Tag: Google Monopoly

As Predicted, Google Refuses to Comply with EU Copyright Directive #ThisIsWhatMonopolyLooksLike

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Journalist enemy #1

The first time I met with the French Minister of Culture, we met at their offices at the historic Palais-Royal complex which is also home to the Comédie-Française, the oldest active theater group in the world (founded in 1630).  The French take their culture very seriously.  One would do well to remember that in your dealings with them.

But of course, Google doesn’t give a rip about France, culture, French culture or the French Minister of Culture.  And as predicted, Google are refusing to comply with the new European Copyright Directive as transposed into French law.  (Once passed by the European Parliament, the Directive must be implemented at the nation state level–Google has no time for the nation state, either.  The law goes into effect in France on October 24.)

Having suffered a spectacular loss in the European Parliament, the American multinational Internet company is now going to bring Silicon Valley justice to France.

Agence France-Presse reports:

Google said Wednesday it will not pay European media outlets for using their articles, pictures and videos in its searches in France, in a move that will undercut a new EU copyright law.

The tech giant said it would only display content in its search engine results and on Google News from media groups who had given their permission for it to be used for free.

The announcement, which will result in free content gaining higher visibility, comes after France became the first EU country to adopt the bloc’s wide-ranging copyright reform in July….Google had warned after the European Parliament vote that the change would “lead to legal uncertainty and will hurt Europe’s creative and digital economies.”

Of course what Google meant was that Google will do everything Google can to hurt Europe’s digital and creative communities because they’re pissed.  Make no mistake, it’s not Google’s compliance with the law that is producing harm in France, it is Google’s refusal to comply that does so.

French President Macron made the country’s position clear:

“A company, even a very large company, cannot get away with it when it decides to operate in France,” the French president insisted, during a visit to mark the centenary of the La Montagne newspaper in the city of Clermont-Ferrand in central France.

“We are going to start implementing the law,” he said.

According to Emmanuel Legrand’s excellent newsletter, Google is refusing to pay French news publishers for free-riding on their expensive news when delivered in Google’s massive monopoly on news aka search results:

French minister of culture Franck Riester was particularly incensed by Google’s decision. “I met with the head of Google News [Richard Gingras] this morning at the Ministry of Culture,” said Riester to journalists on the day Google made its decision public. “I sent him a very strong message about the need to build win-win partnerships with publishers and news agencies and journalists. The answer he gave me a few minutes later was stonewalling. This is unacceptable.”

Apparently this philistine from Silicon Valley not only has no respect for the law or the democratic process, he also has no respect for French culture.  Be clear on this–the French law was passed in the European Parliament over Google’s unprecedented astroturf lobbying campaign AND it was passed at the national parliament IN FRANCE.  The people were heard TWICE.

And if Mr. Gingras wasn’t insulting enough to Europeans and the French people from his cozy option-packed Silicon Valley enclave, he sure doesn’t know how to handle himself with the French minister of culture.  Here’s a hot tip–the Peter Pan thing is not a good look outside the Googleplex paedocracy.

But understand this–as I predicted, Google has no intention of complying with the Copyright Directive and will dump as much money as it takes in legal fees, PR campaigns, fake news and astroturf until it has exhausted all possible claims, trials, appeals, lobbying, the works.  Why?

Because THEY LOST AND THEY ARE PISSED.  What you are about to see play out is what happens when the richest and most powerful media company in commercial history strikes back.  What happens when the Silicon Valley company with control over the world’s newspapers says a people should know when they’re conquered.  No blow is too low.  And I keep saying, there’s only one thing they understand which is not fines.  You can’t get fines big enough to hurt them.

What gets their attention is anything that affects their behavior–and that means injunctions or prison.  They have no appreciation for anything we do to create music, movies, news, photographs, illustrations or any other work of authorship.  For them, it’s there for the taking.

In a prescient 2008 book review (entitled “Google the Destroyer“) of Nicholas Carr’s The Google Enigma, antitrust scholar Jim DeLong gives an elegant explanation of Google’s thuggish behavior:

Carr’s Google Enigma made a familiar business strategy point: companies that provide one component of a system love to commoditize the other components, the complements to their own products, because that leaves more of the value of the total stack available for the commoditizer….Carr noted that Google is unusual because of the large number of products and services that can be complements to the search function, including basic production of content and its distribution, along with anything else that can be used to gather eyeballs for advertising. Google’s incentives to reduce the costs of complements so as to harvest more eyeballs to view advertising are immense….This point is indeed true, and so is an additional point. In most circumstances, the commoditizer’s goal is restrained by knowledge that enough money must be left in the system to support the creation of the complements….

Google is in a different position. Its major complements already exist, and it need not worry in the short term about continuing the flow. For content, we have decades of music and movies that can be digitized and then distributed, with advertising attached. A wealth of other works await digitizing – [news,] books, maps, visual arts, and so on. If these run out, Google and other Internet companies have hit on the concept of user-generated content and social networks, in which the users are sold to each other, with yet more advertising attached.

So, on the whole, Google can continue to do well even if leaves providers of is complements gasping like fish on a beach.

What you’re seeing in France is the onset of gasping.

@nickconfessore: The Unlikely Activists Who Took On Silicon Valley — and Won

[A teachable moment in activism that’s an important read to see all the swamp monster machinations that Silicon Valley puts us all through.  The post is extremely well-written but does take a bit of a commitment to read to the end.  Highly recommended that you stick with it to the end of the story.]

