
Google may shut down its news service in Europe - visitednews
https://techgraph.co/hubs/google/google-may-shut-down-its-news-service-in-european-union/
======
mrunkel
As an EU citizen, I'll go against the grain here and say that I will indeed
miss this service.

The idea that google has made "a killing" of news.google.com is just silly.
There are, I'm sure, related benefits, but they don't serve ads on those
pages, they simply aggregate and sort various news services.

As someone who appreciates getting different viewpoints, having the articles
sorted like this was a great value.

This is a classic case of the news media shooting itself in the foot.

To me, this akin to restaurants saying that concierge desks need to pay them
to refer customers to them. Just ridiculous.

~~~
exodust
If we're talking about news.google.com, then yeh it's ridiculous. That site is
just headline links. It's not "content", it's a list of text links.

The foundation of the web is text links. So the EU wants to charge for HTML
links. Struggling to see the logic there. Users click those links, read the
story content, and end up on the news website. _That_ is the fair transaction
right there, no money needed.

Unless I'm missing something? Is this about the web or app? I don't use the
google app so not sure if clicking links just opens a web view in app?

~~~
O1111OOO
> The foundation of the web is text links. So the EU wants to charge for HTML
> links.

What's scary here is how this would effect other aggregators of news: HN,
reddit, automated online RSS Feeds, etc. These kinds of overreaching
regulations don't happen in a bubble, they trickle down to everyone. So the
question: why is Google specifically targeted?

Is this part of the Big Tech Backlash[0] - specifically... the flow and
control of information? Or is it more like a Netflix thing, where I think that
'The Old Guard' News Orgs may be overvaluing themselves.

Also, it was my understanding that News Organizations voluntarily submitted
and made an effort to be compliant with Google News[1]. That is, Google News
doesn't display news source data without permission (I think they did early
on?).

I'm certain that if Google (or other large-scale News aggregator) required
permission to be listed, most news orgs (enough to make a viable product)
would happily comply.

[0]
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22The%22+%22EU%22+Tech+Backlash&n...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22The%22+%22EU%22+Tech+Backlash&norw=1&ia=web)

[1] [https://support.google.com/news/publisher-
center/answer/4078...](https://support.google.com/news/publisher-
center/answer/40787?hl=en)

------
CaptainZapp
We can certainly argue if the "link tax" is a good idea.

Google, however, playing the hurt and wounded entity because they're no more
able to leech "free" content to make a killing is, well, not very plausible.

Don't want to provide EU users with Google News?

Well, good bye and good riddance.

~~~
knorker
> leech "free" content

Google News doesn't (in itself) have revenue. No ads.

If you'd said Google Search or Youtube, then that's a completely different
thing. Those are multi-billion dollar products, and I suppose your argument is
that Google doesn't add any value between site/youtuber and customer?

But Google News? It's one thing to have a service for free. It's another to
force someone to pay to run a free service.

"Playing the hurt"? I have seen zero indication of that. All I've seen is
"Shrug, if that's the rules you make then a product like this cannot exist.
We'll shut it, then".

I don't use Google News, myself.

> Well, good bye and good riddance.

People who like this kind of product (that now cannot exist) and news sites,
would disagree. E.g. see what happened in Germany when the link tax was
introduced.

You may not like it, but users (clearly… I mean they used it) and news sites
do.

And now it's a thing that can't exist in the EU.

~~~
efdee
News sites complain about Google stealing their content, which is why the law
came into existance in the first place. Which is, of course, ridiculous,
because they profit a lot from the eyeballs sent their way by Google.

