Ha!
Less than 24 hours after I made the comparison between Google and newsagents in yeterday's post, Matt Brittin, managing director of Google UK, makes that very same point in front of a committee of MPs:
You can read more about Google's response on Press Gazette and Journalism.co.uk
And this story looks like it quietly kills off the idea that search engines might pay publishers for exclusive content idea.
Less than 24 hours after I made the comparison between Google and newsagents in yeterday's post, Matt Brittin, managing director of Google UK, makes that very same point in front of a committee of MPs:
"It's wrong to paint us as stealing content. We are, if you like, a virtual newsagent... "
"In a physical newsagent's, newspapers will pay the newsagent to have their newspapers in the shop. We don't charge anybody for this service. This is a free service."
You can read more about Google's response on Press Gazette and Journalism.co.uk
And this story looks like it quietly kills off the idea that search engines might pay publishers for exclusive content idea.
Part of the problem with this issue is that the agenda is always set by organisations with their own interestst to the fore rather than the public interest.
The big problem with Google's relationship with content providers is that it is a monopoly. If there were a dozen different Googles then content providers would be in a position to negotiate the terms upon which their content is indexed and their share of the advertising revenue that the indexer gets from pages that retrieve their content.
There are few substantial media owners that are in a very strong position to complain about the abuse of monopoly powers, thus (I suspect) the reason that a slam-dunk argument isn't used more often.