I don’t agree. Free linking has always been a vitally important part of the open internet. The principle that if I make something available on a specific URL, others can access it, and I don’t get to charge others for linking to a public URL is one of the core concepts of the internet itself.
This view is a bit naive in that it doesn’t take into account a lot of variables. It favors established large actors in their ability to extract and accumulate ever more value from the ones they link.
And, with respect, this view is more naive (IMHO) because it’s focused by size of company, and you can’t do that. You can’t have one set of laws for small companies and another set of laws for large companies.
So if Google has to pay to link to IA, then so does DuckDuckGo and any other small upstart search engine that might want to make a ‘wayback machine this site!’ button.
Google unquestionably gets value from the sites they link to. But if that value must be paid, then every other search engine has to pay it also, including little ones like DDG. That basically kills search engines as a concept, because they simply can’t work on that model.
Thus I think your view is more naive, because you’re just trying to stick it to Google rather than considering the full range of effects your policy would have.
You can’t have one set of laws for small companies and another set of laws for large companies.
This is false. We can, and we do. Antitrust laws are one example off the top of my head. There are probably others. The assumption that every actor has to pay the same price is false as well. There are countless examples for this.
Google killed off their own cached pages last month and they’re now using IA as a replacement. Free linking is definitely important, but this is Google we’re talking about, and them using IA to save money - this feels a lot more exploitative if Google isn’t funding them in some way.
I had not realized that. They should absolutely be allowed to do it, but it’s super shitty of them to basically offload that cost onto IA.
IA of course would be well within their rights to try and monetize it. Look at incoming traffic that deep links a cached page and has a Google.com referrer, and throw a splash page or top banner asking for donation.
They better be compensating it…
I don’t know if there is compensation but the internet archive says it’s a collaboration and they seem to be happy about it.
https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/11/new-feature-alert-access-archived-webpages-directly-through-google-search/
I don’t agree. Free linking has always been a vitally important part of the open internet. The principle that if I make something available on a specific URL, others can access it, and I don’t get to charge others for linking to a public URL is one of the core concepts of the internet itself.
This view is a bit naive in that it doesn’t take into account a lot of variables. It favors established large actors in their ability to extract and accumulate ever more value from the ones they link.
And, with respect, this view is more naive (IMHO) because it’s focused by size of company, and you can’t do that. You can’t have one set of laws for small companies and another set of laws for large companies.
So if Google has to pay to link to IA, then so does DuckDuckGo and any other small upstart search engine that might want to make a ‘wayback machine this site!’ button.
Google unquestionably gets value from the sites they link to. But if that value must be paid, then every other search engine has to pay it also, including little ones like DDG. That basically kills search engines as a concept, because they simply can’t work on that model.
Thus I think your view is more naive, because you’re just trying to stick it to Google rather than considering the full range of effects your policy would have.
This is false. We can, and we do. Antitrust laws are one example off the top of my head. There are probably others. The assumption that every actor has to pay the same price is false as well. There are countless examples for this.
Google killed off their own cached pages last month and they’re now using IA as a replacement. Free linking is definitely important, but this is Google we’re talking about, and them using IA to save money - this feels a lot more exploitative if Google isn’t funding them in some way.
I had not realized that. They should absolutely be allowed to do it, but it’s super shitty of them to basically offload that cost onto IA. IA of course would be well within their rights to try and monetize it. Look at incoming traffic that deep links a cached page and has a Google.com referrer, and throw a splash page or top banner asking for donation.