News Publishers Call On Europe To Support Them Against Aggregators

I think there are two things about the internet, that are pissing off newspapers.

1. Power-Loss

Newspapers do not dominate public discussions any more. This is nothing new and the melting adrevenues are just proving the pint to all those few that didn't already knew it.

2. Being forced to be engaged

Newspapers still have a chance, because quality still matters. The question is how to organize a profitable quality-producing workflow. There's no ultimate answer yet, but for the publishers it is already humiliating enough to be forced to do anything (see point 1).

It seems the organizations that are participating in this are still stuck in a 20th century media monopoly mindset. They really don't get the Web, and in the case of the American companies (Dow Jones, etc.) seem to be angling to regulate the clock back to 1987, when they didn't have to deal with more than a handful of competitors, and pesky things like fair use, hyperlinks, and Google weren't a concern.

It seems they haven't heard of robots.txt.

It must feel really horrible to have your content spidered, indexed and found by users who will come to your site and see your ads.

As far as I have understood the issue, the newspapers want to control how users interact with the site, coming in from the front-page where they can tempt/lure the users to more on-site content and more ads, or just have two page-views and double ads for that one same story.

What I don't get, is how in this time and age where everyone should know more or less how the World wide web works, anyone can think they can control how users interact with your content.