Google Removes links to California News Sites, Due to Proposed Law entitled “California Journalism Preservation Act”
Google also said it is “pausing further investments in the California news ecosystem.”
I appreciate the fact many Legal Insurrection fans have schedenfreude whenever I cover the inanity occurring within my current home state of California.
There has been in interesting development, in terms of the news media in this state, which may offer some additional entertainment. Google is removing links to California news websites due to proposed state legislation that will require tech firms to pay news outlets for their content.
The legislation has a hilarious title: California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA).
Google said Friday it would remove links to California news sites from its search results for some of its users, as it pushes back against a pending bill that would require the Silicon Valley technology company to pay publishers.
The online search giant said the bill, called the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), would upend its business model. The bill, if signed into law, would require companies including Google to fork over a “journalism usage fee” when they sell ads next to news content.
“We have long said that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism,” Jaffer Zaidi, vice president of Google’s Global News Partnerships, wrote in a blog post Friday. “If passed, CJPA may result in significant changes to the services we can offer Californians and the traffic we can provide to California publishers.”
Google also said it is “pausing further investments in the California news ecosystem.”
California legislators are deeply unhappy with Google’s countermove against their rule-making.
On Friday evening, California State Senate President Pro-Tempore Mike McGuire, a co-author of the bill, called the move an act of “bullying” and an “abuse of power.”
“This is a dangerous threat by Google that not only sets a terrible precedent here in America, but puts public safety at risk for Californians who depend on the news to keep us informed of life-threatening emergencies and local public safety incidents,” he wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “This is a breach of public trust and we call on Google Executives to answer for this stunt.”
Media officials accuse Google of “threatening democracy” by taking this action.
Danielle Coffey, president of the News/Media Alliance, a sponsor of AB 886, called the announcement a “power move” by Google to try and sway the government and said that the act makes it all the more important for the bill to become law. “Google removing news is undemocratic and antithetical to open access to information,” she said. Chuck Champion, president of the California News Publishers Association, another bill sponsor, said in a statement that “Google’s suppression today of California news demonstrates exactly why the California Legislature needs to pass legislation to rein in the tech colossus.” Champion accused Google of leveraging its monopoly power “to brazenly undermine our democracy.”
“Google removing news is undemocratic and antithetical to open access to information,” she said.
Chuck Champion, president of the California News Publishers Association, another bill sponsor, said in a statement that “Google’s suppression today of California news demonstrates exactly why the California Legislature needs to pass legislation to rein in the tech colossus.”
Champion accused Google of leveraging its monopoly power “to brazenly undermine our democracy.”
If media organizations were really interested in preserving journalism, they would make more of an effort on presenting facts, figures, and accurate information to the public rather than the latest woke narrative.
Neither California or its news media are getting any sympathy from potential customers.
😂😂 California is on a complete self destruct right now. The minimum wage bill, now this..
— Kaviteus The Red ⚠️ (@NotaFundi) April 14, 2024
That’s what California does… try to scrape money from every company, small business, or individual to pay for ridiculous entitlement programs and excessive regulation enforcement. Soon all the money will leave California, and it will be called North Venezuela.
— Jason Weeks (@ChipperJack71) April 13, 2024
Good. Let those publishers lose the reach that google provided them. California now cost them views and they went backwards as a result. Almost every California policy is a failure.
— The Analog Kid (@Analog_Kid_2112) April 13, 2024
I also foresee a time coming to pass when news analysis sites, such as Legal Insurrection, become even more important in the exchange of news and information as a result. This would be another unintended consequence of California political polices…but one of the rare good ones.
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Similarly, dog supply catalogs that feature a powder that, when sprinkled on food, “gives feces an unpleasant taste.”
Another story where I want everybody involved to lose – California, the california news media, and Google, the most californian of search engines.
LOL! This is one of those “which button do I pick?” scenarios for Google, because they will have to pay for the propaganda from their leftist buddies!
Of course, they could just say they were fact checking the “news” and took out the articles with misinformation.
Which would be all of them.
P.S. Make Californica define “journalism” first.
Right? Leftist Google vs. leftist California politicians vs. leftist media. They’re borrowing the Republicans’ circular firing squad concept.
I haven’t seen something this schadenfreude-licious since The Zon’s “Headquarters II” debacle in NY caught Amazon, NY State, The Hereditary Proconsul Cuomo The Lesser, NY City, Chiquita Guevara, and NY Urban Hipsters all at the same time.
This goes on much longer, I may have to contact my doctor.
California is on to something. Think of the possibilities. The CJPA can then be part of the CFAPA (the California First Amendment Protection Act) in which Google pays fees for the fact that people comment on-line, fees to carry protest coverage, or cover petitions to government, attend public meetings or share film content online. Why stop there? Heck, why should the citizens of California not be charged as well for protecting the First Amendment? They can afford it with the $20 minimum wage.