It's just plain greed, and I'd rather have Google shut down their news service
instead of getting some unholy exemption which would stiffle innovation in the
news gathering area.

~~~
simias
Even though I'm not in favor of this law I understand the point of view of the
news outlets. Basically it's a team effort: Google aggregates the news which
gives users a convenient entry point to access articles that interests them
from a variety of websites but of course that wouldn't be possible if
journalists didn't write the articles in the first place. Google wins by
having more people use their services and log into their Google account, news
outlets wins by reaching a larger audience through Google.

But then, from the point of view of the news outlets, the benefits from this
arrangement are not split fairly because they're the ones who do the hard and
expensive part (writing the articles, investigating etc...) while Google
merely links to them while making money from ads and collecting user data. If
they're lucky the user _may_ end up clicking on the headline to actually
access the website, and then if they don't have an ad blocker they _may_
generate a couple of ad impressions. Basically they're left with the scraps
even though they're the one who actually did most of the actual work.

Now I think the link tax is a bad solution to this issue but I also think it's
not completely fair to call news agencies "greedy" in a blanket statement. The
business model of journalism in the internet era is still very much an open
question.

~~~
knorker
I agree with all that except it should be clearer that Google doesn't gain
anything (except PR?) from actually running Google News. There are no ads on
it.

Google probably does gain from people logging in (though you can use Google
News without logging in, it probably does cause people to log in, even if just
a little more).

If the newspaper has ads from Google, then Google does take a cut (that's the
business logic), and arguably Google News is similar to the newspaper buying
ads on Google Search, except they don't have to pay.

People do pay for Google Search ads to drive traffic to their site, and for
newspapers that probably gives them ad revenue and signups.

Newspapers get a similar service from Google News for free.

"Should Google (or anyone else) pay newspapers in order to run a news
aggregation service" really boils down to "how much $ is a login worth to
Google"?

It becomes a formula:

Google News value to google = google_news_users_per_month *
fraction_not_logged_in * fraction_who log_in_because_of_google_news *
value_of_a_login_to_google

Let's guess some numbers:

1M * 0.7 * 0.2 * $0.01 = $1400 per month

If Google has to pay developers, server infrastructure, AND newspapers more
than $1400 then Google loses money on this and SHOULD turn down the product. I
say this as a shareholder of GOOG: If it doesn't make financial sense then
stop wasting my money.

(but yes, there's also brand value)

PS: Yes, there's one more value to Google, and that's the general: "More
Internet use is a benefit to Google because any increase of Internet use will
have a fraction on it go to sites that have Google ads on them". But saying
that's bad is as if Google were to give free Internet, and people would demand
that Google _pay_ to give free Internet to people, because users would browse
to sites where many of them would have Google ads on them.

~~~
simias
If Google news holds so little value to Google, why didn't they shut it down
at the first sign of controversy? After all they publicly oppose these laws
and shutting the service down would remove a big argument of their opponents,
wouldn't it?

In particular I'm sure Google benefits from news indirectly by giving them
valuable info about their users (you can tell a lot about somebody by what
news they're interested in) and also by adding one more potentially useful
service to the Google "suite", giving one more reason for users to commit to
their ecosystems. That being said I'm incapable of judging of the actual
monetary value of either of these things.

>People do pay for Google Search ads to drive traffic to their site, and for
newspapers that probably gives them ad revenue and signups.

>Newspapers get a similar service from Google News for free.

That's a bit of mental gymnastics here. That's like saying "people pay to have
google ads, but you can also get listed in the organic results for free!
Thanks Google!". If I go to Google news then I expect to see news, them only
displaying newspapers that agree to pay for it would make the service
objectively worse. That would be like having Google search only listing ads
and no organic results.

As rational actors it's in the newspaper's best interest to create content
that interests people and it's in Google's best interest to promote that
content to make their service valuable. Nobody is giving anybody a freebie
here.

~~~
knorker
I obviously don't have all the data about why Google is or isn't shutting
Google News down.

But given that we are in 2018, not right after 2001-09-11 as when it was
created, even if Google News doesn't add anything _positive_ to Google's
bottom line or PR (big, BIG "if") there's a huge cost to shutting it down to
Google PR, since it's another example of Google shutting a popular product.

If the EU is doing this, it actually gives Google an excuse, in case they
wanted to shut it down anyway. And nobody else would make a replacement
because it's just not economical.

