Sunday 6 December 2009

Google to limit free news access

Google is going to limit free access to news resources on web-sites of publishers. According to the article, "Google to limit free news access" in BBC News, the publishers of newspaper have been complained that user can see their contents of articles with free through Google, so that a new program is going to be introduced by Google in order to solve this problem. The program allows users free first clicking each article, but charges them who want to read(click) more than five articles for appropriate fee.

Because this kind of conflicts between web-media and publishers has been existed since internet become common, Rory Cellan-Jones, who is BBC technology correspondent, comments "This may still be a significant moment in the battle between old and new media" for this solution. However, the damage of newspapers from online contents has been so severe that it seems to be hard to regain their loss from fee collection by the new program.

Although I like Google's challenging for new technologies, this solution is not clever way and doesn't help publishers because few users would willing to pay for the clicks. To manage this problem, from my point of view, Google should help those of publishers rather than introducing this kind of programs because they has made much more profit by searching advertisements. Therefore, they have responsibility for sharing the profit of delivering contents or information through the internet because it is obvious that if all of publishers were disappeared, they should have lost much more profit than revenues to publishers.

We can easily find a lot of information from the internet. However, the amount of irreverent sources are increasing there. At this point, the quality of information of newspapers are not decrease as terrible as that of internet. Thus, reliable internet organization, such as Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo should have responsibility to find a fair way to get along with newspaper's publisher in order to keep qualities of information.

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References
Google to limit free news access, (2 December 2009), BBC News. Retrieved December 6,2009 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8389896.stm

1 comment:

  1. I'm not sure that "because few users would willing to pay for the clicks". In the past, many people have happily paid for a daily newspaper. They online version won't cost more, so I think that people will willingly pay. Also, people do already pay for quality online information: three online publications I use are by subscription. The OED requires it for any access at all, and The Economist and New Scientist require it for access to some services. I'm sure that I am not the only person who thinks that the quality makes the information services worth paying for. (The OED is the most expensive, but since I use it constantly, I think it's a bargain.)
    That said, I do think that Taka makes a good point: if Yahoo, Google and others profit by using the information created by the work of newspapers and others, then it seems fair that they should pay something for the benefits so gained by the work others have done.

    I also agree with Taka's final point, that there is a vast and increasing amount of garbage on on the internet, but I'm not sure that that is any different to what has always existed in newspapers and books. There are a lot of popular and successful newspapers that are pretty much full of garbage, and whole series of books have been written about things like astrology, ghosts, and so on merely to cater to popular superstitions and make money, so I don't think that the internet is very different in that, there is just a lot more there, but there is also a lot more really good stuff available - as the recent posts here have shown.

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