this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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EU: You have to pay to show our news.
Google: Ok. We won't show your news.
EU: Pikachu face
That's what basically happened in Germany like 10, 15 years ago when the first publisher had that idea. Its news stories would still show up in search results but only the headline, not that text snippet and no thumbnail image. These results were less attractive to users, so traffic from Google to those web sites crashed down by like 80, 90 percent.
In the end the publishers gave Google a free license to reproduce text snippets and thumbnails. The tightened copyright law provision wasn't repealed. Small search engines without leverage still (AFAIK to this day) have to pay.
So Google pays nothing, publishers earn nothing, upstart search engines can't afford the fees, and so Google leaves even more in power because of a law not even they wanted.
But, is this bad? Google makes a crap-ton of revenue compared to publishers who are now struggling with AI content competition. They need revenue to pay journalists.
Hard to define the good guys on this one.
Note: It's also a misrepresentation. The EU asked Google to do this.
The EU gave Google an option: pay or take down the content. The latter option was a bluff, and Google called them on it.
I don't think this will hurt Google at all.
But it will certainly drive less traffic to these news sites if they are banned from Google. And that will hurt the news sites.
The problem is that it won't stop people from using Google. Most people probably wouldn't even notice aside from having to spend more time searching for local things, which incidentally will give Google more ad money.
The average person probably doesn't know that search engines other than Google or Bing (or maybe Yahoo if they're old enough) even exist. As much as it worries me that most of Firefox's revenue comes from having Google as the default search engine, regulating that practice might actually give other search engines a chance to be seen.