
Google to stop showing news snippets for French users - tannhaeuser
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-france/google-to-stop-showing-news-snippets-for-french-users-idUSKBN1WA1FK
======
pavelludiq
Congratulations to the EU commission and the EU parliament on achieving the
exact opposite of what they wanted to do despite being told this would happen
and despite it actually already happening in Spain and Germany. It's not like
this is any kind of surprise, it's the only logical thing that could've
happened. I am still extremely bitter about the dirty way this law was passed,
the lies, the deliberate lies by the commission, the nasty response EU
politicians had at protesters and the absolute contempt they had for young
people saying they we're entitled children trained by internet giants to
expect free things. I watched the debates in parliament and there were MEPs
who actually said that. The horsetrading France and Germany did over Russian
gas in order to get a deal on this law. That disgusting blog post the EU
commission published calling people who disagreed with them bots and
brainwashed and positioning themselves literally as knights out to slay the
google dragon. It's all horribly corrupt and cynical. I'm sure many young
people got the message that their leaders view them with such absolute
contempt and open hatred and I fear the consequences for Europe.

~~~
simias
Your reaction is over the top IMO. I'm quite perplex about this law myself but
I think you're missing the point.

You comment reads a bit like "the workers wanted a raise, now they're on
strike and they get _less_ money than previously, achieving the exact opposite
of what they wanted to do!" It's technically true of course, but I think they
hope that Google will suffer enough from this decision that they'll have to
reconsider in the future. Alternatively, they hope that people will still want
to get French news and will move to other websites which will accept to give
money to the news organizations.

I'm really not sure that it's going to work on either count but on the other
hand it's clear that many EU constituents (those who actually pay taxes and
employ people in the EU) felt that something had to be done.

>the absolute contempt they had for young people saying they we're entitled
children trained by internet giants to expect free things

I mean, if anything I agree with this statement, except I'd put "free" between
quotes. The ad-driven business model is a cancer as far as I'm concerned.

~~~
tylerl
> ...they hope that Google will suffer enough from this decision that they'll
> have to reconsider in the future...

Google loses literally nothing.

Google doesn't make any money off Google news. They make money sending traffic
to advertisers, not to news sites. And the Google news page doesn't run ads.
It's just a free service.

The only benefit to Google is that it makes their brand better.

This has been the irony all along; Google's been running a 100% free (NOT ad
supported) service to help users find news sites, and the news sites demand to
be compensated. So OF COURSE this is going to be the response; there was never
any money to share.

~~~
untog
> Google loses literally nothing.

That's not true. The entire reason Google hosts these "snippets" on their
search results page is to keep users on that page and not clicking through to
other sites. With this they lose that ability.

You're talking as if Google News is the only affected site here. It isn't: the
vast majority of this traffic is on search results pages. Which Google does
make vast amounts of money from.

~~~
beaner
Are you saying this out of theory or experience? Anecdotally as a user I can
tell you that when I see a compelling snippet, I am more likely to click, not
less.

------
tastroder
I really wish traditional news media, aka those people that are supposed to
dissaminate the news, would get a grip and stop breaking the internet and
their core business altogether one of these days. If you lose revenue because
google shows a few sentences of the introduction your content is not worth it
to readers. But no, instead of better content and easier ways to consume it,
we get more clickbait and whining about fake news.

At least on the level of local newspapers in Germany it's a complete disaster
for me personally. It's not even that I wouldn't want to pay people that go
out and report on local happenings, it's just that I don't want to add another
10-20EUR subscription for the 1/2 articles I'd want to skim that's actually
relevant content and not some made up outrage or simply agency content.

~~~
wcoenen
> it's just that I don't want to add another 10-20EUR subscription for the 1/2
> articles I'd want to skim

I've also been thinking about this, with all the paywalls I've been running
into. I don't mind paying for quality news, but I'd prefer to pay one entity
for a certain article/month limit for _all_ (or at least most) paywalled news
sources. The one entity could distribute my subscription money to the news
providers pro rata, according to my consumption.

The current system of paying for one news source doesn't work for me, because
I want to read articles from all over. I don't consume enough from one source
to justify the subscription cost.

