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Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

> If Google stops linking to news articles, media companies would be the bigger losers than Google would be.

Only on the margin. If all countries in the world simultaneously imposed this law, and google stopped linking all news articles world wide, then Google would be the bigger loser than media companies.

It's important to acknowledge the problem: Google extracts more monetary value from the news industry ecosystem than the the value it creates.

I am not entirely sure if forcing Google to pay that difference is the correct solution, or whether helping evil media companies in this way is the right thing to do, but the problem exists.

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> If all countries in the world simultaneously imposed this law, and google stopped linking all news articles world wide, then Google would be the bigger loser than media companies.

Large media sites would perhaps benefit from that but in general I don't think that's the case. I get almost all my news from link aggregate sites like Hackernews and Reddit. If I didn't get news links from those sites, I'd end up consuming less news. Especially local news.

> It's important to acknowledge the problem: Google extracts more monetary value from the news industry ecosystem than the the value it creates.

I don't think that's the problem. The problem is that news just isn't that valuable anymore. The only reason it was as profitable at all was local monopolies on distribution. Craigslist did more to kill media profitability than Google could ever do. Now you just have a thousand media companies all writing an article on the same current event and trying to capture a few eye balls mostly from being linked to elsewhere.

Some news isn't valuable anymore. In the world we're going towards, wouldn't it be fair to expect that reliable/verified news will increase in value? Similarly, what is the true value of local news that would otherwise go unreported?

It's important to consider what someone would pay for news directly alongside the value that a healthy media ecosystem plays in a healthy society. It's not called the fourth estate because someone thought it would be fun.

Whether I agree or disagree this doesn't have anything to do with governments legislating that Google pay the largest media companies some money for linking. I absolutely see value in a healthy media system but massive companies owned by billionaires paying each other would not fit that definition for me.

> Now you just have a thousand media companies

Those 1000 --media-- news companies have been created in part by Google. Google created a game, where the website with the best SEO would bubble up to the top of their news results - not the website with the best editorial standards. This was Google 'commoditifying its complement'. In the absence of Google (but even in the presence of social media like HN or Facebook), there would be far fewer news websites that would be rewriting/summarizing the work of the actual journalistic newspapers. And in such a scenario the fewer news companies would actually make enough to continue to do serious journalism.

This is a lot more apparent if you look at other languages, which are not indexed as much by Google. There the status of news companies is a lot better.

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