Google News May Shut Down over EU Plans to Charge Tax for Links

Megalith

Megalith

24-bit/48kHz
Staff member
Joined
Aug 20, 2006
Messages
13,000
Due to the region’s plans to charge a “link tax” for using news stories, Google’s news service may no longer be available in the EU. Richard Gingras, the search engine’s vice-president of news, suggests it could very well happen unless the phrasing of the legislation is altered in some way. The law is meant to “compensate struggling news publishers if snippets of their articles appear in search results.”

He pointed out the last time a government attempted to charge Google for links, in 2014 in Spain, the company responded by shutting down Google News in the country. Spain passed a law requiring aggregation sites to pay for news links, in a bid to prop up struggling print news outlets. Google responded by closing the service for Spanish consumers, which he said prompted a fall in traffic to Spanish news websites.
 
Do people not ever look at history? How has taxing saved a business which would naturally decline anyway? With this logic, they might as well have put a horse saddle tax on cars when they came around.

History moves on... People apparently do not.
 
You can't stop progress, they tried to stop the automobile with all kinds of whacky schemes. Didn't work then, won't work now. Pointing to a long passed era you never experienced and hoping you can regress society far enough that it will be great again like you wish it was then doesn't work. Tomorrow is inevitable and you can only move through time in one direction.

Harming a new industry model to support an old industry model is completely insane on so many levels, utterly counterproductive.
 
Nafensoriel said:
Do people not ever look at history? How has taxing saved a business which would naturally decline anyway? With this logic, they might as well have put a horse saddle tax on cars when they came around.

History moves on... People apparently do not.
Click to expand...
Literally every single cable & satellite provider in the US gets "taxed" for rebroadcasting local tv channels, which your cable/satellite provider almost assuredly passes on to the consumer as a "fee" on their bills. This is largely all that is, and from both sides of it I'd say Google should stomp it's feet and just say no, and on the other hand everyone else can get their news from elsewhere there is no reason why Google needs to have it's hand in everything.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Literally every single cable & satellite provider in the US gets "taxed" for rebroadcasting local tv channels, which your cable/satellite provider almost assuredly passes on to the consumer as a "fee" on their bills. This is largely all that is, and from both sides of it I'd say Google should stomp it's feet and just say no, and on the other hand everyone else can get their news from elsewhere there is no reason why Google needs to have it's hand in everything.
Click to expand...

Except this isn't the same thing--it's a couple of sentence fragments. In my experience, too, they are usually cut in a way such that you can't really get the story from the blurb.

If Google were summarizing the linked article down to a paragraph or so, you (and the EU) would have a point. This rule, taxing snippets, is dumb, and the EU is going to learn the same lesson Spain did.
 
Much as I hate kneejerk reactions to news headlines, I'd have to agree that this is a bit of a silly legislation: guess which kinds of "news stories" are going to be spread even more quickly after this tax (rhymes with break).

When they started publishing on the net, news outlets knew fully well that their articles would be linked to from outside of their websites, they should have thought of this before starting an untenable business model and then complaining about this defining property.
 
Nafensoriel said:
Do people not ever look at history? How has taxing saved a business which would naturally decline anyway? With this logic, they might as well have put a horse saddle tax on cars when they came around.

History moves on... People apparently do not.
Click to expand...
Actually they did have a horse saddle tax on cars. Of course it was called something else, I don't recall the name now but I remember reading about it.

BTW I still don't understand what's the problem with linking to websites. Links bring in more viewership, then how is that bad for them? This is utterly stupid "you must pay me if you want to advertise my content"?!
 
M76 said:
Actually they did have a horse saddle tax on cars. Of course it was called something else, I don't recall the name now but I remember reading about it.

BTW I still don't understand what's the problem with linking to websites. Links bring in more viewership, then how is that bad for them? This is utterly stupid "you must pay me if you want to advertise my content"?!
Click to expand...

The issue is that people arguably won't visit newspaper websites and instead just read the snippets from Google News, thus cutting into the profit from said newspapers.
I call bullshit on that but I'm swiss so I hope the EU trainwreck finally dies and we survive.
 
M76 said:
Actually they did have a horse saddle tax on cars. Of course it was called something else, I don't recall the name now but I remember reading about it.

BTW I still don't understand what's the problem with linking to websites. Links bring in more viewership, then how is that bad for them? This is utterly stupid "you must pay me if you want to advertise my content"?!
Click to expand...

cause without these links, and snippets, and ranking management, Google News becomes useless, thus making the Google main page a little less attractive, and it is a negative on the goal of complete audience capture..

which ties in with building and exploiting a complete behavioral profile of the consumer ( or in another perspective, the end product of you the consumer, be a little less juicy when sold to other 3rd parties )
 
M76 said:
Actually they did have a horse saddle tax on cars. Of course it was called something else, I don't recall the name now but I remember reading about it.

BTW I still don't understand what's the problem with linking to websites. Links bring in more viewership, then how is that bad for them? This is utterly stupid "you must pay me if you want to advertise my content"?!
Click to expand...
I'm actually impressed someone else knows that :D. It was an English tax btw. I made the point deliberately. A tax didn't save the industry from change then.. it won't now. I hate this obsession in keeping everything exactly as it is. Apparently, nothing in this world can change unless its an iteration of what has come before.. it's actually extremely disheartening.
 
They are just getting in on the ground floor. Tax it before it really takes off is just investing in the first offer round. Who says the government doesn't know exactly what it is doing, now they don't have to come up with some lame excuse afterwards.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top