They would rather stop showing those extracts in Switzerland than pay the fee.
I think there already was case like this with either Google or Meta somewhere around Europe few years back. Or it might’ve been actual search results instead of extracts. The decision was overriden shortly as their web traffic dropped drastically. They’ll 100% do this and don’t think twice.
This was also tried in Canada and Australia. Here’s the story in the EU:
Germany made this kind of law in 2013. This was struck down in 2019 because of a formality. The EU had not been notified in advance, as would have been required in such a matter. (outdated and incomplete WP entry)
Then the industry lobbied the EU and got such a law enacted EU wide in 2021. The press is still extremely influential in Europe and causes a lot of damage as it struggles against its inevitable decline.
The problem with these laws, as others have pointed out, is that tech companies will simply follow them. Outrageous, no? Well, it is when you’re a copyright head. The press made licensing deals, but they want much, much more money.
The latest splash was a few months ago when Google made an experiment to better estimate the revenue they generate from news content. In France, the press went to court and got an injunction that stopped the experiment.
That happened in Canada as well a while back.
Funny story though, web extracts that become visible when you share a link for example on a social media platform or even through a text message are actually “controlled” by the source website.
This means the short summary that can range from a sentence to a few sentences is actually completely in the hands of the source website and is not actually “scrapped” when the link is shared.
Wasn’t it with Axel Springer (Bild & co)?
Sounds like a lot of Swiss newspapers are going to notice a sudden and drastic dive in their web traffic.
Absolutely correct, Canadian Newspaper pulled the same thing, but they also blocked social media sites from sharing or posting links to their sites, blaming the links were “summarized”. Their argument was the links were being summarized and users were not visiting the Newspapers website.
So social media sites blocked all links of Canadian news, then Newspapers cried foul after a drop in traffic.
Funny enough when you see a summarized link, such as ones that show a picture and maybe a sentence, the content shown in that summary is directly controlled by the site being linked.
They’ll blame this for more ads and enough people will say, “Oh, that makes sense.”
Kill AI Switzerland. I believe in you now !
