Why did Google block access to news sites in Canada?
For five weeks, Google has blocked access to news content for about 4% of users in Canada. Here's what the experiment was all about and why there's a worldwide dispute between new and old media
There was some great news in Canada last week, but if you were in Canada you might have missed it. It emerged on Feb. 22 that Google was blocking access to news content, in a five-week trial that affected around 4% of users across the country. The measure comes as the Canadian Senate is considering a law that would force big internet companies to pay publishers for displaying links to their stories. Google argues that it could simply block them instead; the Canadian government says the search engine's actions amount to intimidation.
It is the latest episode in a worldwide dispute between new and old media. News organizations, which have seen most of their online advertising revenues disappear over the past two decades, accuse search engines and social networks of profiting from content that isn't theirs. Google and Facebook, which have received most of the criticism, retort that they merely display links and a few lines of text, rather than the articles themselves, and thus drive traffic to publishers (who in any case can choose not to participate). Facebook estimates it sends 1.9 billion clicks a year to Canadian media, advertising it values at $230 million ($170 million).
The arguments of online platforms have mostly fallen on deaf ears. Encouraged by the national press, governments in countries such as Australia, Great Britain and Spain have passed or proposed laws that aim to squeeze money out of Silicon Valley for local media companies. The Australian law, passed in 2021, prompted tech companies to make payments to Australian media worth around A$200m ($135m) in the first year.
To prevent the adoption of similar laws elsewhere, Google and Facebook have developed mechanisms to "support" media companies. Google's "News Showcase" will spend approximately $1 billion in 2020-23 licensing content from more than 2,000 news organizations in more than 20 countries. Facebook's News Tab (which the Economist also participates in) does something similar, but has been scaled back lately. Unlike Google, Facebook can live without news, which makes up just 3% of what users see in their feed.
The laws have sometimes given the impression of government control over wealthy foreign technology companies. But developments in the research industry mean that publishers' grievances seem increasingly justified. Search engines have improved the display of information without sending visitors to external sources. If you ask Google for the size of Canada's population, it will simply tell you that it was 38 million in 2021 (followed by the usual list of suggested websites). According to Semrush, an online marketing company, about a quarter of Google desktop searches end up with no clicks.
Artificial intelligence (“AI”) promises to dramatically improve this ability. Google's aides, Bard, is still secret. But its rival, built into Microsoft's Bing search engine, is already resolving queries. If you ask the old Bing for a summary of the results of the last Canadian election, the engine refers to sites like Cbc News and Globe and Mail. If you ask the new Bing, it'll give you a decent account on its own (along with source links with footnotes). AI assistants can even get behind paywalls. A user trying to find the New York Times macaroni and cheese recipe is stopped by a payment and subscription request. But if you ask Bing's AI, it comes up with a paraphrased version of the entire recipe, complete with a lip-licking emoji.
Research companies admit they are still finding their way with the new technology, most of which is not yet commercialized. This is unlikely to satisfy the publishers' lawyers. The legal counsel of a major media company argues that AI research companies should be forced to license the content they regurgitate, just like Spotify has to pay record labels to play their songs. The use of other people's material by AI is "the copyright issue of our times," he says. For years, publishers' complaints against platforms have been somewhat in vain. Now they have a real story on their hands.
(Excerpt from the foreign press review by eprcomunicazione )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/perche-google-ha-bloccato-laccesso-ai-siti-di-notizie-in-canada/ on Sun, 19 Mar 2023 06:57:49 +0000.