

German Government Wants Google To Pay For the Right To Link To News Sites - rrreese
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/08/20128207532338270.html

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btilly
The day before yesterday I would have thought that the German government was
being stupid, of course you shouldn't make search engines pay for this.

But yesterday I read _Trust Me, I'm Lying_ and learned how much incentives
matter. When the news media competes based on their established brand - people
seek you out because they know you are good - you have an incentive to produce
high quality content. By contrast when people seek you out because your titles
and teasers are compelling - as happens when people find you through a search
engine - then your incentive is to generate the most compelling lead-in to
useless content. You have no incentives to do mundane things like check facts.

The result of per paper sales over a hundred years ago was the "yellow press".
Today it is blog spam. If Germany can encourage better incentives, the result
will be a better served public.

I don't know the details of the bill. I don't know if it could successfully
accomplish anything like that. But discouraging business models that depend on
blogspam is not a bad thing for our world.

