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今天是【最新外刊精读团】的第12节外刊精读直播课，要学习的是3月4日《经济学人》商业版块的一篇文章，讲的是传统的纸媒出版社将Google等有新媒体业务的科技公司告上法庭索赔一事。
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中午12：30开始，我会在视频号直播间和大家一起精读学习这篇外刊文章。课后，还会有针对性的复习检测作业，以帮助同学们消化巩固文章中的语言知识点。
今天外刊精读直播课的学习点：
如何把开头段写得吸人眼球，引人入胜？如何呈现正反双方的说辞？
欢迎大家来直播间一起学习进步！
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Artificial intelligence is reaching behind
newspaper paywallsPublishers long accused tech firms of
profiting from their content. Now they have a pointTHERE WASbig
news in Canada last week—but if you were in Canada
itself you may have missed it. On February 22nd it emerged that Google was blocking access to news content, in a five-week trial affecting about 4% of users in the
country. The measure comes as Canada’s Senate considers
a bill that would force big internet companies to pay publishers for displaying links to their stories. Google says it may simply block them instead; Canada’s government says the search engine’s
actions amount to intimidation.It is the latest episode in a worldwide dispute between new media and old. News organisations, which in the past two decades
have seen most of their advertising revenue disappear online, accuse search
engines and social networks of profiting from content that is not theirs.
Google and Facebook, which have come in for most of the flak, retort that they merely display links and a few lines of text, rather than articles
themselves, and that by doing so they drive traffic to publishers (who in
any case can opt out if they choose). Facebook estimates that it
sends 1.9bn clicks a year to Canadian media, publicity it values at C$230m
($170m).The online platforms’ arguments
have mostly fallen on deaf ears. Cheered on by their domestic
press, governments in countries including Australia, Britain and Spain have
passed or proposed laws aiming to squeeze money out of Silicon Valley
and into local media companies. Australia’s law, passed
in 2021, prodded tech firms to make payments to Australian media
reportedly worth about A$200m ($135m) in the scheme’s first year.To ward off similar legislation elsewhere, Google
and Facebook have set up mechanisms for funnelling “support” to media companies. Google’s “News Showcase” will spend about $1bn in 2020-23 on licensing content from
more than 2,000 news organisations in more than 20 countries. Facebook’s News Tab (in which The Economist has
participated) does something similar, but has lately been scaled back.
Unlike Google, Facebook can live without news, which makes up only 3% of what
users see in their feed.The laws have sometimes had the feel of a shakedown of the wealthy foreign tech firms by governments. But developments in the
search business mean that the publishers’ complaints seem increasingly justified. Search engines have been getting
better at displaying information without referring visitors to external
sources. Ask Google the size of Canada’s population and
it simply tells you that it was 38m in 2021 (followed by its usual list of
suggested websites). About a quarter of desktop Google searches now end with no
onward clicks, according to Semrush, an online marketing company.Artificial intelligence (AI)
promises to improve this capability dramatically. Google’s AI helper,
Bard, is still under wraps. But its rival, incorporated into
Microsoft’s Bing search engine, is already resolvingqueries. Ask the old Bing for a summary of Canada’s last election results and it points to sites including CBC News and the Globe and
Mail. Ask the new Bing and it gives a decent account by itself
(along with footnoted links to sources). AI assistants can even reach behind paywalls. A user trying
to find the New York Times’s recipe for
macaroni and cheese will be stopped by a demand for payment and subscription.
But ask Bing’s AI and
it serves up a paraphrased version of the whole recipe, complete with a
licking-lips emoji.The search companies admit they are still finding their
way with new technology, which is mostly not yet on general release.
That is unlikely to satisfy publishers’ lawyers. The
chief counsel at one large media company argues that AI-search companies should be made to
license the content they regurgitate, just as Spotify has to pay record
labels to play their songs. AI’s use of others’ material is “the copyright question of our times”, he
says. For years the complaints of publishers against platforms have rung somewhat hollow. Now they have a real story on their hands. ■
