<story><title>Google is giving $1B to publishers to help convince governments not to take more</title><url>https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/10/google-is-giving-1-billion-to-news-publishers-to-help-convince-governments-not-to-take-a-whole-lot-more-than-that/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MaKey</author><text>Without Google those sites would lose the majority of their visitors, so what is the point you&amp;#x27;re trying to get across?</text></item><item><author>ricardo81</author><text>I won&amp;#x27;t pretend to be an expert on big business and the answers to the problems of users expecting free, but I will say that initially Google had a good symbiotic relationship with publishers and that it no longer exists.&lt;p&gt;News publishers, webmasters suffering lower CTR due to G properties in SERPs, ads placing organic results below the fold, rich snippets taking content from pages to prevent a click through to the site. That kind of thing. It is&amp;#x2F;was all a bit insidious and now time is being called on it, they seem to be relenting, a bit, at least on face value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>senko</author><text>&amp;gt;  Without Google those sites would lose the majority of their visitors&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not neccessarily true. Without &lt;i&gt;a search engine&lt;/i&gt;, those sites would lose the majority of their visitors. But absent Google, another search engine would do the job.&lt;p&gt;A search engine is a vital component in today&amp;#x27;s web. &amp;quot;Google search&amp;quot; is not, and its market power dominance doesn&amp;#x27;t give it a moral blank check.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google is giving $1B to publishers to help convince governments not to take more</title><url>https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/10/google-is-giving-1-billion-to-news-publishers-to-help-convince-governments-not-to-take-a-whole-lot-more-than-that/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MaKey</author><text>Without Google those sites would lose the majority of their visitors, so what is the point you&amp;#x27;re trying to get across?</text></item><item><author>ricardo81</author><text>I won&amp;#x27;t pretend to be an expert on big business and the answers to the problems of users expecting free, but I will say that initially Google had a good symbiotic relationship with publishers and that it no longer exists.&lt;p&gt;News publishers, webmasters suffering lower CTR due to G properties in SERPs, ads placing organic results below the fold, rich snippets taking content from pages to prevent a click through to the site. That kind of thing. It is&amp;#x2F;was all a bit insidious and now time is being called on it, they seem to be relenting, a bit, at least on face value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ricardo81</author><text>Google has a search monopoly in many countries. Are you implying that if Google did not exist, no one would visit websites any more, or read the news? They were originally a search engine to find other things on the web, not so much a portal.</text></comment>