Yes. I agree that "being logged in while browsing the Internet" has value to
Google.

You may disagree on what that value is. I may be _way_ off, but it's a Fermi
estimate. I encourage you to plug in the numbers you would estimate, and see
what monetary value Google News has to Google, and see if a link tax with
amounts that news sites would actually care about makes economic sense.

> That's a bit of mental gymnastics here.

I agree. It's more a counter-point to "obviously Google should pay" than a
suggestion for a better model.

> Nobody is giving anybody a freebie here.

On this we agree. Both supply-side parties add value, and all three parties
gain value. To say that one of the parties is a "leech" is not accurate.

If the EU forces Google to pay a meaningful fee to news sites, then that may
(in my estimate: extremely likely to) completely erase any benefits, and it'd
be rational for Google to bug out.

------
slivym
I've got to say - I found it REALLY difficult to find an authoritative or
trustworthy source on what the link tax is.

From my understanding here's the rub: there are two definitions. One
definition is you'd have to pay a publisher if you link to their article
whilst quoting it. That's what the opponents are saying. This seems
disingenuous, since it's the quoting the article that triggers the tax - no
the link.

The supporters characterize it as: If you rip off a significant part of a
copyright work the publisher can charge you since you're taking their
copyrighted work (whether you link to them or not).

Now people are saying sites link Google News would be affected because they
list lots of news sites quotes with links to the source. I would've thought it
was pretty obvious however, if the aggregater quotes enough then there's no
point to click through and therefore the revenue accrues to Google rather than
the publisher. This seems fine to me -- there should be a charge for that
behaviour. What's more it actually seems self-levelling. If Google doesn't
quote too much and people click through then there's no incentive for the
publisher to charge Google for the content since they're generating demand and
charging Google would cause them to be de-listed.

So let's move on, why is Google complaining? Well it seems to me that it's
actually in Google's interests to be able to leech off these publishers by
stealing their content wholesale and this would prevent that, and apparently
they think whining publicly is a reasonable strategy. It's not.

~~~
ggggtez
I believe the root complaint is the link shows the "Title", a small snippet,
and/or a thumbnailed image.

The concern is that it's a law essentially designed to punish large companies
for essentially doing what the internet is built to do: link to other sites.

To not have any snippets and just display raw URL links would be to
essentially go back to the early 90's in terms of user experience.

Edit: Also, arguably, the headline itself is a quote. How can you charge
someone for quoting something newsworthy? That seems to be the very definition
of fair use.

------
mhomde
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Hacker News would technically be affected by the
same Link tax. It would probably not be enforced but still.

It's such a stupid idea and I really lose hope about the future of a free
internet when I see stuff like this. Hopefully saner minds will prevail

~~~
merijnv
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but Hacker News would technically be affected by
> the same Link tax. It would probably not be enforced but still.

The "link tax" isn't a tax on actual links. That name is a misnomer, it
applies to links that _reproduce key parts of the linked content inline_.

So, for example, Google News links duplicating the headline and providing a
summary. Because, in essence, Google News is copying content from news
organisations/sites reducing their traffic (usually skimming headlines is
enough to cherry-pick the few things you care about) while themselves
profiting (keeping people on Google sites and around Google ads longer).

Whether this "link tax" is the right solution is debatable, but I hope we can
agree that Google and Facebook abusing their dominant position this way isn't
health for the world.

This does _not_ apply to HN, because HN isn't reproducing any of the linked
content inline.

~~~
dalf
What about RSS ? Many news sites have a RSS feed : *
[http://www.spiegel.de/schlagzeilen/tops/index.rss](http://www.spiegel.de/schlagzeilen/tops/index.rss)
* [https://www.lemonde.fr/rss/une.xml](https://www.lemonde.fr/rss/une.xml)

So as an individual I can use them, but the dead Google Reader would have meet
the same issue than Google News ?

