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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 de

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.

easytiger 7y ago
This. The EU proxy war against Ireland thrown in with this utterly corrupt approach to information companies is an utter embarrassment and fully demonstrative of the complete lack of oversight of a tiny handful of people.
pteraspidomorph 7y ago
There's been legislative elections since and not only was turnout a little better than usual, the major traditional alliances lost a lot of seats in the european parliament to the smaller less conventional ones on both sides of the spectrum. Still a long way to go but baby steps.
timwaagh 7y ago
It may be counterproductive but in a way those publishers always held the rights to their own work. Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to. But maybe that should be opt out, rather than opt in. I expect most of them to request Google to use snippets again before very long in any case.
- kozhevnikov 7y ago
  It should be a simple robots.txt setting (i.e. indexed but without snippets) available to any publisher and content creator in any country.
  - dahauns 7y ago
    But there already is? That's exactly what the nosnippet meta-tag is for.
  - zmix 7y ago
    It is already. And in addition to that, since 'robots.txt' is being considered to broad and too 'out of time', Google offers meta tags, that their bot evaluates. They did this long time before the EU direction.
- realusername 7y ago
  They already can, they just leave the meta tags with an empty string and nothing will show up.
- zmix 7y ago
  > Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to. They were! From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en <meta name="googlebot" content="..., ..." /> These meta tags control the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing. nosnippet - Don't show a text snippet or video preview from being shown in the search results. For video, a static image will be shown instead, if possible. Example: <meta name="robots" content="nosnippet"> max-snippet:[number] - Limit the text snippet length for this page to [number] characters; specify 0 for no snippet or -1 to allow any snippet length.
kd5bjo 7y ago
We don’t know how this plays out yet. This first step was quite predictable, but its effects on the overall news media landscape will take months to unwind. Will this increase the ad revenue for news sites because of increased clickthrough rates? Will it push them towards obscurity because their reporting is less available? Will it make no meaningful difference whatsoever?
- sbx320 7y ago
  Google did the same thing in Germany after a similar national version was introduced. News sites quickly noticed a significant decrease in visitors coming from Google. They then attempted to sue Google to force them to list results with snippets AND also pay for it. Courts quickly ruled against that, so news sites just decided to allow Google to list the full results again. The end result is that the law meant to work against Google actually benefited them. News sites cannot afford to not give Google a free license, but smaller search engines face a big issue. I highly expect it to pan out the same way again.
  - amelius 7y ago
    But what was the effect for the consumer? Did they read less news? Was that a problem? Did they read other news? Did they visit more smaller news sites as opposed to a few large ones?
    - Krasnol 7y ago
      There was no effect on the consumer who uses google as the law was supposed to be installed August 1st 2013 but the main publishers who lobbied for the law granted google a free license 2 days before the deadline. As far as I know google is now the only search engine who has this free license. It's quite funny because those publishers advertised the law with some heavy criticism towards google. The whole thing was some kind of "anti-google-law". In the end they made them stronger as other portals and search engines have not been granted a free license. I always wondered if this whole thing was not intended this way to give them a better standing on google news in the end. The EU could have learned something here just like the lobby who pushed for it again. I'd assume the result for those who do not use google to look for news will find smaller "news" sites. Especially those who feed them fake news because every serious news site has their license rights protected by the VG Wort. A lose - lose for everybody.
tannhaeuser 7y ago
Excuse me, you find it ok that Google et al get all the ad money by republishing and publishers and content creators get nothing? And even go so far as spinning this into an EU corruption story, where the only alternative, and the one we're living through right now, is to rely on a monopolist for news?
- Kiro 7y ago
  > and content creators get nothing? Axel Springer had to revert because their traffic and revenues plummeted. With your logic it wouldn't even have affected them.
- AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
  Could you please explain to me how Google is making money from showing a brief excerpt from a linked website. Especially "all the money". Before you answer, please consider where most of Google's revenue comes from. Is it from showing things on their search page or is it from their ad network? Making money from the latter requires people to actually click through to the site. Maybe I am missing something, so please enlighten us.
  - simias 7y ago
    In order to display ads Google needs users to use its websites. Google being able to offer news snippets on his website is a feature that drives traffic and therefore drives ad impressions and therefore revenue. It's like saying that Google doesn't benefit from GMail because people reading mail doesn't make them money. I guess an other way to answer this question would be to say: if Google doesn't care at al about previews, why did they develop the feature in the first place and then fought against these laws instead of just removing it as soon as people started complaining? Clearly they do deem them valuable enough to go through this whole charade.
    - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
      Those impressions are not from the search site but come into play once people click on a link. Google has an incentive to have people click on links. Including news sites. Especially news sites that come with tons of ads. Let's say I blog about topics a lot of other people blog about. Let's say there was a Google Blogs. I would want Google to post a relevant snippet of my blog post to help me stand out from all the other links. And Google would happily comply, because this makes those who bought ads that now get displayed on my blog happy, and Google can charge them more money. I'd say I would have to have a very twisted and self absorbed mindset to believe that Google is stealing from me for posting a relevant excerpt from my blog. But maybe that's just me.
the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
> 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. I don’t follow: what is happening is exactly what the EU wants. I fail to understand the comment here entirely. Until all countries are executing this law this is exactly what the commission predicted is going to happen.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  > what is happening is exactly what the EU wants. No, they wanted Google to pay licensing fees and all for showing snippets. That did not happen.
  - elcomet 7y ago
    No. They wanted google to either pay or stop displaying snippets.
