> Of course, the change could reduce traffic to French news sites. Google says that if news sites want Google to start showing snippets again, they just have to give Google permission to do so.

> This isn't what advocates of the law had in mind.

Yeah... I think a bunch of us here expected exactly this outcome. Warned about it, even.

> Their goal wasn't to make European news sites less prominent in search results—it was to convince Google to start paying licensing fees. But Google is signaling that it has no intention of doing that.

Good for Google.

Highly tangential comment:

> every ad on Google is clearly marked

Personally, the few times I use a browser without an ad blocker lately I find myself confused about what is an ad until I go hunting for text to indicate it. I click links in YouTube for channels I don’t follow thinking I may have followed them at some point too, since they appear in my sub feed. This “clearly marked” point is not true in any but the most technical sense

The YouTube app now shows ads for adult dating apps every few lines.

It's almost as if it has gone rouge.

When you put something out in the world for free, the expectation is that it is free. Trying to charge selectively to only certain companies is discrimination and violates the spirit of net neutrality.

Not always true. I recently heard a famous band's song playing in the lobby of a hospital.

I can listen to this music freely on Youtube (or torrenting) from the same band. But I think that in the hospital application of this music, it is probably written somewhere that the hospital needs to pay the band a licensing fee for "commercial use".

They put it out for free because they make money on ads. Publishers don't mind Google reading the the content on their page, but don't like Google republishing their content on search results page and keeping the ad revenue. This has nothing to do with net neutrality.