“Make Google Pay” and Other Hallucinations

The news industry has generated much sympathetic publicity lately about the woes of the news industry.

First, let’s say this: It’s easy to get positive coverage for an issue when you control so many ways to getting the message out. Pity the poor clowns who need to grovel to get major media attention for groundwater pesticide contamination.

Anyway, as the news industry continues to fight the inevitable, one phrase keeps coming up again and again:

Make Google Pay

The idea is that Google’s search results pages link to news content that costs a great deal of money to produce. Google makes money by placing ads around those search results. The content producers should get some of that money, the content producers argue.

I am bewildered–and a bit ashamed–that anyone who has achieved even middling professional status in a line of work that attracts a lot of really smart people can even say the words “Make Google Pay” and believe they have validity.

“Make Google Pay” is not a strategy, it’s a consensual hallucination of desperate minds. It is cognitive spatter that results from overwhelming stress. It is HAL’s final, dirge-like notes of “Daisy.”

I don’t want to get into a full-blown discussion about changing news ecology, user behavior, content abundance, link journalism, anti-trust law, etc.

I will make just three points. They seem so obvious to me that they don’t even need to be said. But as demonstrated at last week’s Congressional hearings about the future of journalism, people in the news industry, their lackeys and retainers appear not to have heard them. So:

1. Google is linking to content, not publishing it. I am amazed at how often Google is said to be “publishing” others’ news. Google points people to content that its algorithms determine to be high-value. Linking is not republishing. It is not a copyright violation. It is a way to direct people to high-value content that appears on the creators’ sites. The fact that Google is shrewd enough to extract value from its sift-and-direct service does not constitute unfair trade or thievery.

2. Publishers can block Google any time they want. If they think Google is extracting value from their content unfairly, they may choose to make their results invisible immediately. Any junior member of a news site’s web team can do this by 2 p.m. today.

3. Publishers instead are trying to make Google function as their utility. This is an astonishing act of delusional bravado. To wit: “Our content is so valuable that you must direct people to us and pay for the privilege.” Plus: “We need an anti-trust exemption to make this work, but our work is so important we deserve it.” This is not a business proposition, it is confiscatory collusion. I am stunned that various personages at the recent hearings entertained this proposal as if it were a serious idea worth consideration.

For god’s sake: “Make Google Pay” is a dead-end, an intellectually bankrupt proposition from a group of businesses that blew their big chance and continue to blow it every time they gather.

Trying to re-shape Google’s business to the demands of a failing method of distribution is a fool’s errand. If not precisely evil, it is at least destructively self-interested.

Every intercranial electrical firing, every synaptic twitch that news leaders devote to Make Google Pay represents a withdrawal from the central challenge they face: Creating bankable value that will fund the portion of  their journalistic work that truly matters to democracy.

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nb: Do a Google search using the words

Congressional hearings on future of newspapers

The pages that appear include no advertising. I mean, what are the chances?