If I were a policymaker and I had to choose between saving a free and independent press and saving a big advertising company, I know which side I'd be on.
Google provides a lot of traffic to the websites operated by the free and independent press. If they don't manage to monetize that traffic sufficiently then that's their problem. Google obeys robots.txt, if they don't want to be indexed it's easy to achieve this.
I really don't understand why Google should pay for what they do.
It is a permission culture mentality. It doesn't matter that you are making them money by say buying their hardware and painting it neon green to resell - you made more money from their work so they feel entitled to another cut.
Except it does the exact opposite of that. It is like a mudslide - burrying the small and leaving the giants diminished but lacking competition.
The point is that their childish fantasy of a policy will only hurt everyone except for those who long for a tightly controlled media oligarchy with moats protecting from competition.
It's funny, at first, I misread that you wrote "I know which side I'd bet on." Which raises an interesting question. We know which side we'd probably be on, that's the rationalist speaking. Which side would we bet on though? Specifically, which side does the realist bet on winning in both the short and long run?
Oh, I think it's pretty clear that Googbook has the legacy media at their mercy. The realist bet has been against responsible news media for almost long as that's even existed as a market segment.
Probably one of the most telling charts I saw was data extracted from a Google quarterly report[1], showing how much of their ad revenue has moved from ads embedded in pages (which they have to share with page owners), and ads in their own search engine and apps, which they get to keep 100% of. While Google used to be providing value to the sites it helped locate, more and more it's enriching itself at the cost of those sites.
If we can't realign their incentives with revenue sharing with news sites, we need to shut them down, because the way things are going, Google is bleeding out the journalism industry. They were in a symbiotic relationship, but it has transitioned to a parasitic one.
I think this is an interesting insight: Google is, in a way, competing with the pages it links to. If you can find the info you want, and click on an ad while still on a google owned domain: they make more money.
We've seem some shots fired in this battle already. In the earlier days of google search for something with a clear cut answer, and you'd likely see the answer in the summary. Sites missed out on that traffic so they started moving the answer lower down in the page, with poorly written teaser summaries in the results. Now google is showing a large block at the top of the page with it's guess to the answer at the top.
1) Any time somebody suggests taxing, breaking up, or otherwise regulating the tech giants, there's a chorus of voices afraid we'll kill their golden goose. That's why I phrased it as a choice to "save" one or the other. If it ever did come down to a binary choice, I'd sooner our society sacrificed Google to save NYT/BBC/Der Spiegel. Others may disagree, of course.
2) There's a legitimate argument to be made that government intervention to shore up the press will result in unintended consequences and/or make the press beholden to their government benefactors.
