Why do you think the EU constituents had anything to do with these laws? The laws were incentivised by the publishers. The crux in the EU is that the biggest part of the industry see the internet just as infrastructure and couldn't care less about net neutrality, censorship, equal access, or ad revenues. The only industries affected by those issues are tech companies and publishers.

The tech companies have a pro liberalisation stance while the publishers hate the internet's guts. Now guess where countries with strong and influential publishers and a nearly non existent tech industry are leaning to. That publications like Süddeutsche, Zeit, and FAZ have been portraying the internet as a bad and dangerous thing for decades now, doesn't help.

I'm not pitying the useless money grab ad-infested publications, but they were the ones that actually spent on good journalism.

Though it would be good to see a lot more numbers/data about this. Also probably with globalisation the market simply consolidates. There's no need for more than a handful big "trust anchors" for news. The local news problem is tougher to crack though :/

It's just a wee bit less popular than the centralized ad-fueled internet.

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.

Once they have your attention, then they can sell ads.

Google News is an attention winning product, and it feeds into their broader ad ecosystem even if they don’t monetize it today.

And the French law applies to all companies in Google's position, not just to Google. So the there's still nowhere better than Google for users to go.

The only losers in this deal are the French news agencies, and perhaps French users if you consider them worse off for not finding French news sources.

So French users go to French media sites. I'm not really seeing the big loser here beyond Google, which is exactly why they've fought this so hard and for so long (despite, by your take, making no money on it).

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.

I don't think this is the case for search or news. The "snippets" under a search result make me more likely to click through and really don't ever provide enough info to allow me to skip reading the page.

Since your assertion runs counter to my (and others) experience, I hope you have some actual data to back this up? Perhaps a website that added a robots.txt to prevent snippet collection and saw an improvement in traffic from search?

So Google gets to advance the dominance of AMP, gets to track user behavior and does make money from Google News. If it didn't really have any value to Google and advance their agenda, it would be shutdown.

https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-ad/#supported-a...

This is a remarkably naive take.

If Google provides a service, they make money off it.

In 2008, during one of the many legal battles Google has waged over Google News, Google estimated that they made $100M off of people using Google to access news. Clearly that number would be some factor larger now. Because the more people who rely upon Google for a service, the less they end up elsewhere. The more Google controls your eyeballs and is likely to capture your ad clicks.

It's the same reason Google scrapes the web and provides the top answer in their answer bubble. It's "free" and it also robs viewers from ever going to the sites actually providing the information.

Or do you think Google puts all of that engineering effort, endless lobbying and legal fights with the news community...because they're just so benevolent?

Even ignoring the captured attention, this also enables Google to prioritize news sources that are more Google friendly (e.g. use Google ad networks), and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it.

If that's the case, then they must believe the snippets send more people to news websites than they otherwise would?

Honestly, the entire institution gets what it deserves. I've never seen such an utter shambles of democracy as bad as the Article 13 one.

Sometimes representative democracy has problems, sure; the usual generation gap between politicians and their constituencies is a big reason it takes so long for human-rights legislation (on e.g. gay marriage) to catch up with public sentiment.

But it’s still probably better than the alternatives, e.g. direct democracy. There are a lot of things you just can’t get done using direct democracy. Imagine a nation run by referendum trying to negotiate e.g. a distasteful-but-strategically-necessary wartime alliance with another nation. Sausage needs to get made; but who has the political capital to make it?

Democracy is not a system to promote meritocracy. It's a system to avoid autocracy, and all other things are exernalities rising from this core purpose.

The point of democracy is to have a constant churn within a large enough powerpool to discourage formation of ruling cliques and oligarchies. It's nice if the chosen representatives are efficient and skillfull, but that's not the point of the system.

There are two other important problems with the system as well: voter turnout and voting in blocs (country or EU party). The reason this is a problem is that the candidates campaign as individuals, but act according to what their group tells them. Sometimes they vote along what their country votes, other times they vote along the lines off what their parliamentary group tells them. But where are the interests of the actual constituents here?