    - phoe-krk 7y ago
      No. They wanted Google to either pay or pay. They never wanted Google to show displaying snippets, as we will shortly see when the French publishers notice the plummeting page views and issue "emergency snippet licenses" to Google in order to save themselves from their own greed.
      - eps 7y ago
        > Plummeting page views Previous discussion on this had a link to the research paper that actually measured said "plummeting" in case of Spain - the decrease in traffic was well under 20%. Just FYI. * Edited for clarity.
        phoe-krk 7y ago
        Could you link and/or clarify a little bit? Did their profits shrink by 20% to 80%, or by 80% to 20%?
thunderbong 7y ago
I'm sorry, I don't have a clue what you're talking about.
simias 7y ago
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.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  No. The vast majority of the informed peoples of the EU campaigned and pleaded them not to pass Article 13. The fact they turn around and basically call us too stupid to know what's best is just icing on the cake. They ignored the people. 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.
  - benologist 7y ago
    Would you rather they iterate towards a solution or have giant corporations calling the shots? 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-france-being-raided-for-unpaid-taxes https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/05/24/2025223/google-fran... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-refund-advertisers-after-suit-over-fraud-scheme-11558113251 https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-refund-advertisers-af...
jorvi 7y ago
I mean, let's not pretend this only happens in Europe. Pinterest sued Google and got the amazing 'view image' button taken away. Didn't even take something as mighty as federal government interference.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
  It was Getty Images that sued Google. Otoh Pinterest taking over Google Image search results with useless results is nothing short of malware.
lumberjack 7y ago
Why is this bad? The further away Google is from news coverage, the better. They have the power to be extremely manipulative.
bsaul 7y ago
I'm really on your side. However, note that we (assuming you're european too) are in such a shity place because we've got 0 internet giants in Europe, and so we have really no good option between tax or laissez-faire
- threatofrain 7y ago
  A large portion of savvy web users are ready to switch search engines on a snap if a superior value proposition comes along; if you build it (well) they will come. The same is 10x as true for news sources.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    By a large portion do you mean virtually no real users? People are lazy.
    - TulliusCicero 7y ago
      People will absolutely switch if another search engine is substantially better. But that's hard to do because Google isn't a lazy incumbent, their search is being continually worked on and improved. Mostly other search engines seem to try to compete based on privacy or something, and while that's nice, it's not as tangible as superior core search functionality. Like, DuckDuckGo isn't a bad search engine, and for a lot of things it seems about equally good. But "comparably good most of the time" doesn't make for a very compelling case to switch.
  - bsaul 7y ago
    There’s a reason why states have rules against monopolistic companies. Once a company reaches a critical mass in one sector, it becomes almost impossible to create competition, for many various reasons. But you’re right, old european countries really never tried to think seriously about what makes them lagging so much behind the US and China.
  - ativzzz 7y ago
    You underestimate how much higher this value proposition needs to be for people to switch, and you overestimate the amount of savvy web users.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
makomk 7y ago
It's not just the EU and its institutions pushing that narrative either. For example, before the European elections the BBC ran an article about all the great things the European Parliament has done which gave it credit for this and described the controversy as follows: "Supporters say the rule helps to ensure that artists, musicians and other creators are fairly compensated. But tech companies say it will destroy user-generated content." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48024400 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48024400 No mention of the fact that MEPs had very little to do with the contents of the law, which was mostly shaped by shady back-room dealings between the French and German government, or of the concerns non-corporate-affiliated artists and content creators had about it screwing them over, or the bizarre voting fiasco.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  While the BBC is certainly decaying in quality and balance with each passing day, I think those deals might have surfaced after the vote happened. > No mention of the fact that MEPs had very little to do with the contents of the law, which was mostly shaped by shady back-room dealings between the French and German government Actually a lot of MEPs participated in the discussions and their contents (which doesn't mean what you're mention didn't happen, of course it did)
- pas 7y ago
  Could you please elaborate on the voting fiasco thing?
  - makomk 7y ago
    Supposedly there were enough MEPs who were opposed the copyright changes that they should've been able to block them (which is pretty remarkable and almost never happens), but due to the confusing way the vote was organised some MEPs "accidentally" pressed the wrong button and voted for it instead, causing it to be passed. It's not clear whether this was in fact an accident or just plausible deniability.
buboard 7y ago
Its not like the alternative is better. They have the choice of slowly bleeding to death vs severing the hand. Its not clear which is best. There are upsides, eg google news will stop being an option for news
- workaway 7y ago
  Having fewer options for getting news is an upside?
  - buboard 7y ago
    How is gnews “more options”. They dont write news, they aggregate
    - kansface 7y ago
      It’s aggregation that is the valuable part, not the news or we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place and it would be newspapers that took over the world instead of google.
      - buboard 7y ago
        Aggregation of a product that is devalued the more you aggregate it. Inevitably it kills the product and you have nothing to aggregate. Google is doing that (sucking up all the ad revenue) to all kinds of publishers and i expect to see more of this.
        pas 7y ago
        How is Google sucking up adrev.? Publishers get revenue from Google, or they can manage ad sales however they want. They times have changed, and it seems going back is not an option. Before Google big publishers were the default for many people, either on paper or online. Now publishers are in the headline business. Also if they write good things, people will read it still. They lost some/much of their network effect. And sure, we can say G is sucking up revenue, but they also make it possible to advertise for whatever keyword you want, much more effectively, than publishers did. In this sense G is just a better paper, truck, road, printing press and ad-sales-house in one. Pretty hard to beat it.
twirlock 7y ago
>boohoo someone stopped google from piping propaganda directly to users' rectums

