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Google News: The Secret War Against Net Neutrality

Publication Date: 16 Dec 2017 - By Market Mogul By Market M.

Thematic USA EU Technology

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Anyone watching Google News can see that mainstream news outlets are a monoculture, with 100 different outlets reporting essentially the same “big” story. That is, whatever is the top scandal of the day. With click-bait headlines the norm, mainstream news and fake news look indistinguishable. Readers struggle to tell the difference. It’s all negativity and shouting. That’s changing our culture, and not in a good way.

Google News is making the news monoculture worse by blocking independent news publishers seeking to join Google News. There’s an almost insurmountable headwind for new publishers who haven’t been “grandfathered in” to Google News. Google urges us to take action to support net neutrality while at the same time defeating net neutrality by giving favoured nations treatment to big business news organizations at Google News. Why is that a real problem? Let’s talk about what happened to news in Spain.

The Case in Spain

Spain’s repressive Google tax, and consequent Google News blackout, crippled independent news there. When that happened at the time, Google may have thought, serves Spain right for passing a stupid law. However, the suppression of independent news in Spain has had consequences. The Spanish news blackout by Google News played into the hands of the Spanish government seizing mainstream media, reducing mainstream news to official propaganda.

In its early days, Google News was a tremendous democratic influence for good. Smaller news sites you wouldn’t otherwise know about could get to the top of Google News based on merit. A colleague once wrote a story about a TV movie premiere starring Jennifer Love Hewitt. There was surprisingly big interest in this story. It was the only story that quoted Hewitt talking about her film. That story went to the top of the entertainment section of Google News on a Sunday morning and stayed at the top all day. It drove tremendous amounts of traffic to the news site that published it. They took a lesson from it.

Their success with that story on Google News changed their editorial mandate. The new marching orders? Find more stories that we can uniquely cover that will put us at the top of Google News. What Google had done, intentionally or not, was support diversity and make journalism better. For years that publication ranked on the front page of Google News almost daily. They survived on that traffic. It doesn’t work that way anymore. It isn’t how good you are. It’s how big you are that gets you into the Google News club today.

Difficulty for Small Publishers

In fairness to Google News, this publication, The Market Mogul, is carried by them, so clearly it’s not impossible for a new publisher to gain access. However, given their loud support of net neutrality, why doesn’t Google News have a program that nurtures net neutrality on their own platform? Why not help small publishers, rather than making it more difficult for them to launch and sustain themselves?

Maybe Google simply hasn’t thought about the consequences of not helping small publishers. After all, it can be more work to deal with them. They may have more questions to answer than establishment outlets. However, big mainstream publishers aren’t actually subject to the official rules. Google News isn’t about to drop the New York Times or Washington Post if they make a web template change that moves the author byline down a line or another superficial change that might confuse Google crawler robots.

A small publisher, however, is expected to play 100% by Google’s rules. A long-time Google News forum advisor talks about how things have changed at Google News:

In simple terms, the Google News guidelines have tightened up over time.  I joke that the NYTimes might not be accepted these days.  Yes, that tight.  So your goal is not to generate a marginally passable website that might get accepted into Google News, but one that is so wonderful that Google will drop all of your perceived competitors to find room for you.

Maturity.  If the site doesn’t have 6 months of strong journalism history to review, don’t bother applying.  Maybe 1 year in some niches.  And don’t be surprised to be rejected as 99% of all sites that apply will be rejected.  Think of this as a challenge and go forth and make the best possible news site in your niche.

Why should better journalism mean dropping a perceived competitor? Has the Internet run out of space?

If the above observation is correct, and it is judging from what small publishers have told me and the general feedback on the Google News forum, then Google News has changed. No longer a news democracy with room for every legitimate news publisher no matter what size, Google News has morphed into a walled garden that embraces big business. It’s the opposite of net neutrality. Google News has become a censor promoting the establishment viewpoint. Think that’s bad? It gets worse.

What billionaires think, is the establishment viewpoint. Billionaires control the mainstream press. Google News is boosting the 1%. Whether that’s Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, which continues to provide outstanding journalism, or Rupert Murdoch, owner and head of Fox News, which does not. Warren Buffet owns 31 news dailies and 50 weeklies. In the UK, five billionaires, Rupert Murdoch, Jonathon Harmsworth, Richard Desmond and the Barclay twins own 80% of the newspapers, plus TV stations, press agencies, book companies, and cinemas. None of the top UK billionaire press owners actually live in England.

Conclusion

A handful of billionaires, many tax avoiders living mostly beyond the law by bending it to their wills, has become our society’s thought overlords through their control of the press. And Google is helping them do it. Why has Google become a gatekeeper to enforce a news mono-culture? Will Google reconsider, stop suppressing small publishers and demanding they be “better” than the New York Times before allowing them a voice?

What society needs is news net neutrality.

The post Google News: The Secret War Against Net Neutrality appeared first on The Market Mogul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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