> “The negotiations were difficult, but what counts in the end is that we have a fair and balanced result that is fit for a digital Europe,” said European Commission Vice President Andrus Ansip. “The freedoms and rights enjoyed by internet users today will be enhanced, our creators will be better remunerated for their work, and the internet economy will have clearer rules for operating and thriving.” The bill is expected to be formally approved by mid-April, after which European Union governments will have two years to include it in their national laws.
Take the claims one by one:
> The freedoms and rights enjoyed by internet users today will be enhanced
I'm not sure what freedom or right was enhanced. Maybe the rights of publishers not to have their content seen by users? But certainly the freedom and right of a news consumer in France was harmed as they have less access to news in a convenient fashion.
> our creators will be better remunerated for their work
This clearly didn't happen. Maybe people will click more, but Google is said to have performed experiments and found that not showing the text leads to a 45% decline in traffic to the website. Yes, they are likely bias and it might be a ruse, but considering how much internet giants focus on providing the least amount of friction and latency to users, I believe the sentiment is correct.
> and the internet economy will have clearer rules for operating and thriving
This is an odd claim because some smaller internet companies got exemptions and there was some horse trading with gas. Doesn't seem any clearer to assert publisher rights based on a case by case basis
> The deal was made possible after France and Germany proposed a compromise last week, giving smaller internet companies some exemptions from the rules. The compromise coincided with a separate deal in which France agreed to support Germany on a natural-gas pipeline with Russia, according to officials in Brussels and Berlin.
> Well, it was always their right (as they could use robots.txt) but now Google gives them a more fine grained control over it.
Does it? I am pretty sure Google already provided on page directives that gives sites full control of image indexing, snippet usage and even snippet length. [0]
The differences is that now all news sites are opted-out by default, a legal agreement is required to opt in, and the force of law ensures compliance.
I don't really see how this actually does ANYTHING to help anyone except lawyers. I guess it makes it harder for small aggregators to get going...but is that really a result we wanted?
> Google already provided on page directives that gives sites full control of image indexing, snippet usage and even snippet length
Yeah I heard so also as well (your link might be missing some things though), though now they can do it through an UI?
> The differences is that now all news sites are opted-out by default, a legal agreement is required to opt in, and the force of law ensures compliance.
I don't think a legal agreement is required to get back in, or it might be a simple one. Of course if you let Google show it and forget about the others then you're just encroaching its position (but hey isn't that what everybody said it would happen? tough)
> I guess it makes it harder for small aggregators to get going...but is that really a result we wanted?
Yeah... I'm actually sad Google is not asking for money to show full results for them, it would have been funnier.
They never wanted Google to show displaying snippets, as we will shortly see when the French publishers notice the plummeting page views and issue "emergency snippet licenses" to Google in order to save themselves from their own greed.
Previous discussion on this had a link to the research paper that actually measured said "plummeting" in case of Spain - the decrease in traffic was well under 20%. Just FYI.
Growth of 2-3% in anything you are actively work towards is the baseline success expectation as it is stagnant or declining otherwise. That is the equivalent of losing a decade's growth. Losing 20% of your salary would certainly qualify as losing 6 to 10 years of minimal growth expectation. It is twice that of a literal dictionary definition decimation. "Plummeting" is certainly not hyperbole.
Even a 10% can rightly be considered a "plummet" in many business contexts.
If a stock drops 10% in a day, that's gigantic. Considering how precarious the profitability of news organizations can be to begin with, a 10% drop that can't be reversed could be the difference between staying in business and folding, depending on how costs are structured.
If your traffic decreases by, say 10%, that's huge -- that's a plummet. (If your traffic decreases by 80%, you don't need adjectives anymore -- you're probably out of business now.)
They only win in this context if people use a different search engine that does pay to show snippets.
If people still use Google to find results but have to go on just title and publication to figure out what link to click which spoiler alert they already mostly do then you have 2 net effects.
Searching for news is slightly more cumbersome and resources that do allow snippets will get slightly more clicks from people who can read both.