easytiger 7y ago

This. The EU proxy war against Ireland thrown in with this utterly corrupt approach to information companies is an utter embarrassment and fully demonstrative of the complete lack of oversight of a tiny handful of people.

pteraspidomorph 7y ago

There's been legislative elections since and not only was turnout a little better than usual, the major traditional alliances lost a lot of seats in the european parliament to the smaller less conventional ones on both sides of the spectrum. Still a long way to go but baby steps.

timwaagh 7y ago

It may be counterproductive but in a way those publishers always held the rights to their own work. Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to. But maybe that should be opt out, rather than opt in. I expect most of them to request Google to use snippets again before very long in any case.

kozhevnikov 7y ago
It should be a simple robots.txt setting (i.e. indexed but without snippets) available to any publisher and content creator in any country.
- dahauns 7y ago
  But there already is? That's exactly what the nosnippet meta-tag is for.
- zmix 7y ago
  It is already. And in addition to that, since 'robots.txt' is being considered to broad and too 'out of time', Google offers meta tags, that their bot evaluates. They did this long time before the EU direction.
realusername 7y ago
They already can, they just leave the meta tags with an empty string and nothing will show up.
zmix 7y ago
> Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to. They were! From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en <meta name="googlebot" content="..., ..." /> These meta tags control the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing. nosnippet - Don't show a text snippet or video preview from being shown in the search results. For video, a static image will be shown instead, if possible. Example: <meta name="robots" content="nosnippet"> max-snippet:[number] - Limit the text snippet length for this page to [number] characters; specify 0 for no snippet or -1 to allow any snippet length.

kd5bjo 7y ago

We don’t know how this plays out yet. This first step was quite predictable, but its effects on the overall news media landscape will take months to unwind. Will this increase the ad revenue for news sites because of increased clickthrough rates? Will it push them towards obscurity because their reporting is less available? Will it make no meaningful difference whatsoever?

