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Comment by hazz | Hacker News Reader

"Google has also been faced with demands for compensation from content providers such as newspapers, who charge the search giant makes lots of advertising revenue from referencing their material."

"Hollande said “Those who make a profit from the information” produced by media companies should participate in their financing."

It's depressing to see so many examples of the abysmal understanding of the internet that so many politicians seem to have. Ignorance can be forgiven to a certain extent, but not even making an attempt to try to understand the situation - just spending five minutes on google or wikipedia researching the Googlebot will tell you about robots.txt - is inexcusable.

Public and state ignorance of computers and the internet are leading us down a very dark path; there needs to be an effort to try to educate our political representatives, or we risk a future where legislation like SOPA is passed purely out of ignorance of what it means.

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> just spending five minutes on google or wikipedia researching the Googlebot will tell you about robots.txt

So basically your position is binary: Either don't allow your site to be indexed by Google or accept that they are going to profit from your content.

If you don't see why companies and governments see more shades of grey in this situation then the only person who is ignorant is you.

>So basically your position is binary: Either don't allow your site to be indexed by Google or accept that they are going to profit from your content.

Nonsense. If you want to put "no access" in robots.txt and then go to Google and negotiate a fee from them for removing it, you're perfectly entitled to do that. But you know perfectly well that the value of search traffic to your site is worth more to you than the value of indexing your site is worth to Google or any other web search engine, so any such negotiation is not going to end with a payment from the search engine to you.

And passing a law wouldn't even change that. All it would do is create an explosion of transaction costs as every single website has to negotiate with every search engine to not pay to be included in the index. Which if anything would only cement Google's dominant position in web search forever as any of its smaller competitors are bankrupted by transaction costs. Unless, of course, the law allowed some kind of standard technological means of allowing a site to specify that it doesn't require any payment to be included in the search results... like robots.txt.

It's very easy to not let google index your content. What exactly is the problem here?

Why in god's name would Google index a site if there was no benefit in it for them? The whole point of the relationship between search engines and sites that allow indexing is that it's mutually strictly beneficial (otherwise one party would pull out of the transaction since neither party is forced to remain in the relationship). I'm a little flabbergasted that it's necessary to describe how a transaction works in an HN thread, given that it's probably the single most fundamental unit of even the most basic economics. The "shade of grey" you're referring to is forcing Google to index the site and forcing them to pay to do so (in essence, mandating that a private corporation enter into a transaction against their will).

"So basically your position is binary: Either don't license your movie's streaming rights to Netflix, or accept that they're going to profit from it."

You may want to think through your statements a step or two further before throwing around accusations of ignorance.

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