Comments on: In settlement with French publishers, Google promises $82 million fund and advertising help http://paidcontent.org/2013/02/01/in-settlement-with-french-publishers-google-promises-82-million-fund-and-advertising-help/ The economics of digital content Thu, 23 May 2013 21:30:39 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: RabidAnubis http://paidcontent.org/2013/02/01/in-settlement-with-french-publishers-google-promises-82-million-fund-and-advertising-help/#comment-199072 Mon, 04 Feb 2013 20:05:49 +0000 http://paidcontent.org/?p=224003#comment-199072 I think that this is a bit silly, but it is buisness.

]]> By: test1515 http://paidcontent.org/2013/02/01/in-settlement-with-french-publishers-google-promises-82-million-fund-and-advertising-help/#comment-198985 Mon, 04 Feb 2013 11:10:00 +0000 http://paidcontent.org/?p=224003#comment-198985 This is an insane deal where everyone loses. Google, like many multi-nationals pays almost no tax on French revenue, funneling the money through offshore accounts. The French government used this to put pressure on Google to strike a deal to help ailing newspapers, despite the fact that the two things have absolutely no connection.

As a result, the French government are hailing as a success a system which forces a company which is helping a dying industry to pay a fine for doing so. For any tech company to subsidize newspapers is like having HP fund the slide-rule industry, but to have a news search engine do so for driving traffic is deluded.

This has reduced the leverage the French government had to get Google to pay tax on revenues in the manner it does in the US. Which is a much bigger deal.

(disclaimer – I co-founded the first news search company, which was the forerunner to Google News)

]]> By: Paolo Amoroso http://paidcontent.org/2013/02/01/in-settlement-with-french-publishers-google-promises-82-million-fund-and-advertising-help/#comment-198881 Sat, 02 Feb 2013 10:58:00 +0000 http://paidcontent.org/?p=224003#comment-198881 The two largest Italian newspapers alone get about 43 million € combined (Corriere della Sera: ~24M€; la Repubblica: ~19M€; quoting from memory) worth of public subsidies each year. Yet they don’t do much digital innovation and have no significant growth. Compare this to the 60 M€ fund by Google., which is probably once only.

For the record, even if newspapers in my country, Italy, did great digital innovation and thrived, I wouldn’t be interested in their conent anyway. They can no longer be trusted as independent, reliable, and unbiased sources of news.

]]> By: Jebb Dykstra http://paidcontent.org/2013/02/01/in-settlement-with-french-publishers-google-promises-82-million-fund-and-advertising-help/#comment-198858 Fri, 01 Feb 2013 22:19:20 +0000 http://paidcontent.org/?p=224003#comment-198858 Back to the future — Eric Schmidt is CEO of Google. Not Really!! That’s still Larry Page, but this is Eric’s problem of old. USD $82 mm / E60 mm — for the French and another USD $6 mm to the Belgians. What is going on! How far does this Domino fall? Does every Country in the world get to start filing complaints against every search engine company — is this same suit filed against Bing and retroactively against Yahoo!!

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