sbx320 7y ago
Google did the same thing in Germany after a similar national version was introduced. News sites quickly noticed a significant decrease in visitors coming from Google. They then attempted to sue Google to force them to list results with snippets AND also pay for it. Courts quickly ruled against that, so news sites just decided to allow Google to list the full results again. The end result is that the law meant to work against Google actually benefited them. News sites cannot afford to not give Google a free license, but smaller search engines face a big issue. I highly expect it to pan out the same way again.
- amelius 7y ago
  But what was the effect for the consumer? Did they read less news? Was that a problem? Did they read other news? Did they visit more smaller news sites as opposed to a few large ones?
  - Krasnol 7y ago
    There was no effect on the consumer who uses google as the law was supposed to be installed August 1st 2013 but the main publishers who lobbied for the law granted google a free license 2 days before the deadline. As far as I know google is now the only search engine who has this free license. It's quite funny because those publishers advertised the law with some heavy criticism towards google. The whole thing was some kind of "anti-google-law". In the end they made them stronger as other portals and search engines have not been granted a free license. I always wondered if this whole thing was not intended this way to give them a better standing on google news in the end. The EU could have learned something here just like the lobby who pushed for it again. I'd assume the result for those who do not use google to look for news will find smaller "news" sites. Especially those who feed them fake news because every serious news site has their license rights protected by the VG Wort. A lose - lose for everybody.

tannhaeuser 7y ago

Excuse me, you find it ok that Google et al get all the ad money by republishing and publishers and content creators get nothing? And even go so far as spinning this into an EU corruption story, where the only alternative, and the one we're living through right now, is to rely on a monopolist for news?

Kiro 7y ago
> and content creators get nothing? Axel Springer had to revert because their traffic and revenues plummeted. With your logic it wouldn't even have affected them.
AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
Could you please explain to me how Google is making money from showing a brief excerpt from a linked website. Especially "all the money". Before you answer, please consider where most of Google's revenue comes from. Is it from showing things on their search page or is it from their ad network? Making money from the latter requires people to actually click through to the site. Maybe I am missing something, so please enlighten us.
- simias 7y ago
  In order to display ads Google needs users to use its websites. Google being able to offer news snippets on his website is a feature that drives traffic and therefore drives ad impressions and therefore revenue. It's like saying that Google doesn't benefit from GMail because people reading mail doesn't make them money. I guess an other way to answer this question would be to say: if Google doesn't care at al about previews, why did they develop the feature in the first place and then fought against these laws instead of just removing it as soon as people started complaining? Clearly they do deem them valuable enough to go through this whole charade.
  - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
    Those impressions are not from the search site but come into play once people click on a link. Google has an incentive to have people click on links. Including news sites. Especially news sites that come with tons of ads. Let's say I blog about topics a lot of other people blog about. Let's say there was a Google Blogs. I would want Google to post a relevant snippet of my blog post to help me stand out from all the other links. And Google would happily comply, because this makes those who bought ads that now get displayed on my blog happy, and Google can charge them more money. I'd say I would have to have a very twisted and self absorbed mindset to believe that Google is stealing from me for posting a relevant excerpt from my blog. But maybe that's just me.

the_mitsuhiko 7y ago

> 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. I don’t follow: what is happening is exactly what the EU wants. I fail to understand the comment here entirely. Until all countries are executing this law this is exactly what the commission predicted is going to happen.

ekianjo 7y ago
> what is happening is exactly what the EU wants. No, they wanted Google to pay licensing fees and all for showing snippets. That did not happen.
- elcomet 7y ago
  No. They wanted google to either pay or stop displaying snippets.
  - phoe-krk 7y ago
    No. They wanted Google to either pay or pay. They never wanted Google to show displaying snippets, as we will shortly see when the French publishers notice the plummeting page views and issue "emergency snippet licenses" to Google in order to save themselves from their own greed.
    - eps 7y ago
      > Plummeting page views Previous discussion on this had a link to the research paper that actually measured said "plummeting" in case of Spain - the decrease in traffic was well under 20%. Just FYI. * Edited for clarity.
      - phoe-krk 7y ago
        Could you link and/or clarify a little bit? Did their profits shrink by 20% to 80%, or by 80% to 20%?

thunderbong 7y ago

I'm sorry, I don't have a clue what you're talking about.

simias 7y ago

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.

cameronbrown 7y ago
No. The vast majority of the informed peoples of the EU campaigned and pleaded them not to pass Article 13. The fact they turn around and basically call us too stupid to know what's best is just icing on the cake. They ignored the people. 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.
- benologist 7y ago
  Would you rather they iterate towards a solution or have giant corporations calling the shots? 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-france-being-raided-for-unpaid-taxes https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/05/24/2025223/google-fran... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-refund-advertisers-after-suit-over-fraud-scheme-11558113251 https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-refund-advertisers-af...

