Web No Longer Wants To Be So Free

This an editorial from posted from Wolfe's Den - By Alexander Wolfe, InformationWeek
April 7, 2009
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=216403304

Read the article and weigh in with your comments. Would you pay for web news content?

AP Vs. Google Proves Web No Longer Wants To Be So Free

Online reuse has long been governed by a culture in which China is only slightly more of an intellectual-property outlier than your average, 13-year-old Limewire music-file thief. But newspapers are now mad as heck (also, broke) and they're not gonna take it anymore.

So now the Associated Press had added its voice to the growing chorus of newspapers throwing a Google snit fit over the obvious fact that the online search engine giant is doing very well, but the creators of the original content to which it links, well, not so much.

The AP's angle this time is actually a little more nuanced than a blanket "don't use our content." They want to be paid by news aggregators which post up headlines and blurbs from AP stories without permission, and, more than that, they seem to want to set the rules of engagement for such links. This seems reasonable enough in the real world, but online it's shocking because it flies in the face of long-standing Internet expectations. Web reuse has long been governed (or not) by a culture in which China is only slightly more of an intellectual-property outlier than your average, 13-year-old Limewire music-file thief.

Mostly, this latest fracas is little more than a redux of the time-tested "you stole my content; no we didn't, and even if we did, don't you understand the Web wants to be free?" battle. But the urgency is greater than ever before, because the crappy economy has put the newspaper industry into free fall.

Not that the latter has been a quick study. After mostly ignoring online -- and, in fairness, you can't heed that which you don't understand -- newspaper owners have suddenly begun to hammer away at this "Where's my money?" meme. Highest profile was the recent Time magazine cover story -- a magazine, not coincidentally, which everyone knows about but few read -- in which Walter Isaacson argued that newspapers should start charging online.

Also wishing that a desire to put the free-content genie back in the bottle will make it so is Newsday, which has announced an incoherent plan to gate its site. The New York Times, which tried pay-walling its Op-Ed columnists (and other select site elements) with the failed Time Select experiment, halted in September, 2007 after a two-year run, is now making noises about having another go at premium priced posts.

Most famously, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch went on a tear last week, telling newspapers they've got to start charging on the Web if they want to survive. (And to think he owns just about the only site -- WSJ.com -- which makes decent money from online subscription fees!)

The common sense analysis of most of these plans begins and ends with the thought: Good luck with that.

The Wall Street Journal can do the fee-based Web thing, and succeed at it, because it has timely business content which people need (i.e., they perceive they can make money off of it, by, say, trading stocks). Most other sites -- even the vaunted Times, which toted up only about 250,000 paid users during Times Select (not bad, but not Timesian) -- can't say that. No one will pay to read the Podunk Daily News on the Web. Truth be told, many people didn't even read it in the old days when the tabloid was flung onto their front porch. They took it in for the ads and the funnies.

You might make the argument that, if every last single Web site charged, then people would have to pay if they wanted to keep up with the news. Wouldn't they? My answer to that is, no, they wouldn't. They simply wouldn't read the news. They'd play Nintendo, or whatever other time-waster presented itself as a work alternative. (You'd be surprised, or maybe you wouldn't, at the hours during the day when traffic spikes.) So where does Google fit into all this? Pretty surely, Google is the online equivalent of the bank that's so big it can do as it wants. Sure, Google has occasionally pushed the boundaries of fair use. Though in legal fairness, fair use is not a codified (small "c") concept, notwithstanding the fact that it is indeed in the U.S. Code. Rather, what does or does not constitute fair use rests on the body of legal precedent. As the famous Gerald Ford case made clear, you can't determine whether something is fair use or not until you litigate it.

It's also true that Google has proceeded, Pac-Man Like, to gobble up every online data set that's ripe for the taking. (Google Book Search is currently embroiled in battle not dissimilar to the AP challenge.)

Nevertheless, Google got where it is by not by predation, but by filling one great big honking vacuum.

You can't blame them there. Where were all the now-complaining publishing executives when they had a chance to proactively do something about their soon-to-be superfluous industry? The "Web wants to be free" ethos didn't emerge overnight. If you date the emergence of serious content on the Web to 1994, then print had good 12 years to get its act together. Heck, Google wasn't even a force in the early days (it wasn't founded until September, 1998); the primo search engine back then was Alta Vista.

So what it amounts to is that the dead-tree businesses mostly squandered the 1990s, and now they want their cheese back. That's not going to happen. At the same time, it's equally unctuous to have to read the chatter in the blogosphere on how it's all about "adding value." Newspapers, and the AP, do have a point when they point out that one day (soon), if they're unable to pay reporters, there won't be any stories left for bloggers to point to, comment on, "add value to," or otherwise glom off of.

Oh, I forgot. We're all "reporters" now. Spare me. Even most reporters get worn down by the grind after a while. Only people who don't understand what real reporting involves would float such a non-starter of a concept. Perhaps, in the interregnum until a new Web revenue model emerges, good content will be created mostly by new grads, or retired writers. Or possibly it will be outsourced to near-native English speakers reporting on Pasadena City Council meetings from overseas. Who knows?

What I can predict is that, driven by the availability of good open-source content management systems, blogs will evolve from today's A-list-driven Web sideshow into the standard presentation format for most Web sites. (And then blogs won't be blogs, they'll just be. . . sites. Or, all sites will be blogs. The canonical example here of course is Huffington Post. Is it a "site" or a blog? Answer: Yes.)

I'll close with the observation that it seems that, regardless of what newspapers or the AP do at this point, the old game where analog bucks funded the creation of gobs of content, is drawing to a close. At the same time, the explosive growth curve for search-driven ad revenues also appears to be at an end.

Perhaps the legacy folk who are all of a sudden so online-aware can figure out how to put the horse back in the barn (an apt analogy when you're talking newspapers), just like cable TV was able to up-end over-the-air broadcasting. Perhaps Google can learn to create "real" content for no money down. More likely, to paraphrase the immortal words of Rodney King, we'll just have to figure out a way -- one that's as yet apparent to no one -- to all get along.

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