These claims seem irrelevant, inaccurate, or dumb.
Google News only shows brief abstracts from each article, and drives traffic to the publications' own sites. It's free advertising! How is this at all BAD for the publications?
Google News only shows brief abstracts from each article, and drives traffic to the publications' own sites. It's free advertising! How is this at all BAD for the publications?
As google is in a monopoly position, they can not refuse to display them (without even having tried to find a fair price) as it would hurt press (and, doing so, press freedom, which is a fundamental right in france).
You may think it's dumb, you may think it's not, I'm not debating this, I'm just stating what is the position of the lawmaker and the court.
Press freedom is fundamental. Monopoly must pay for press because they must show it. We demand they show it for press freedom.
And press has an incentive to pay for being propagated in search results. As both sides gain in this exchange even without monetary transaction, there is no obvious way to see who should pay whom and zero price (in both sides) is a reasonable position.
It is true that Google being in a monopoly position makes it hard to establish price for 'being announced in search results'.
But the French government wants Google to pay regardless of whether Google wants to display the content or not. Which is clearly offensive to natural justice, even if you don't like Google.
In truth paying for journalism going forward is going to be a difficult problem made more difficult by the fact that most of the money spent on journalism does not go directly to people who produce value like editors, analysts, photographers, journalists but instead goes to buildings and busines people.