The EU isn't a democracy or even a representative democracy. Notice how lots of people wrote to their MEPs and nothing happened other than MEPs calling their voters stupid? That's because in the EU all decisions are ultimately made by the Commission. The Commission started this, the Commission made it happen and by treaty the Commission is the only body able to actually propose changes to the law.

The EU Parliament quite literally doesn't fit the dictionary definition of Parliament. There isn't any way voters can change this law by voting, not even if every party was for changing it, because even a majority of MEPs cannot change the law. But changing the law is the entire and sole purpose of politicians, so we can observe that MEPs aren't really politicians.

A group elects someone who’s better at statecraft than the group is

That has never been part of the idea of democracy. What makes you think politicians are so great at statecraft? There are no tests they have to pass, assuming you could even make such a test to begin with. What's the definition of statecraft, even?

There's no evidence politicians are smarter or better than the average voter. That's why anyone can turn up and get votes.

Or, from the people’s perspective: elected representatives engage in awful horse-trading and disrespect their constituency’s opinions, and yet gradually everything gets better “somehow.”

For a whole lot of people in the EU things are either stagnant or getting worse. Look at the dire economic performance of Italy since joining the Eurozone: was growing, since flat.

Things don't get better because people repeatedly elect politicians who are superior to themselves. Things, by and large, get better when governments shrink and stay out of things. The fate of the eastern bloc under Soviet rule and then capitalist democratic rule shows that in action (although, now they are at risk of going backwards thanks to things like Article 13).

There are a lot of things you just can’t get done using direct democracy.

Tell that to the Swiss. Most successful country on the continent, by far.

It's true that the EU Parliament doesn't quite work the way you want it to, however it does have the ability to "Censure" the EU Commission by a vote of no confidence:

http://en.euabc.com/word/151

If it did so, a new Commission President would then be nominated, which the EU Parliament could approve based on the nominee's support for a change to the law.

This would be a way of working around the fact that the EU Parliament does not formally possess legislative initiative, which you seem to think it is missing, despite the fact that the law in question was amended and approved by the parliament as part of the legislative process.

The Parliament doesn't get to choose the leader. They can only ratify or delay the decision of those who do. That makes them useless. Even if they fire the entire Commission, the Council will just immediately re-appoint a new President who has exactly the same views and policies.

This kind of "you may be a nuisance but not change anything" arrangement is everywhere in the EU's structure. It's infantilising. It says you can cry if you like and get some attention for a while, but ultimately, the decisions aren't being made by you.

> ...

Thank you for pointing this out.

Edit: Why is the parent comment being downvoted? All of the facts presented are quite public knowledge.

> What's the definition of statecraft, even?

A member of the old boys club who graduated from Eton college seems to be the British definition.

In practice, MEPs are told who to vote for by their advisors. Who had even heard of Ursula von der Leyen until she was voted in?

It's common for europhiles to describe this sort of process as democratic because the Council is made up of national leaders. Unfortunately there's a key detail that makes this step non-functional: Council meetings are held in secrecy. No minutes or voting records are published.

How was von der Leyen selected and why? Nobody knows outside of the national leaders themselves. And there are sadly good reasons to believe that they systematically lie to their populations about what happens in those meetings. For one, Juncker himself has complained about this: leaders support a policy in private at the Council level, then go back home and tell their populations they fought against it and are being forced to do it by the EU.

Given the staggering amount of mendaciousness and duplicity the current anti-Brexit Parliament has been revealing amongst the ruling classes, I have no doubt at all Juncker's complaint is valid. But of course if the EU wanted it could easily fix this: just make Council meetings public so people can see if their leader's acts in those meetings matches their acts back home.

The other problem is the number of levels of indirection. Politicians don't base campaigns on who they'll vote for as leader of the Commission. It's "democratic" only in tortured theory.

I think it's a question of how many steps removed the decision makers are from elected officials.

Probably by people not reading it and having a kneejerk Brexit-related response.

The words I read were what I already believed to be true and indeed would've written myself - and if it wasn't true I'd want to know.

They're just trying to fix Google's mess, like when they have to litigate to collect taxes or when the DOJ litigates to prevent colluding to depress employee wages or when customers litigate to collect their refunds. It's Google forcing new laws and litigation, the EU is much their victim as their employees, customers and users.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/05/24/2025223/google-fran...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-refund-advertisers-af...