~~~
JohnStrangeII
Interesting. This probably exists already in one form or another, but it could
also be good opportunity for a major startup. "Netflix for news" \- premium
access to the best articles from the best newspapers and news agencies, with
sophisticated A.I. powered recommendation system, custom content
subscriptions, instant access wherever you are.

~~~
bloak
Alternatively, some news organisations should get together and set up an
independent non-profit organisation to do that before some corporation gets a
monopoly and starts taking a 90% cut while implementing political bias and
censorship as a compulsory extra.

------
Traubenfuchs
Users will have less incentive to click on links without a little preview.
Publishers will scratch their head about numbers getting worse. Smart
publishers will enable previews. Soon, everyone will enable previews.

Well done!

~~~
iMerNibor
> Soon, everyone will enable previews.

Only on the big websites though, why would a news org bother with small or
tiny news aggregators?

The small websites will have to shut down while google will get even stronger.
(This happened in germany already when they introduced a very similar law)

~~~
Traubenfuchs
I do not know about the technical details. Is it more effort than putting
something in your robots.txt or putting a meta tag in your HTML?

~~~
ru999gol
That's not really the question, the news sites will give Google explicit
permission to use their content while not granting the same usage rights to
any other smaller EU-based search/news-aggregation service.

That's why every single person who knows what they are talking about has
warned about this law from the beginning, but they were all ignored. Now this
deals incredible damage to the future of EU internet companies and helps
established big US corps. Everyone knew that, its just business as usual with
the corrupt to the core and incompetent EU.

------
oaw-bct-ar-bamf
I am in favour of this. If a site is doing the work of providing content
(news, sport game scores, weather, ...) and Google passes by, scrapes the most
important information and shows it on their own site, a large swath of users
will never visit the content provider.

The one providing the content has rights to his content.

~~~
chmod775
I'm wondering whether you're also in favor of disallowing journalists to
basically create blogspam copies of other, real journalist's, work?

Because that actually hurts the original source. Google providing the first 2
sentences _with a link to the article_? Not so much.

As the Springer case has shown, Google is actually providing a service to the
publishers here, who receive considerable less traffic without Google sending
users their way.

~~~
SomeOldThrow
What do you mean by disallowing? Regulation is extremely specific for a
reason. If it works, yea, that would substantially raise the quality of
reporting. Google just seems trivially regulatable compared to “journalists”.

------
jeroenhd
Reminds me of when news publishers tried to do the same in Germany and then
lamented the drop in click through rate.

Lobbyists for magazines and newspapers got the EU to put this law into effect
and I'm glad they're going to be the ones who suffer the worst. If your news
story is so short it can be explained in a thumbnail and the two lines Google
shows, you don't have anything of value to protect.

~~~
skrebbel
I agree with the gist of your comment, but:

> _If your news story is so short it can be explained in a thumbnail and the
> two lines Google shows, you don 't have anything of value to protect._

Major scoops that require many man-months of digging can often be summarized
in just a headline.

~~~
AnonymousPlanet
Everything can be summarised in just a headline, including your or my life.
But I doubt your life can be _explained_ in just a thumbnail or headline.

------
lettergram
After reading the comments (on HN) and the law I think this is a good thing.
I’m rather confused by the visceral response by some people on HN.

It may be an unpopular opinion, but Google was stealing. They were showing
enough information no one was clicking the links. What this means for content
creators is that you couldn’t make revenue.

If I search for something on Google I get so much information above the fold
(and ads), I pretty much never see a real site. That’s a serious issue,
because Google isn’t creating that content. Worse, their using their monopoly
to push the AMP framework to make it easier to get snippets and actually serve
your content on their servers.

No, this doesn’t have to be the end of the world. Almost all decent sized
websites add their own preview and snippets (which Google can display). So all
it does is enable further controls to publishers.

~~~
sbx320
> They were showing enough information no one was clicking the links.

Were they? From the data I found for a very similar law in Germany the
opposite seems to be true.

Axel Springer AG (biggest publisher, also primary lobbyist for the law) gave
Google a free license two weeks after Google removed the snippets for all
their sites. They noted a 40% drop in clicks coming from Google and an 80%
drop from Google News. With estimates from statistics collectors putting users
coming from Google anywhere between 15% and 35% (depending on the individual
site) that's a massive reduction in users and ad revenue.