The way Alastair Mactaggart usually tells the story of his awakening — the way he told it even before he became the most improbable, and perhaps the most important, privacy activist in America — begins with wine and pizza in the hills above Oakland, Calif. It was a few years ago, on a night Mactaggart and his wife had invited some friends over for dinner. One was a software engineer at Google, whose search and video sites are visited by over a billion people a month. As evening settled in, Mactaggart asked his friend, half-seriously, if he should be worried about everything Google knew about him. “I expected one of those answers you get from airline pilots about plane crashes,” Mactaggart recalled recently. “You know — ‘Oh, there’s nothing to worry about.’ ” Instead, his friend told him there was plenty to worry about. If people really knew what we had on them, the Google engineer said, they would flip out….

Facebook and Google were following people around the rest of the internet…using an elaborate and invisible network of browsing bugs — they had, within little more than a decade, created a private surveillance apparatus of extraordinary reach and sophistication. Mactaggart thought that something ought to be done. He began to wonder whether he should be the one to do it….

Almost by accident, though, Mactaggart had thrust himself into the greatest resource grab of the 21st century. To Silicon Valley, personal information had become a kind of limitless natural deposit, formed in the digital ether by ordinary people as they browsed, used apps and messaged their friends. Like the oil barons before them, they had collected and refined that resource to build some of the most valuable companies in the world, including Facebook and Google, an emerging duopoly that today controls more than half of the worldwide market in online advertising. But the entire business model — what the philosopher and business theorist Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” — rests on untrammeled access to your personal data. The tech industry didn’t want to give up its powers of surveillance. It wanted to entrench them. And as Mactaggart would soon learn, Silicon Valley almost always got what it wanted.

Read the post on The New York Times.

@AlanWolf_TWICE: Let’s Get Physical: Amazon and Google embrace brick-and-mortar

Wasn’t too long ago that pundits predicted the end of physical storefronts.

Now, in an ironic twist, the very forces of digital commerce that were supposed to do in brick-and-mortar have become hot for commercial real estate.

Two of the biggest proponents are smart-home contenders Amazon and Google. The e-tailer has opened bookstores, pop-up shops and in-store Kohl’s sections across the country, while the search engine giant is plying its proprietary Home products via temporary holiday stores in New York and Los Angeles.

TWICE visited two of these physical manifestations, which provide further proof that the corner store is here to stay.

Read the post on TWICE

@music_canada: Where would Google be without creators and the distortion of copyright protections?

PRESS RELEASE:

In a ground-breaking report, Music Canada, a national trade organization, documents the scale of harm being caused by the Value Gap – defined as the significant disparity between the value of creative content that is accessed, particularly through user upload content services like YouTube, and the revenues returned to the people and businesses who create it.

“This is the story you will not hear from Google,” says Graham Henderson, President and CEO of Music Canada.  “YouTube would never have emerged as the largest music service without distorting the use of safe harbour protections in copyright law that were created to protect ‘mere conduits’ or ‘dumb pipes.’  We now know that today’s digital platforms are the smartest pipes that have ever been imagined.”

Creators and governments around the world are taking notice, and taking action. In Canada, thousands of musicians, authors, poets, visual artists, playwrights and other members of the creative class, have urged the Canadian government to address the Value Gap in a campaign called Focus On Creators.

The Value Gap: Its Origins, Impacts and a Made-in-Canada Approach is available for download at https://musiccanada.com/resources/research/the-value-gap-report/.

@buzzfeedben: There’s Blood In The Water In Silicon Valley

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Before you think it can’t happen to Google or Facebook, remember–if you told a room full of MBAs in 1984 that in a few years time Drexel Burnham Lambert would be bankrupt and Michael Milken would be in prison, you would have been laughed out of the room.  And also remember–they almost got Google on violations of the Controlled Substances Act.  If you’re concerned, call your representatives at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you want an investigation into Google and its price fixing cartel the MIC Coalition.

The blinding rise of Donald Trump over the past year has masked another major trend in American politics: the palpable, and perhaps permanent, turn against the tech industry. The new corporate leviathans that used to be seen as bright new avatars of American innovation are increasingly portrayed as sinister new centers of unaccountable power, a transformation likely to have major consequences for the industry and for American politics.

That turn has accelerated in recent days: Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders both want big tech treated as, in Bannon’s words in Hong Kong this week, “public utilities.” Tucker Carlson and Franklin Foer have found common ground. Even the group No Labels, an exquisitely poll-tested effort to create a safe new center, is on board. Rupert Murdoch, never shy to use his media power to advance his commercial interests, is hard at work.

“Anti-trust is back,

baby,” Yelp’s policy chief, Luther Lowe, DM’d me after Fox News gave him several minutes to make the antitrust case against Yelp’s giant rival Google to its audience of millions….

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So Facebook should probably ease out of the business of bland background statements and awkward photo ops, and start worrying about congressional testimony. Amazon, whose market power doesn’t fall into the categories envisioned by pre-internet antitrust law, is developing a bipartisan lobby that wants to break it up. Google’s public affairs efforts are starting to look a bit like the oil industry’s. These are the existential collisions with political power that can shake and redefine industries and their leaders, not the nickel-and-dime regulatory games Silicon Valley has played to date.

eric-and-friends
Uncle Sugar and some witnesses

Read the post on Buzzfeed