyArticle authors whose studies they publish
summaries of _without even citing the DOI /URL and Title_; or the journals
said ScholarlyArticles are published in?
[https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle](https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle)

------
malinens
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...

------
imgabe
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?

------
hiccuphippo
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.

~~~
bagacrap
does France get tax revenue in this scenario? Usually corporate expenses are
tax deductible, ie you only pay tax on profit.

------
jimmaswell
Europe's not going to stop until the internet is totally burned to the ground,
are they?

~~~
matheusmoreira
The internet was never going to last anyway. Every country wants to impose its
own laws on it in order to guarantee the rights of their citizens. Instead of
one international network, we'll end up with many national networks with
strictly controlled boundaries.

I'm fortunate I got to know the true internet. Truly one of the great wonders
of this world.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The Internet isn't a magical virtual destination immune to the law. It's a
communication technology, and like fax, the telephone, and the postal system
before it, it runs within the framework of laws of the countries it operates
in.

~~~
matheusmoreira
"The" law? There are as many as there are sovereign nations. Are foreigners
subjected to your country's laws when they post on your site? No. Your laws
cannot be enforced because those people aren't subjected to it. Like an
embassy on foreign soil, you have no actual power over those people.

This very site's terms of service infringes my rights by requiring
arbitration. Can I do anything about it by legal means? Who knows? Could I
even sue them to begin with? Could they even sue me? Do the terms even matter
at all?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
So essentially each country has control of the physical structure within their
borders. This is not different from any other technology.

Now, a country can then hold anything they control as collateral for any other
demand they make: France could block a site from the country, they could seize
any assets that site has in the country, or arrest personnel in that country.
France has a vested interest in not overplaying their hand, such that
companies won't operate there at all, but effectively a country has complete
power to demand anything in exchange for access to their country.

In that way, the Internet is not subject to any country's law in only that
country, but every country's law in every country, insofar as those countries
are places they want to do business.

Nothing here is new and the US is traditionally the largest user of this sort
of power.

~~~
matheusmoreira
> France could block a site from the country

That's exactly what will turn the international network into regional ones
with tightly controlled borders. Large groups of people simply won't be
reachable from the outside. My country blocked WhatsApp for several days when
it couldn't decrypt messages for the benefit of an investigation.

> they could seize any assets that site has in the country, or arrest
> personnel in that country

And then countries will start requiring that all data concerning their
citizens be stored on computers located on their soil and therefore under
their jurisduction. That almost made it into law here. How many sites are just
gonna block the entire country in response to that? How many are going to be
blocked for not complying?

------
bgorman
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".

"Press freedom" historically means that the press can publish anything
factual, artistic, or opinion based without fear of government censorship or
retribution.

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.

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.

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.

~~~
samatman
> _the country that was the inspiration for the US independence._

The United States declared independence in 1776, and the storming of the
Bastille was in 1789.

I'm pretty sure the arrow of causality runs in the opposite direction from
what you describe.

~~~
bgorman
Clearly factually my statement is incorrect. However there certainly was a lot
of cross-polination of enlightenment ideas between the early US, France and
England.

------
smogcutter
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?

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.

~~~
kevindong
I don't necessarily disagree about Google being required to pay publishers to
make money off of having snippets of their content in Google News.

But requiring Google to both index all websites (in a separate attempt to
mitigate the monopoly effect) __and __requiring Google to pay publishers to
include content in search results certainly has a bad smell to it.

If Google had the option to not index the websites, then I'd say it's fine.

~~~
Talanes
Google did have the option. They chose instead to pressure newspapers into
signing free agreements to add their content back. Google obviously thought it
had found a loop around the law, and the French courts saw through it.

------
franczesko
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.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
How exactly is Google the parasite here? They are only providing links to
content since the publishers didn't want them to provide snippets or previews.
So literally the only thing that Google is providing is a link to the content
on the publisher's site.

~~~
Talanes
Google was still providing full content, just after getting the providers to
sign free contracts. THAT was the behavior the French court came down on them
for. They were given the option to just provide link and title and chose to
try and have their cake and eat it too.

------
kerhackernews
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.

~~~
sneak
I think that in a strict interpretation of current copyright attitudes, web
spidering/mirroring in general is probably an infringement if you then
republish any part of that content in any way for your own benefit. Imagine if
you made a "Google for Twitter" today; you'd be sued out of existence. I
believe precisely this happened with LinkedIn, IIRC.

I think the concept of copyrights is fundamentally incompatible with an open
web, ultimately. It should be that a webserver sending you a response to your
request is an implicit usage license. After all, the webserver doesn't _have_
to send you anything. If it does, we take that to be an implicit agreement
that you can have and use the data. That should be codified as law, because it
is the current convention.