~~~
lettergram
I mean, those claims are anecdotal at best and more importantly Google
controls what people see, which is kind of my point. You can’t validate Google
isn’t manipulating results. They have every incentive to manipulate them.

I don’t know the specifics though and there was no link provided. However, in
any case I think my point remains - assuming that’s true, why was it the case?

~~~
repolfx
I'm not sure you fully follow what's happened here, as the post you're
replying to is comprehensive. Here's a history of this whole sordid affair.

Publishers have always been able to control their appearance in Google and
Google News, using robots.txt and meta tags. If they thought Google was
'stealing' they could prevent it by just ... asking them not to.

They (Axel Springer and other EU publishers) didn't do this, because they make
a lot of money out of Google sending them traffic which they can then monetise
by running ads on the resulting page loads, ads that Google will also help
provide if they want, but doesn't insist on. Instead they quite happily let
Google index and send them traffic completely gratis.

At some point some newspaper barons noticed that the EU was very much in hock
to them because it relied for its own ideological and political goals on lots
of positive press coverage and more importantly, no digging for dirt. Also the
only tech firms that existed were all foreign and publishers are bleeding
money, so, they decided there should be a "new deal" in which Google not only
paid lots of money to index their website and serve a Google News index (in
return for nothing), but should also _pay them_ for the privilege! And because
this made absolutely no sense for Google at all, they decided the only way to
make Google do it was to enforce that Google News couldn't exist in Europe
without these huge payments.

Google said that they weren't going to pay firms for the privilege of linking
to them and if they weren't happy they were welcome to take themselves out of
Google using robots.txt. So the battlefield was laid out.

First was Germany. The publishers bet Google would pay them rather than lose
Google News. Google called their bluff and refused, with the result that the
publishers caved and basically voided the law they'd lobbied to pass by
granting Google a free license.

Next up was Spain. Spanish publishers looked at what happened in Germany and
decided the problem was that the German publishers had been able to chicken
out. Because the sort of news sites that get a lot of traffic from Google are
largely interchangeable there was a prisoners dilemma in which whichever
publisher folded first would take all the traffic and earn lots more money
than their competitors. So in the Spanish law, publishers weren't allowed to
give Google a free license.

The result was Google shut down Google News in Spain entirely. Also local
competitors to Google News shut down too because the prices were calibrated to
suck money out of a rich tech giant and small firms couldn't pay. Once again,
Google called their bluff but this time, nobody won, the Spanish people just
lost everything.

France and Germany looked at this and decided the problem was that individual
countries were too small. If the same thing was done at the EU level then
_this time_ surely Google would be defeated and give them a free firehose of
money, as they so desired.

Fortunately for them the EU Commission long since gave up on its people ever
creating a tech firm, and the EU is very pliant to the wishes of German
publishers. Note how Juncker and other top EU functionaries always write their
op-eds in German newspapers. So the Commission was quite keen. Popular outcry
doesn't matter because the EU is not democratic, it just resulted in this
amazing response from the Commission:

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190215/18005841607/eu-
co...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190215/18005841607/eu-commission-
decides-to-mock-public-insists-fears-about-eu-copyright-directive-are-all-
myths.shtml)

So now the EU has passed the same law and round three begins. Will Google give
in and pay the publishers lots of money? Or will it just shut down Google News
in all of Europe?

So far we seem to be in the middle of this engagement, with France losing
snippets. Maybe other countries will soon too. In the end Google News may
vanish entirely in the EU. I am very skeptical Google will pay because after
all, once the principle has been established that they'll pay to link to
content, where does it end? That's all the company does: they could open
themselves to arbitrary payments to anyone, anywhere, until they have no
profit left at all.

