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Comment by kevincox | Hacker News Reader

For Google at least they have the option to opt-out. They can add a robots.txt file to prevent indexing. It isn't clear to me why special legislation is required to give the media companies bargaining power. They already have the power to say no if they don't think the arrangement is fair.

(For facebook it is less clear, because you can't really force people to stop sharing your links)

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Sorta kinda. You can completely opt-out of Google Search entirely but there's no way to opt-out of having your content excepted while also appearing in organic search results.

I mean I would be pissed if I was a major news org that saw traffic drop off because Google is copy-pasting content from my site in their omnibox. This stuff is extremely good for the user and I rely on it a lot but they should have to license the content they republish.

Is the "omnibox" a big problem for news? I mostly see it for "facts" as opposed to recent events. But yes, it would be good to prevent that. However it seems like this isn't the primary focus of the legislation?

I think it would be very interesting to have a copyright infringement case on the information pulled into the answer boxes, but I think that is a separate problem.

> there's no way to opt-out of having your content excepted

You mean the news carousel, or whatever it's called in the search results? Doesn't appearing in thst require you to add a lot of metadata to your page?

Let us not kid ourselves, opting out of Google is suicide for any kind of content. Google is (sadly) critical internet infrastructure by now and lawmakers can not ignore it.

Let me get this straight. It’s suicide because of how much traffic Google sends your way and... you’re entitled to get be paid to receive that traffic... why?

Pretty sure there are thousands of sites that will "quote" what you reported / investigated so there's no winner here. You can exactly copyright news entirely and people are faulty liberal when it comes to quoting someone else's work.

It is perfectly possible to create a website without direct deep links. Every other SPA does exactly that.

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