jorvi 7y ago

I mean, let's not pretend this only happens in Europe. Pinterest sued Google and got the amazing 'view image' button taken away. Didn't even take something as mighty as federal government interference.

kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
It was Getty Images that sued Google. Otoh Pinterest taking over Google Image search results with useless results is nothing short of malware.

lumberjack 7y ago

Why is this bad? The further away Google is from news coverage, the better. They have the power to be extremely manipulative.

bsaul 7y ago

I'm really on your side. However, note that we (assuming you're european too) are in such a shity place because we've got 0 internet giants in Europe, and so we have really no good option between tax or laissez-faire

threatofrain 7y ago
A large portion of savvy web users are ready to switch search engines on a snap if a superior value proposition comes along; if you build it (well) they will come. The same is 10x as true for news sources.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  By a large portion do you mean virtually no real users? People are lazy.
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    People will absolutely switch if another search engine is substantially better. But that's hard to do because Google isn't a lazy incumbent, their search is being continually worked on and improved. Mostly other search engines seem to try to compete based on privacy or something, and while that's nice, it's not as tangible as superior core search functionality. Like, DuckDuckGo isn't a bad search engine, and for a lot of things it seems about equally good. But "comparably good most of the time" doesn't make for a very compelling case to switch.
- bsaul 7y ago
  There’s a reason why states have rules against monopolistic companies. Once a company reaches a critical mass in one sector, it becomes almost impossible to create competition, for many various reasons. But you’re right, old european countries really never tried to think seriously about what makes them lagging so much behind the US and China.
- ativzzz 7y ago
  You underestimate how much higher this value proposition needs to be for people to switch, and you overestimate the amount of savvy web users.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

makomk 7y ago

It's not just the EU and its institutions pushing that narrative either. For example, before the European elections the BBC ran an article about all the great things the European Parliament has done which gave it credit for this and described the controversy as follows: "Supporters say the rule helps to ensure that artists, musicians and other creators are fairly compensated. But tech companies say it will destroy user-generated content." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48024400 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48024400 No mention of the fact that MEPs had very little to do with the contents of the law, which was mostly shaped by shady back-room dealings between the French and German government, or of the concerns non-corporate-affiliated artists and content creators had about it screwing them over, or the bizarre voting fiasco.

raverbashing 7y ago
While the BBC is certainly decaying in quality and balance with each passing day, I think those deals might have surfaced after the vote happened. > No mention of the fact that MEPs had very little to do with the contents of the law, which was mostly shaped by shady back-room dealings between the French and German government Actually a lot of MEPs participated in the discussions and their contents (which doesn't mean what you're mention didn't happen, of course it did)
pas 7y ago
Could you please elaborate on the voting fiasco thing?
- makomk 7y ago
  Supposedly there were enough MEPs who were opposed the copyright changes that they should've been able to block them (which is pretty remarkable and almost never happens), but due to the confusing way the vote was organised some MEPs "accidentally" pressed the wrong button and voted for it instead, causing it to be passed. It's not clear whether this was in fact an accident or just plausible deniability.

buboard 7y ago

Its not like the alternative is better. They have the choice of slowly bleeding to death vs severing the hand. Its not clear which is best. There are upsides, eg google news will stop being an option for news

workaway 7y ago
Having fewer options for getting news is an upside?
- buboard 7y ago
  How is gnews “more options”. They dont write news, they aggregate
  - kansface 7y ago
    It’s aggregation that is the valuable part, not the news or we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place and it would be newspapers that took over the world instead of google.
    - buboard 7y ago
      Aggregation of a product that is devalued the more you aggregate it. Inevitably it kills the product and you have nothing to aggregate. Google is doing that (sucking up all the ad revenue) to all kinds of publishers and i expect to see more of this.
      - pas 7y ago
        How is Google sucking up adrev.? Publishers get revenue from Google, or they can manage ad sales however they want. They times have changed, and it seems going back is not an option. Before Google big publishers were the default for many people, either on paper or online. Now publishers are in the headline business. Also if they write good things, people will read it still. They lost some/much of their network effect. And sure, we can say G is sucking up revenue, but they also make it possible to advertise for whatever keyword you want, much more effectively, than publishers did. In this sense G is just a better paper, truck, road, printing press and ad-sales-house in one. Pretty hard to beat it.

twirlock 7y ago

>boohoo someone stopped google from piping propaganda directly to users' rectums