Comments on: German parliament passes ‘Google tax’ law, forcing royalty payments for news snippets

By: Fred Marketter

Fred Marketter — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 16:58:51 +0000

I say it all the time. Bunch of leeches. One of my friends who works at Google says there’s a huge denial about the way they’re strip mining the ecosystem. The news sources are drying up and all that’s left are the aggregators. That drives down the value of Google and pushes more and more knowledge into silos and walled gardens.

Suck it aggregators.

By: Fred Marketter

Fred Marketter — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 12:44:53 +0000

Fine with me. There are other good search engines. Hundreds of them.

By: Fred Marketter

Fred Marketter — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 12:19:26 +0000

Once again, the web community shows itself to be greedy and plain rude.

By: Dagg

Dagg — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 20:33:17 +0000

With that move they will even more isolate themselves. Brief look at daily headlines shows that thousands of news outlets repeat same mundane articles. Why pay for that?

If will fasten their demise into oblivion, and raise citizen journalism (which will probably not be worse)

By: Fred Marketter

Fred Marketter — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 17:28:20 +0000

They’re only able to drive the traffic because news.google.com is a great front page. If you steal the headline and the photograph, it makes it easy to create a newspaper for skimming.

I tell you what. Let’s let Google stop stealing all of the content and then we’ll see how much traffic they drive.

By: jeremy

jeremy — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 17:14:24 +0000

How is this controversial exactly?? Google stealing content seems to be controversial but no one wants to come out and say it. In time, it will be seen for what it is. Congrats to Germany for protecting copyright and IP, something that has gone out of fashion here in the US.

By: tetracycloide

tetracycloide — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:54:27 +0000

So your argument is that if Google stopped aggregating their ad revenue, now without traffic driven by search results, would go… up? Yeah, that makes good logical sense.

By: tetracycloide

tetracycloide — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:53:04 +0000

Because Google isn’t one of if not the biggest driver of traffic to these sites. Leaches indeed…

By: Luuuke

Luuuke — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 13:35:08 +0000

They don’t get it, but this might be excellent. Maybe this will make it cheaper to publish news snippets from lesser known outlets who do not demand royalties, having the side effect of displaying more honest news instead of the main stream echo chamber.

By: Karen Kazaryan

Karen Kazaryan — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:47:09 +0000

Learn about robots.txt. And fcuk off