I say this without jest: At least the giant corporations can be held to account - I can choose not to use their services, or decide to use an adblocker. The EU can't and I can't opt out of it.

In matters such as these (and others, such as food, medicine, and transport safety), it makes more sense to have government regulation rather than relying solely on consumer pressure. Moreover, it is more efficient for businesses to have one consistent set of rules to follow, rather than a patchwork of 28 contradictory rules, and it is harder for large corporations to pressure countries if those countries are acting together as a bloc.

If you want to opt out of the EU, I'm sure there are several territories in the world that would welcome you to live there. Alternatively, you have EU protected free speech and voting rights to convince your fellow citizens that your country should end its EU membership. You just need to get enough of those citizens (and their elected representatives) to agree on what specific alternative to EU membership they want instead.

The reason nothing has been done is because the majority are uninformed or just don't care. I'd argue we still get the better end of the deal with free as in beer content.

> Moreover, it is more efficient for businesses to have one consistent set of rules to follow, rather than a patchwork of 28 contradictory rules, and it is harder for large corporations to pressure countries if those countries are acting together as a bloc.

What do you personally think is better? A huge institution with power to regulate the markets of 28 nations, or 28 independent nations?

It's not about money. I think it's too much power concentrated into a single body. Would you prefer a business-first approach for anything else?

> EU protected free speech

Not allowing parody and remix is also an attack on my free speech.

That is why EU wide regulations need to be considered with more considation for the needs of EU users and less consideration for the demands of private industry lobbyists.

None of which had anything to do with Google News and publisher demands.

I wonder where those informed people got their information from.

How exactly google will suffer? It seems to me that Google is the party that can afford to walk away and that the French news media cannot.

The whole concept France is pushing has been ludicrous all along. There's no revenue to share or for Google to lose. It's just a free service. Just free. No ads. No money.

The ads are on the search page. Not the news page.

Having data on online news reading habbits is a nice bonus, but the reason Google News exists is to boost ad sales to news sites.

This is using law to grant the lobby of newspapers additional revenue. And blame Google for not abiding.

because they're using someone elses intellectual property in the process, and that's what this law is about. Sure, the relationship goes both ways in that it increases exposure for the newspaper, but there is a very principled case to be made that Google profits for free off the intellectual creations of third parties.

The one point I agree with in your question is "why only newspapers", I think we should systematically move towards monetisation when Google indexes, reuses and displays content from third parties and incorporates them in their products.

Also there is no genuine search competition anyway, so instead of waiting another 20 years I'd just be happy if Google starts paying people for the content that they use.

That would be a terrible business model though. Maybe the French newspapers should join together to create a search engine of their own content, if there really is a lot of money to be made in that game.

I think we need to pass legislation that prohibit exclusive content licensing and require that equivalent licensing terms are offered to all competitors (similar perhaps to rules about patent licensing when it is incorporated into a standard?)

Edit: Since Google has a near monopoly on ad networks, there is a sense in which Google already is the one paying for much of this content.

The news isn't an important business for google and it doesn't get its revenue from their.

In a strike, the employer has pressure to relent because workers have a thing the employer values.

But what does Google have at stake in this situation? Why on earth would they pay to link to news? Why are news links special?

The politicians who were pushing this through were deliberately breaking just about every rule of civil political discourse. This is all on the record. Such behaviour it is completely out of line, but I don't know how to counter it effectively when those responsible for it have more political power and have better contacts in the media to have their views (and, in this case, lies) reported.

Reconsider what? What is Google doing wrong here exactly?

This is exactly the problem. X was something, therefore it had to be done, although it was utterly pointless.

This is everything that’s wrong with politics.

Really? Because only the Commission can propose laws and the Commission is not elected. Even MEPs get really low voter turnouts in many EU countries, because people feel that MEPs don't mean anything. I can understand it too, because MEPs seem to vote in blocs and what the people want seems to be entirely irrelevant.

It’s an understandable move by google to a short-sighted law.

I’m VERY sympathetic to publishers - I work for them but this is a BS move

Google believes it receives some sort of value out of their News service even if that value isn't directly in the form of advertising payments.