By Bradley J. Fikes
The S.E. is paleoleftist journosaur Tim Rutten, pushing one of the favorite tired memes of his fellow Internet haters: Charge Google and Yahoo for the privilege of linking to their stories.
It’s the increasingly tiresome lament of the fading monopolist against technology. The Internet is the bad guy, allowing people to read news stories for free. And Google and Yahoo are enablers, pointing people to those free stories, and making money on advertising that is rightfully the newspapers’.
Newspapers could just shut down their Web sites and pretend the Internet doesn’t exist. But even the sanctimonious endomorph realizes that’s not feasible. Instead, Rutten revives the fantasy that if all newspapers and other news sources like CNN got together and put up a united front on pricing, Google and Yahoo would be forced to subsidize news reporting. To do that, however, would violate antitrust laws. So Rutten wants the government to carve out an antitrust exemption for the media.
It would allow all U.S. newspaper companies — and others in the English-speaking world, as well as popular broadcast-based sites such as CNN.com — to sit down and negotiate an agreement on how to scale prices and, then, to begin imposing them simultaneously.
That, in turn, would set the stage for tackling the other leg of this problem — how to extract reasonable fees from aggregators like Google and Yahoo, which currently use their search engines to link to news that newspapers and broadcasters pay to gather.
As veteran journalist and book publisher Peter Osnos said this week, newspapers and magazines “have to start demanding payment for use of their material or they will disappear.” No one delivers more of that content online than Google does, Osnos noted, through its advertising-supported search functions. That revenue goes to Google, not to the companies that gathered the news.
This entitlement mentality conveniently omits the most important facts. Google doesn’t reproduce the entire article, it links to the article on the newspaper’s Web page. Google is doing a favor by sending customers to these newspapers. Also, Google News does not have advertising, although Google’s regular search does.
Newspapers that have tried charging for their articles has almost uniformly failed. That’s because erecting a pay wall cuts down more on advertising revenue than the paper gets in revenues. Rutten wants Google to solve their problem — and charge Google for the privilege by forming an information cartel.
But Google’s business model isn’t based on links to news articles and would scarcely notice their absence. So the newspapers need Google far more than Google needs newspapers.
Even with an antitrust exemption, not all news sources will want to charge for news. Google could just link to those who keep their stories free, who would benefit from more traffic.
The Rutten Cartel would suddenly disappear from Google, which means to the average Web reader, their stories wouldn’t exist. And if those stories are as poorly reasoned and factually challenged as the typical Rutten column, few would care to pay for them anyway.
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(Disclaimer: This, and all of my writings here, represents my personal opinion. It does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer, the North County Times, which is not involved.
People, if they choose, should be able to ban together and set a price that all will charge for something. However that choice MUST be and remain voluntary. That means that the court system must NOT be used to enforce agreements to price fix. A, B and C may agree on a fixed price but if B decides to cheat and sell at a lower price, A and C can do nothing about it other than not to trust B’s word again. Union members should be treated in the same way. If a member chooses to work for less the company should be able to pay him less and discharge other union workers if down sizing. This should not be forbidden by a court because it means that our court system would be supporting price fixing.
Hi Robert,
I agree with you. Let the information cartel form, but don’t use the government to enforce it. The whole idea is doomed to ignominious failure anyway, and I’d enjoy watching it.
Rutten and his ilk haven’t a clue about the hopelessness of keeping information off the Internet. They are not only Net-stupid, but actually are proud of their ignorance.
The other factor they seem to be clueless about is that Google and its owners are big Obama supporters and no doubt have standing invitations to the Lincoln bedroom, once Obama finds out where it is.
Can’t anybody here play this game ?
I wonder if Rutten et al would go to bat for conservatives, such as Michael Savage, who get their content scrubbed off google and wikipedia. I suppose at some level google could be considered a “common carrier”, like the post office, and they have some responsibility to carry all content. But the Lefties like to game the system when they get the chance. No markets for them.