~~~
lettergram
I'm fully following what's going on and I think it's a bit more nuanced than
your comment. Many many of the arguments i've seen have not to do with
_linking_ , but with the _preview_. The preview is Google automatically
pulling answers to questions from their site. They wanted that to end, because
they wanted actual visitors OR they wanted Google to pay for that information.

Google _can_ and _could_ always link to the website. What they were doing was
a bit more than that. Google is now trying to strong arm them to let them pull
data from their sites. Literally, everything you describe above is what occurs
when someone has a monopoly.

~~~
shkkmo
There are two different things you are conflating, the quick answer thing to
the right of the search results is different from the snippet shown below the
item in search and news.

The quick answer area has a different set of issues and I think there is a
stronger argument to be made for it reducing click through rates (though I
always click through when the quick answers my question to verify there isn't
additional relevant context that is not included.)

Publishers already had the ability to block Google's indexing, image indexing,
news indexing and snippet creation and even snippet length using meta headers.

It is unclear to me how this actually gives publishers any more control over
how Google uses their content. It seems to have much larger impacts on smaller
aggregators. It does put legal weight behind that control, but it seems to me
that a much better law would have standardized these meta-headers and put the
force of law behind them, perhaps creating a header that notifies crawlers
that they must have a license to display snippets of text over a certain
length from a site. As it is, is there any way for a publisher to
automatically grant all agregators rights to display snippets of their content
or does the law forcibly opt all publishers into content restrictions?

------
rq1
Almost there... just a small effort and Google News will look like Hacker
News.

------
dghughes
This reminds me of the daily posting on reddit in the GPDR subreddit. People
are shocked that the countries outside the EU are not respecting the GPDR. Or
more shocked that a website would rather not do bushiness with or block people
in the EU from seeing their website. Most times a website put up bannersaying
"yadda yadda cookies...privacy...agree/disagree?" and that's that.

------
ifthenelseend
EU is the nightmare for every startup with all that laws. No time to develop
the product, because there is a lot of bureaucracy that take all your time.

~~~
simion314
So Google should be allowed to grab your content and put it on their page -
but if you make a video of yourself and put it on youtube and a car with the
stereo appeared for a few seconds in it your video is claimed. It is like all
the laws that make big companies money are good and the ones that make the
same big companies less money are bad.

~~~
cromwellian
Google is not the one issuing takedown requests on YouTube for music in the
background.

This whole concept of a small sample of something violating copyright IMHO is
the death of culture, it's excessively injecting chilling effects and barriers
into information sharing. We went through this in the 80s with Hip-Hop artists
and sampling.

I mean, if my son quotes a paragraph out of a French news website for a term
paper, and that paper is published online, is it now a copyright violation?
When does text summarization down to 2-3 sentences violate copyright? How far
do we take this?

The publishers business models are collapsing, but their foray into hyper
monetization and litigiousness surrounding any use of what they publish, if
anything, will only serve to speed up they're demise.

We have to find alternate models to support local journalism, and this ain't
gonna help.

~~~
simion314
I know Google is not the one asking to take those down but they are actualy
the ones that made the algorithm , but taking those videos down is based on
DMCA law witch is a US law pushed internationally by the big US companies.

What feels to me as hypocrisy is when US citizens accuse Europe of targeting
this big US corporations with some laws where similar laws were pushed before
by US, So is illegal for me to make a video clip with scenes from different
movies but it should be legal for a big US company to compile snippets of text
and images and put them on their page.

