And if Google are making a profit by bringing eyeballs to their site using other people's content, shouldn't it be up to the people who created that content to choose how to negotiate that? They're free to let Google take the content for free / pay Google to take the content if they want, unless there's something in article 11 that I've missed.

That's not was this was at all. It was a change in the liability structure to make platforms liable for content published on their platform.

It was basically about news. European news organisations hate that people are getting news via Google and Facebook so they want to restrict that.

I am a big fan of the GDPR, because it protects the rights of the users. But this time they are building a law to ease the fight of large corporations, affecting everone else in the process... not cool.

But once the member states start enacting the directive to legislation, the manure will surely meet the propeller. No amount of regulation can change fundamental economic facts. Once Google News starts going black around EU, and the search engine traffic & revenue disappearing from the publishers, I am sure they will be soon very eager to license their content at zero cost, or less.

The thing is, if this was just a new related right, like the EU Copyright Directive, we'd see the market play out as usual. News corporations would realize that Google and Facebook actually are paying them in valuable exposure, and sign away their aggregation rights for free or little cost to the aggregators. Australia appears to be trying to do an end run around that by taking away as many negotiating options from Google as possible. Effectively, there's one massive news collection society and anyone who carries news at all, regardless of who it's from, has to play ball with them. They also are legally required to get what is effectively most-favored-nation status. This is such an oddball way of doing things that I see this either crashing and burning so hard that the courts have to bail out Australian Parliament, or it works perfectly, becomes the new model regime for funding news, and winds up in the next set of WTO treaties (whenever those come around).

There are plenty of reasons to tax and regulate Google and Facebook and disrupt their respective monopolies, but the proposed legislation would have far reaching consequences for the Internet and set a poor precedent.

What happens to the likes of DuckDuckGo and any future new entrants?

It also highlights the fact that we need a better model of paying for content. Advertising is just unbearable, maintaining several subscriptions is a pain. A Spotify model would work better for news sites.

The article is spot on for highlighting the transfer of revenue from Google/Facebook to News Corp without anyone else benefiting.

Publishers in Germany are indeed trying to pass a new law that would enable them to sue Google for using snippets on Google News. Thats literally the whole point of the law - get some money out of Google, because they are not making any with their news websites. They have failed monetizing their content and are now trying to corner the biggest single source of traffic hitting their sites. Lament about copyright all you want, this is an industry unwilling to innovate and reform alright.

I speculate that they consider Google News to have monopolistic power, so that even if a fair market in snippets would set a finite price Google News would still use its clout to drive that price to zero by removing individual papers who tried to charge. A mandatory price would counter act this, similar to the way that government mandates to publish open access give bargaining power to the researchers over oligopolies like Nature and Science.

If I understand correctly, which way this goes is completely at Google's discretion. And Google hasn't shown inclination to cooperate with such schemes in the past...

But I don't see why this is relevant to my point that there is actually a real issue here, and ignoring it is going to cause even more laws like these to be passed because the narrative from publishers (that they are losing business because of internet companies that have a cavalier attitude about the people they are cutting off) is not entirely fictitious. When's the last time you saw Google telling large websites about changes in PageRank that will negatively impact them?

I hope they don’t cave disgracefully like in Australia and just shut down Google News and remove news sites from the search index in France as they did in Belgium a few years back IIRC. I am a Frenchman and very skeptical of Google, for the record, but rent-seeking by failed businesses should not be condoned, like the copyright levy charged on data storage devices here.

It's a silly regulation, a quick approach to re-gain lost profits for the media corporations. The fact that those companies were able to talk the government into passing this law is rather ridiculous in my opinion.

I find this actually quite good. Companies accepting "user uploaded content" are mostly entirely pointless, cost a lot of bandwidth and unnecessarily centralise yet another part of our lives. Anything which harms them will effectively be a net positive.

> #2 Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content. This is to prevent google and the like to profit from publishers content without “paying” for it. This is totally absurd. Again, two things will happen: large corporations will stop linking to publishers site (see how google Spain stopped their news offering) and second everybody posting links online publically will become an outlaw.

