If you don’t like the rules of the internet, you’re free to go elsewhere
At last, Google has decided to stand up to Germany’s newspapers, telling them that if they don’t allow it to index them for free, it will stop doing so. For the time being, it will no longer include photographs or snippets from searches, but it must be clear to all that this is simply a first step and that if the print media doesn’t change its tune, then it is doomed to extinction.
In response, Germany’s papers have accused Google of blackmail, a ridiculous charge, given that the company is simply defending the open nature of the internet, one of the fundamentals of which is that linking is free. The newspapers behind this attack, an attack on the internet itself, are still living in the last century, and making a desperate bid to change the environment they now find themselves living in.
This dispute is not about intellectual property right, a dubious concept to begin with, but a form of pillage carried out with the connivance of government, keen on reaching a deal with the media to guarantee more favorable coverage. This is corruption, plain and simple: I have something the government wants, and I’ll use it to negotiate in return for the government making laws that allow me to extort third parties.
Google’s dilemma is not whether to pay the media, it has plenty of cash: the issue here is that the media will then be able to get much smaller players to cough up for providing links to content, a de facto tax on opinion. In practice, this would be the same as the government charging us for expressing our opinion at the dinner table with friends.
Most newspapers face a worsening problem: after years of failing to adapt to the web and losing money hand over fist, they now want somebody else to pick up the tab. With the aid of irresponsible or corrupt governments able in many cases (Spain, for example) to oblige newspapers to replace editors in return for institutional advertising, they have set up a lobby that wants to change how the web works, redefining the concept of a link, and to decide who pays who and why, based on concepts that have nothing to do with the subject in hand. A link is a link, and while the content and tone of my link doesn’t involve criminal activity, I can link to any source I see fit when writing, and without having to pay the media I am providing a link to.
Google’s move is just a first step. The company has gone out of its way to avoid it, but there comes a time when things no longer make sense: you cannot be telling everybody else to take a tough line on this issue while at the same time tiptoeing around the issue, because it’s going to look as though you are trying to have your cake and eat it.
Leaving some media out if its index is not a good solution for users or the media: Google will no longer reflect all the information that’s out there; leaving users short. Similarly, the newspapers in question are going to see a shortfall in traffic on their websites, as well as losing their position as key sources of information. But it is the only way to bring order to a situation that is rapidly spiraling out of control, thanks to media greed and government corruption. We will all lose out; but at the same time, no source is irreplaceable, and much less so when it thinks that based on some kind of divine right it can change the rules, rules that are made not by the media, nor by search engines, but by us, the people who use the internet. At the end of the day it’s this simple: if you don’t like the rules of the internet, you’re free to go elsewhere.
(En español, aquí)