Not a lawyer, but I am a bit surprised the proposed law doesn’t have some federal preemption problems because there are a number of federal statutes that control both copyright and fair use, right? Congress has carved out exceptions to copyright in order support the free and fair discussion of important news/events. And yet, California is looking to stifle that discussion by taxing it. Seems problematic.
Michele Boldrin has a convincing case that intellectual property laws do more harm than good, the opposite of the popular belief.
econtalk.org has put all its old podcasts on youtube, this one is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtzqTTWDFWQ
I’ve been a software developer my entire career. These days everything is ‘cloud based’ so not so easy to copy (at least the back-end stuff). But in earlier years of my career I built and sold packaged software applications. You’d have a hard time convincing me that allowing somebody to freely copy software that I spent many years and millions of dollars to develop is a ‘good thing.’
Oh come on, who doesn’t want to work for years so some scammer can undercut them with a stolen copy of their own work.
I was in computational physics and we shared everything with all comers. There’s reciprocity there, sort of a Protestant work ethic.
Your remuneration wasn’t tied to people buying your work product.
I just released my sixth book. This one I’d been working on intermittantly since 2016. I’d sooner give it away for free than accept someone else profiting off the labor of eight years without me getting my share.
You were living off government grants.
How much of your salary was tied to the end result of your work product being useful and profitable? Answer; none.
If you had to sell your work product in the marketplace in order to pay your mortgage and feed your kids, you would view piracy of that product in far different terms.
But since its likely your paycheck came directly or indirectly from the government, you were insulated from that reality.
China’s already hacking it and doing it. They will probably even offer to sell you manufactured end goods/services from your own patents. It happened to a materials Chemist friend of mine who had a phone call from a Chinese company offering exactly that.
The Chinese aren’t good at developing technology on their own but they are very good at stealing it from others. China’s whole economy is based upon theft of intellectual property from those that develop technology and then using the stolen IP to flood the market with cheap chinese copies of the IP to undercut anyone else in the market.
How about just shutting down Google?
That’s easy. There is a little “X” in the upper-right corner of your browser screen. Click that.
Moronic government bureaucrats passing idiotic laws, not so easy to shut down.
naw … lets shut down CA.
Go ahead California, refuse to learn from New York’s mistakes. Create an environment that is so blatantly anti-business that your employers start leaving the state in droves.
Oh, wait….
These stupid woke c*nts using the ‘safety’ canard and the ‘safeguard our democracy’ trope really need to be punched in the throat.
You don’t hear a lot of “it’s for the children” these days. I guess they wore that one out. Sandyhook seems to be making a comeback, though. After the Dexter Reed Show (old people get that one), I am sure that “Hands Up: Don’t Shoot” will be the new cover tune on NPR etc.
Yeah, the progs gotta ‘save the children’ so that they can surgically mutilate their genitals. Or maybe just abort them. The cognitive dissonance must be deafening.
Maybe I’m not old enough. I’ve found a comedian character named Dexter Reed on a show I’ve never seen called “Good Burger,” but the search engine results just got polluted with some Chicago thug named Dexter Reed that apparently went all George Floyd just last week at the business end of police gun muzzles.
>>Google said Friday it would remove links to California news sites from its search results for some of its users, as it pushes back against a pending bill that would require the Silicon Valley technology company to pay publishers
Go ahead Google, but don’t do it for some of your users. Do it for all of your users. Just make all CA news sites disappear from your search results for everyone. I’m more than sure nobody would even notice the difference..
Canada did this last year. For example if you use FB in canada, any news links that were on your FB page are disappeared. So Canadians learned to use VPN and the news links are restored. It won’t help the news publishers generate more $. But it generates demand for VPN services. It also makes it increasingly difficult for google to track the behavior of users across the internet while people are using VPN, so less data mining opportunity for google.
Its dumb law.
I am not proposing this but it would make more sense for the site getting linked by Google to pay Google. How many things do you go directly to? How many do you find searching via Google or other search site? Most of these sites would have never made a Nickle without Google.
Bingo.
The fact is, if you follow a link from a search engine or news agglomeration site (like Revolver.news), if the news source wants to make money off the viewer it can still prevent the viewer from using an adblocker or can put its content behind a paywall. But, as you say, many (most?) viewers are directed to news sites by third parties, for free. You’d think that they’d encourage, rather than punish/discourage), this.
Search placement has been various kinds of pay to play for, pushing 20 years.
Interestingly the search and ad services companies get paid for “placement” regardless of how many many people follow the links, while they pay out for “impressions” and the like, meaning actual hits. Some, perhaps most video streaming or image sites are actually hosted on the big name web bigs. Interestingly, they benevolently change the terms, fees, and services at will. It’s their ecosystem. Even their business “partners” are just there to be harvested.
