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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

It does seem like, because of all the national laws requiring big tech companies to pay news organizations merely for linking them, that big tech companies are increasingly getting out of the news business. And I don't blame them.

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I do think it’s worth remembering that Google makes enormous amounts of money from the news companies’ content and knows that a fair fraction of readers only read the summary without visiting the source. Sharing that ad revenue seems fair given the comparative levels of contribution.

The laws in question are more or less devoid of any fiscal definition of fairness. They operate on a vague sense of envy that someone might be making more money than a preferred class. If the distribution of revenue were still profitable to Google then I don’t see why Google and Facebook would both be spending NRE to make less money.

> They operate on a vague sense of envy that someone might be making more money than a preferred class

They operate on the principle that without revenue the people doing the actual work of journalism will go out of business.

Do you think the regulators are wrong on that point?

A link tax is fine in principle and can be good policy in a number of situations. In practice such a tax needs to be set in such a way that all parties make money for their efforts. The rates given in the Canadian and Australian taxes were basically made up by media companies and represented a significant inflation of the value of their content.

If government regulators think we need more paid journalists then they could simply subsidize them, or even hire them directly like the BBC.

A link tax could be construed as a way to do that, particularly in countries in which these companies operate but do not really pay tax.

Isn’t a tax on aggregators’ ad revenue effectively that? It’s not saying that Google or Facebook can’t make plenty of money, only that they need to share some of their profits with the people whose work allowed them to make that profit in the first place.

Okay. If that’s the case, let the newspapers and Google negotiate. We already see who is hurt more when Google walks away

That appears to be in progress, so it looks like regulation is working.

You mean forcing Google to pay Rupert Murdoch who pushed for the legislation in Australia?

They might be wrong with how high the rates are set, though, as large tech companies truly do seem to be getting out of this space, no longer considering it worth it.

Apple doesn’t seem to be, or have I missed something?

Apple doesn't run a search engine or a social network though? Do they even sell ads on news content?

Seems completely different to me.

Well, in that case the newspapers should be able to offer something of enough value to get people to pay for it.

I haven’t seen that be the case. Can you provide specific examples?

If the content providers don't like that arrangement then they can simply opt out of Google News. No one is forcing them to participate.

That's not how the country's laws work, though. They fixed that "loophole".

So in that case, the news organizations should just not allow Google to index their sites. Who do you think that’s going to hurt more - Google or the news orgs?

We already know the answer from other countries where Google was forced to share ad revenue or not index the papers.

That’s an option but it makes both of them less money. Google has pulled out of other countries as a negotiating tactic because they can afford to lose that money indefinitely but that does not mean it’s optimal for anyone.

But they aren't making enormous amounts of money from news content. Google News shows no ads, and never has. I've never seen an ad for a news query on search either, but can't say whether that's by policy or because nobody buys those searches. But it doesn't matter what the reason is: when there's no ad revenue, there's nothing to share.

Also, news sites have control over how their site shows up on Google. If they want to continue being indexed and show up in the search result with just a title and no snippet of the page, that's something they could make happen immediately just by themselves. That none of them are choosing to do so makes it pretty clear that the "people just read the summaries and don't click through to the article" thing isn't a problem in reality.

Yes, but they do show news along with ads on Google search results. My point isn’t that Google delivers no value but that we need to find a balance which pays for good journalism if we want healthy societies - the 20th century had local businesses paying for things like foreign reporting which kept subscribers but that clearly doesn’t work any more.

Like I said, I've never seen ads on the kinds of searches that return news. You're the one making claims about "enormous amounts of revenue" being generated by that. Have you seen ads next to news articles? Could you take a screenshot?

> we need to find a balance which pays for good journalism if we want healthy societies

Sure. Why do you think that it's search engines and social networks that should be doing the paying?

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