In my experience it happened to find the answer in that snippet and not visit
the website and in other case the smaller snippet you see under the results
was not to be found on the web-page that was linked

~~~
cromwellian
Most people I know opposed to the European laws also hate the DMCA too.

------
riclad1
This law is pointless , it was tried in germany and spain, result,google news
closed down. google news provide a service , free , no ads. if a newspaper
wants to get paid for links or snippets, it should expect that most websites
will opt out. The result is less traffic to newspaper websites, see google
reader, google plus etc no one can force google to provide a service, even if
it has millions of users. If it does, not fit in google,s plans the service
will disappear . IT WOULD Be disastrous if google actually paid for a snippet,
IT,S , a slipperly slope, next thing is google will have to pay to link to Any
european news or list them in the search results. Say i,m looking for news on
brexit, i should not have to go to 30 different websites, going to google news
is a much better option.

The european newspaper companys remind me of of music companys in the 90,s ,
they were facing declining sales of cds, , music piracy, they launched apps or
various mediocre incompatible music service,s with drm some of which only
worked on phone,s or pc,s or various devices, and used various , It required
steve jobs to appear and apple to invent the ipod and itunes , a simple
service ,buy music, buy albums, ,1 song for 99 cents ,all music in mp3 format.
Then streaming came along and the music industry is actually making more money
every year as people get used to paying subscriptions for apple music, spotify
etc The News industry needs a tech genius to come along who knows how the web
works , what users want, what they will pay for , Maybe have a website, New,s
.fr, news,germany.com, news,spain.com etc Where any news paper or blog can
post links to news storys or any article. WIth ads if they want , Any news
paper with a website can post on the website, it would be run by a semi
independent board, so its not under the control of just one company .

------
theboulevardier
Google has also started classifying non-news sites as being news sites and no
removing snippets from them. I have already had to manually change the
designation in the Google Search Console on a couple of sites that I look
after this week after Google flagged them. I'd recommend that site owners
check in the search console to see if they are affected.

------
pkaye
> The change means French users will only see the headlines and not the first
> few lines or a thumbnail image for news content unless European publishers
> specifically request to show previews, the company said.

I'm guessing some publishers will give permissions and eventually forcing
others to follow suit when they start losing traffic.

------
skybrian
I'm a bit confused by this because Google News has only been showing headlines
since their last redesign. I guess they will stop showing images as well? I
think that would be an improvement.

------
remotecool
This is why more countries need to break away from the EU.

------
andrerm
How does Google rank pages with and without nosnippet?

------
OrgNet
I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner and all over the world.

------
chvid
How the eu fights American big tech. Compare it with how China fights American
big tech ...

------
nkkollaw
Not that Google News is any good. My newsfeed is basically far-left
propaganda.

I would almost go as far as to say that this is a good thing for France.

------
mola
Good, I believe media outlets will benefit, unless Google deliberately
undermine their business model in some way. As a deterrent for others.

------
xorcist
This would have been a logical part of robots.txt from the beginning. Under an
earlier Google this would probably not have been allowed to escalate this far.

------
buboard
This is good. More clicks to the news sites and google is more like Reddit
now. But it is sad that there had to be a law for that. Gooogle should give
the option to remove anything but the title from the page result (is this
possible?).

~~~
jhall1468
Less clicks. Much less. It's exactly what happened in Germany. They "won" and
then saw their Google click-through rate plummet, which was a significant % of
their click-throughs.

~~~
buboard
Less clicks through search for sure. This however may render google news
useless, and increase direct traffic instead

~~~
jimmaswell
Would a news stand being forced to cover all the newspapers in black bags
drive more sales to online orders?

~~~
buboard
That s not what s happening. Paper Newspapers have a frontpage for a reason:
only titles, not the content. If you want more, buy it

------
rendall
Google is still a new phenomena, and we are still trying to come to terms with
it as a society. It's the first global monopoly, and it's on _information_.
Holy cow, that's just strange.

I applaud the EU for at least attempting to grapple with the potential
existential threat that Google represents, rather than rolling over and
pretending nothing is wrong as the US does; or censoring, as China does. Even
though I think the specific solution is probably unhelpful, it's _much_ better
than pretending that everything is as it should be, and crowing when
newspapers get their "comeuppance" when Google punishes them by reducing their
traffic.

~~~
buboard
The US is not pretending; there is actually nothing wrong because googld is a
US business. EU is following china here, building a covert great firewall in
an attempt to resurrect local market. A little too late though

~~~
rendall
You didn't address the main point. So to expand on it, Google is effectively
an information monopoly, which means that it uses its market dominance to
restrict competition. Moreover, it also uses its position to influence the web
and public opinion itself in ways for which there is no precedent. The US is
not addressing this last aspect in any respect.

Not sure what Google being an American company has to do with that.