Funny how whoever writes the rules ends up pushing the variable risk off on the other side of the deal. In other news, in Vegas the house always wins eventually.
“Google removing news is undemocratic and antithetical to open access to information.”
What hypocrites!! These are the first people who were calling for the censorship of anybody saying something they didn’t like during elections or the pandemic. Politicians and left-wing publishers alike.
Now, publishers who failed to adapt their business models to the internet are whining to politicians, who rely on the publishers for endorsements and favorable press coverage, are demanding the politicians shake down the deep pocket big tech companies for them. They figure that everybody hates Big Tech anyway so there won’t be much pushback. When the tech companies decide they’re not gonna play, both politicians and publishers trot out the “undermine our democracy” horse hockey.
I’m not a fan of Big Tech, Big Government, or what passes for the Mainstream Media, but it is not the business of Government at any level to “preserve journalism” or to pick any other winner or loser. Certainly not by picking the pockets of lawful businesses.
What’s next, another fast food minimum wage hike?
Google is literally removing them to not have to pay for them. So these idiots are saying you will direct people to our sites and you will have to pay us for the pleasure of doing so.
It is basically a bunch of losers who would fail if given a job in the Private Sector now telling the Private Sector how to run their companies, and ordering them to do it by law. They realize that they are too stupid to survive under the free market, so they need to make the free market go away, even if it means destroying everything in the process.
Their ultimate goal is to kill everything that they can’t control.
This is actually a step worse than killing the free market IMO.
This is akin to you walking in to the IRS just to look around at the code and be able to help others not mess up their taxes and the government ordering you to pay them for showing up and helping the IRS make its job easier by aiding in compliance.
I use the IRS in analogy bc it’s a government public service (as is the internet to some degree) and it captures the stupidity of biting the hand that feeds.
If their attempt weren’t so pathetically swatted away, then this would be much more serious.
“I also foresee a time coming to pass when news analysis sites, such as Legal Insurrection, become even more important in the exchange of news and information as a result.”
Yes. But sometime after that the leftist totalitarians will be pulling LI’s DNS registration.
This situation reminds me of a rant I posted to a YouTube video that had been (literally) silenced (the audio track had been removed) for using copyrighted music:
Note to the copyright holders:
1. Many people watching this video probably already own (or have pirated) your music, so not permitting us to hear the audio track is pretty senseless.
2. I can’t tell you how many pieces of music that I’ve first heard on YouTube video tracks that I’ve then found on iTunes and downloaded – meaning paid for. The use of your music on YouTube videos is a tremendous source of free exposure for you. Rather than shutting people down, you should insist that they include in the video descriptions links to sites where the music can be purchased, or at least identify the music so that interested people can track it down themselves. (I very frequently see in the comments the question “What music is that?”, so it’s pretty obvious that music in YouTube videos gets the attention of potential customers.)
3. If I discover what music has been blocked on this video, and I do not yet own it, I’ll be much inclined to NOT purchase it simply because you are dicks who are too stupid to recognize the benefits of allowing others to expose people to your product. You don’t deserve my patronage.
LOL…what a complete demonstration of stupidity.
These journo sites get most of their traffic thanks to google and they already have paywalls. How much of a shameless grifter do you have to be?
Let’s tax that activity
-that activity stops
No fair! You’re mean!
“Danielle Coffey, president of the News/Media Alliance… “Google removing news is undemocratic and antithetical to open access to information,” she said.”
Ha ha ha! Let’s go to the videotape and see what you had to say about censoring vaccine and election opposition!
I’m with California on this one. Not because of the fee, but because it will break Google.
In case you haven’t noticed- all that AI in Bing and Google are trying to do is mine stuff from sites and keep people from going to sites while keeping them in the Bing/Google interface. This move from the CA government breaks that business strategy. I freaking love it.
I also love the idea of letting Stalin and Hitler murder each others armies.
Sites that I go to- LI, Ace of S, and HotAir are bookmarks.
Journalism is going through what traditional publishing (tradpub) plowed through some time ago. Great big companies occupying expensive real estate in huge cities employing thousands of employees who mostly talk to their counterparts in other big companies…go broke as smaller companies are formed who are more attentive to the customer needs rather than The Narrative. Ads are a big part of that for news. You just about can’t browse big sites without an ad-blocker, not to stop the quiet ads like I see here on the bottom and side of the screen, but to put a foot down on the big take over your screen blunderbuss.
“If media organizations were really interested in preserving journalism, they would make more of an effort
on presenting facts, figures, and accurate information to the publicto do some. Journalism that is.”Fixed it for you.