~~~
tannhaeuser
The publisher can control how much content is exposed via RSS (typically just
the lede), whereas with presenting scraped content by third party news
aggregators, the user will never need to visit the origin site.

~~~
Andrex
The publisher can also control how much is shared with third party
aggregators, either through robots.txt or a paywall method.

Which has been the case since search engines became a thing.

~~~
tannhaeuser
That isn't the same at all. A publisher cannot use robots.txt, and much less
paywalls, to indicate a part of text that can be shared in syndication.

~~~
Andrex
A paywall can. The page displays the snippet the publication is allowing to be
shared, while the paywall hides the rest. I believe this is what a few of the
bigger US newspapers are doing right now.

~~~
tannhaeuser
Ok, but that would require regular readers to have credentials for the
paywall. I understood the discussion to be about scraping publicly accessible
sites.

------
fybe
Some random site says that another site reported and doesn't link it to the
original article?

Is this them getting ready for the link tax? So now we will see these "news"
sites that regurgitate other peoples news omit links to the original articles
as to not pay this "tax"?

Will this actually be beneficial in the long run? Omitting core internet
functionality, linking, because it costs extra. Only help to spread fake news
as links to sources and references will be omitted. Or is there some clause
that only tech giants will be taxed? How do you define a giant then. Certainly
google but what about Reddit? Or Hacker News?

Don't have answers to any of these questions but until we know more I'll be
very skeptical of this "link tax"

------
otikik
It has been gone from Spain for some time now.

I thought I was going to miss it, but honestly, I don't.

I also thought that the news services would crumble and die. They didn't, but
their news quality took a dive. I can't say whether this is causality or just
correlation.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _I also thought that the news services would crumble and die. They didn 't_

“The [Spanish] law...cost publishers €10 million, or about $10.9 million,
which would fall disproportionately on smaller publishers” and led to “smaller
Spanish aggregators, such as Planeta Ludico, NiagaRank, InfoAliment, and
Multifriki shut[ting] down” [1].

[1] [https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/201...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2015/07/new-study-shows-spains-google-tax-has-been-a-disaster-for-
publishers/%3famp=1)

~~~
otikik
When I said "news services" I meant publishers, not aggregators. I didn't know
or use any of those aggregators you mentioned.

------
Brotkrumen
I wonder who those same publishers are going to blame when their visitors drop
by 13% as they did in spain.

But maybe that's intended, as smaller publishers would suffer the most the
large publishers would finally be able to decide what is news and how it's to
be distributed.

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150725/14510131761/study...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150725/14510131761/study-
spains-google-tax-news-shows-how-much-damage-it-has-done.shtml)

~~~
mike22223333
Too many small publishers are not good. The small publishers which gain
revenue because of Google are too dependent on it. Hence they cannot criticize
Google else indirectly their SEO is affected. Larger independent publishers
have to compete with smaller clickbaity non professional publishers and also
have to serve clickbait. Because Ad revenue is mostly a zero sum game. The
smaller publishers who do not have many journalists just make clickbait titles
eat into professionals who are also dependent on Ads.

It is in Google's interest to have multiple small publishers instead of few
large publishers, because Google can blackmail the smaller ones more easily
and multiple publisher speaking against something is more difficult then few
grouped publishers.

If the publishers and Google's interest clash, it is a good thing for the
readers. If they align, it is a very good thing for Google, a little good for
publishers and bad for readers.

~~~
Brotkrumen
every publisher is "small" at first. This is about not rocking the boat for
larger publishers by better, maybe more professional, upstarts.

The argument about click-baity titles is relevant to whether a publisher is
small or large. Every large publisher now has a yellow press sub-brand that
just pushes out trash with click-baits.

~~~
mike22223333
Larger ad dependent publishers have to push out click bait because smaller
publishers push it out. If larger publishers would not do clickbait if smaller
publishers do, they go out of business, because smaller ones steal the share
of money.

Ad revenue is a zero sum game.

