Walter Watts
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Google Gains More Power
« on: 2007-09-04 23:48:27 » |
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Dvorak sees around the corners as usual.....
--Walter
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Google Gains More Power
ARTICLE DATE: 09.04.07
By John C. Dvorak
Google isn't big enough. Right. So, now the dingbats who run some of the big news services are making it bigger. How? Well, they reckon it's okay to make Google "take" their feeds rather than link to their very own customers, thus screwing those customers and further benefiting Google.
Let me try to explain.
The Google News site robotically scans hundreds of news sources and provides a faux front page of popular news items, with hundreds, if not thousands, of redundant links to those stories (as they are carried by local news outlets). Google links to these outlets, and this is where the reader then goes to read the story. If the story is from the Associated Press , then the local outlet pays the AP for the content.
Until now.
The AP, among others, saw this as some sort of vague copyright violation. It demanded that Google pay a license fee and link to the story directly from the Google site. So, Google said okay. Now, the newspapers—who collectively "own" the AP—lose a link and a potential long-term customer.
So can someone explain to me why the newspapers would stand by and let this happen? No wonder they're dying. They're run by idiots. The newspapers obviously encouraged the AP and others to do this, or they would have squawked when the idea came up.
The other three organizations that now require Google to take out a license and keep the content on the Google site are Agence France-Presse, the Press Association in the United Kingdom, and the Canadian Press. The argument is that Google is somehow violating their copyrights by running the short summaries, despite the fact that many of these summaries are voluntarily thrown into the public domain by RSS feeds and other mechanisms and should be considered fair use anyway.
Since paying the licensing fees is cheaper than a legal battle, Google took the easy way out. The bonus for Google is that it gets even more page views and people stay on the site longer. The old way Google was handling the news was actually doing the varied news outlets a favor. But, hey, no favor goes unpunished.
The readers won't notice an immediate difference, and Google says it won't be placing ads next to the press feeds, but how long will that last? After all, Google has the license. Why not run ads just as the newspapers do? It may as well get some of the ad revenue from the dying papers, right? Someone has to.—next: Concerns >
Some of the news outlets are concerned about this turn of events and will see if this hurts their business. Once the numbers come in, the news organizations might complain enough to these agencies to get them to back off on their demands that Google license the entire stories. By then, Google will realize that this is better for Google, and then you can probably forget about going back to the old way. Oooops!
I'm almost of the opinion that Google would have liked to run the full stories from the inception of the Google News service but decided that it might anger the mainstream media. After all, Google doesn't need the press hating the company.
Now it can act as the innocent bystander. "We were forced into it! We never wanted it this way!" the company can protest.
It's almost as if the whole episode was an elaborate trap that the newspapers fell into out of sheer stupidity. You'll notice that the more commercially oriented news services, such as Reuters, aren't involved in this deal, although Google may take its feed, too, "out of the goodness of its heart."
Watching the U.S. newspaper industry implode because of its inability to keep up with the times, combined with a complete lack of understanding of the Internet and its mechanisms, is something to behold.
As I witness this, I actually see it as a good thing that papers are failing. I say that because this exhibition of incompetence and stupidity tells me that, apparently, this group has no business informing me about anything. It's obvious that they can't get anything right in the first place. After all, computers and the Internet are nothing new.
I have to conclude that their "news product" is suspect and misinforms rather than informs. I mean, there is a Keystone Kops air of bumbling that cannot be ignored anymore. And you can tell that the public at large senses this, too.
Copyright (c) 2007 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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