Google gains more power

[peterk]

Google isn't big enough. Right. So, now the dingbats who run some of the big news services are making it bigger. How? Well, they reckon it's okay to make Google "take" their feeds rather than link to their very own customers, thus screwing those customers and further benefiting Google.


Let me try to explain.

The Google News site robotically scans hundreds of news sources and provides a faux front page of popular news items, with hundreds, if not thousands, of redundant links to those stories (as they are carried by local news outlets). Google links to these outlets, and this is where the reader then goes to read the story. If the story is from the Associated Press , then the local outlet pays the AP for the content.

Until now.

The AP, among others, saw this as some sort of vague copyright violation. It demanded that Google pay a license fee and link to the story directly from the Google site. So, Google said okay. Now, the newspapers—who collectively "own" the AP—lose a link and a potential Link to full story