Welcome, Guest Sign Up | Login | Try Premium

What to do about Google?

“Work with and not without or against google,” says Chief Legal Officer, Google
December 08, 2009 | By Aakriti Agarwal

At the WAN Hyderabad debate on copyright issues called ‘What to do about Google’ saw Gavin O’ Reilly suggesting on behalf of the newspaper industry, the adoption of the Automatic Content Access Protocol (ACAP) and other technology tools that will help monitor and protect against copyright infringements.

David Drummond, Senior Vice President & Chief Legal Counsel, Google, USA at the WAN Congress Forum in Hyderabad on 3 December 2009 Photo: Aakriti Agarwal, IPP

David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer Counsel of Google reflected, “If Google did not exist, will newspapers be in any better off than it is today… Google is a willing partner in helping to find solutions.”

He continued, technology been disrupting the newspaper industry for a very long time. The arrival of television and radio bought down the circulation of newspapers. . . The internet is breaking down the entire news package with articles read individually, reached from search engines or blogs or Facebook and sometimes abandoned if there’s no good reason once the story has lost its relevance. The pressure is on the advertisement revenue caused by the internet and made worst by the recession causing greater damage.

Drummond addressed the copyright issue and said that, “we only show a couple of headlines from each story in a news product and snippets from our search results and not the entire story so the readers can decide if they want more information.”

Talking about the business opportunities, he said, “Millions of people use google to search information. The fact that they are actually looking for something specific is very valuable to advertisers because and they are willing to pay a lot for it but the truth is that the revenue that we generate from advertisement revenue alongside news query is a tiny fraction of our over all revenue.”

On the question of monetising the content, Drummond told the audience about Google’s new ‘First click free’ service for publishers to keep their paid content discoverable on google. An adjustment to this service is that publishers can limit users to no more than five stories per day without registering or subscribing. Google also claims to be actively exploring technology solutions that might help publishers with logistical problems that they find for charging for content such as billing systems for subscriptions and micro payments but Drummond clarifies, “at the end of the day it is for the publishers to decide.” He agrees that it has been difficult to monetise content online and suggests that the new model will have to combine paid and free access to content.

Further on solutions, Robots Exclusion Protocol, also called Robots.txt gives publishers tremendous control over how their content is shown. Eager to play their part in solving some of publisher’s problems, Drummond added, “We are giving publishers more control by launching a separate crawler with indexer for google news that means if you choose to give google one set of instructions for how to treat your content on google news, you can still give another set of instructions for how you would like to be treated for google web search.” Google is also working on testing a service called google fast slip which, as Drummond explained is designed to blend the beauty of the user experience of print with the benefits of the web.