Note that it’s not a link tax but a tax to use snippets of the article. You’re quite fine linking to an article, but reproducing parts of it won’t be ok. Right now this is already a somewhat grey area and, again, it won’t exactly hurt anyone but the right people.

So, sure, this is some extra burden yadda yadda, but mostly it will just limit pointless business activities sucking up bandwidth.

Well, I'm surprised that no one's brought up a similar case that occurred in the EU and which focused primarily on Google's news aggregation service, rather than Meta's.

One significant difference was that the publisher/holding company initiated and won the lawsuit against Google at the national level (see for example this EFF article from 2014: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/12/google-news-shuts-shop... ). From what I vaguely remember about the case, Google's ability to shut down its news service in Spain only (while keeping it running in neighboring countries) was what ultimately allowed it to demonstrate that the news aggregation service had benefitted the publishers rather than costing them revenue, because once they halted their aggregation service in Spain only, Internet traffic to the publications affected was substantially reduced. I assume the lawsuits in Australia and now Canada were initiated on a similar premise, i.e. that Google, et al. Were negatively impacting revenue, rather than bolstering it by referring additional traffic beyond what they would otherwise receive. In other words,

In the European case, what happened next was that publishers, realizing they couldn't win at the national level (actually, they couldn't reasonably win at any level, since their principal claim had already been invalidated at the national level) took it up to the EU level. They still wanted to be paid of course, regardless of the validity of their allegation, so they figured that if they could get a law (or amendment) passed at the EU Commission level, then this would be binding for all member states--and Google's only response would be to shut down their aggregation service completely in the EU, or accept the demand to play for each news article headline/summary that was hosted on their site.

The amendment that was ultimately passed was something quite byzantine as well, since it forbade any exceptions (to prevent Google from only hosting headlines that came from blogs or other, relatively unknown news services that were prepared to "forego" revenue (due to Google reducing their visitor count, as claimed), in return for the privilege of receiving tons of exposure for being hosted on Google's aggregator. The idea was (IIRC) was that there would be a pool of funds that would be disproportionately divided based on the relative portion of total traffic that each site received--which, needless to say, benefitted the big and well known publishers, while hurting the smaller ones (blogs) that didn't receive much money from this pool, but was still forced by law to participate in this scheme.

Which brings me to the final point: if the law that was passed in Canada has anything in common with the EU law (ie to force Google to pay their "fair share"), then the case against Meta/Facebook is a legal extortion racket, sanctioned by the government.

There were numerous articles, legal opinions, etc posted around that time, several by the EFF (again, based on my vague recollection).

So, what it will really do will be to create a monopoly enshrined in law, that news aggregation and search is a business you can only be in, if you already wield Google-esque influence over the world of media.

Which is wrong. It's just wrong, on so many levels.

The consensus in Spain is that this law is very bad for ALL of the aggregators

This sort of thing is just an extension of a very long running feud that goes back a decade or more, driven primarily by the newspaper industries in the EU "core" states. The German and Spanish "Google taxes" were also attempts to change how copyright works on the internet, targeted at Google News entirely to the benefit of newspaper owners, but they failed because Google just either cut deals or in Spain shut down Google News entirely.

So now the newspapers are trying to do the same thing at the EU level, working on the theory that if all EU countries act in concert then Google and Facebook will have to cut the newspapers a big cheque. Early attempts to just change copyright so the act of linking or snippetting requires a license have now warped into this wider attempt to extract money from internet companies via copyright.

There is some political background here too - newspapers can't do this by lobbying national governments directly, because the finances of newspapers is far, far, far down the list of things citizens care about and national governments are all focused on other things. Luckily for them (!) the EU doesn't care what citizen's priorities are and doesn't need to!

Moreover the EU is heavily incentivised to please the newspaper owners because it benefits from unusually positive coverage for governments in the old European media (not so much in the UK or eastern European states). Journalists have largely bought into the narrative that the EU is a glorious positive peace-filled future and as such newspapers in Germany or France heavily weight their scrutiny towards the "legacy" national governments instead. The piper is now demanding to be paid. The Commission is probably worried that if it loses the support of the press then things will get a lot harder for it in future.

That might be the outcome publishers want. They might imagine that if they eliminate outside links to individual stories, people would be forced to use publisher's sites as portals to the news.