------
josefx
Is this related to the news shown on the start screen of the android chrome?
If so I will miss it - not at all. I think I can count the times I saw
something interesting in that list on one hand and I never found an option to
get rid of it.

~~~
code_duck
No, it’s not related to that.

------
Jedi72
People are pointing out that Google doesn't serve ads on Google news, and that
they drive clicks to news sites, like this is some kind of huge favor. Its
not, its strategy. Google wants to be the choke-point for every page lookup on
the web. They have the stats on what people search and news is obviously a big
one, so they provide services like this to put a moat around that sweet sweet
ad revenue that might leak away if users were to ever use anything other than
Google as the first thing they open in a browser.

------
VikingCoder
The phone book is listing my business number, and they're not paying me?!?

Outrage!

The phone book should have to pay me to list my number!

<completely silent phone>

Oh, wait...

------
tuxt
So, HN should pay "techgraph" for linking this article?

~~~
emayljames
HN is not a megacorp that forces websites to use an awful amp version of their
own websites. HN only provide a simple link and heading.

~~~
tuxt
The law even mentioned "amp"? How specific!

------
p2t2p
I have very much hope that Google shutdowns really big things in Europe
eventually, things like YouTube, maybe some parts of Android and stuff.

I'm very curious if it'll cause governments or business to crawl and ask for
mercy or if it'll lead to Google replacements emerging in Europe.

In China, Google's exodus provided a way to emerge multitude of local services
which make me think that what Google does is not a rocket science and other
can do it as well, there is just no incentive. Anyway, that's just random
thoughts, it would be really interesting to see what would happen if Google
left Europe in a big way.

~~~
Jyaif
There is already a youtube "replacement" from Europe: Dailymotion, and it's
absolutely terrible.

They are only surviving by hosting copyrighted content and bombarding it with
Unskippable ads.

------
knbknb
Is it the content-preview (however small), the content-gathering or the
linking that will cost money?

Google could (re-)write the headlines and micro-summaries themselves (using
machine-learning technologies) and just provide links, without copying
anything from elsewhere for previewing purposes. Embedding no snippets and
thumbnails at all from the media-/publisher websites would turn Google News
into a text-only site, making it a lot less appealing to the audience.

------
emayljames
For anybody, (like myself), who cannot stand Google's amp version of popular
website's, try this: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/amp2html/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/amp2html/)

------
r721
Original source:

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/18/google-
ne...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/18/google-news-may-
shut-over-eu-plans-to-charge-tax-for-links)

------
adrr
It may actually help the large subscription news sites. If all the news
aggregators went away, I'd be more likely to pay for news from a reputable
publisher to curate my news for me.

------
sbhn
The link tax is an end to organic search results. You want to be found on
google, then you’ll need to buy clicks using adwords. Google wins

------
excalliburbd
And another one gone, and another one gone Another one bites the dust

------
Jyaif
Would the Apple News widget shown on iOS also be affected by this?

~~~
visitednews
Don't know as it is still unclear, how much "link tax" is going to affect the
newsstand, but there is a less chance of Apple news to get banned as apple is
paying to the publisher for publishing their content on Apple news.

------
bryanrasmussen
don't they mean not providing European sourced news globally, for example if
they provide something from Der Spiegel to US users wouldn't that be hit with
the link tax?

------
jesuslop
goodbye and farewell

------
dbmyh
I hate both Google and the media, so this is great news.

------
romanovcode
And nothing of value would be lost.

------
throw2016
This seems more like an empty threat and a bargaining position. If they wanted
to shut down they would, not leak to the media incessantly about their
intentions.

Why are they pushing amp on publishers if this content doesn't matter to
Google? This is extremely self serving and then trying to play innocent is
disingenuous and predatory.

There are no principles at stake here, only the exploitative business
interests of a monopolistic business. The standard PR playbook of
misinformation, lobbying, 'think tanks' and and 'helpful' opinion pieces is
being rolled out, which is the predictable reaction of any well resourced
interest hellbent on getting their their way.

