Google—once the bad-boy revolutionary of the tech world—is increasingly getting a bad rap, and not just in China. One might even say that it has become the new Microsoft—the big, “evil” company it originally meant to challenge. As of late, Google has acquired more and more media companies, to the chagrin of its competitors; it has come into conflict with publishers and libraries regarding its mission to digitize the world’s literature; and it has incurred the wrath of civil libertarians and privacy advocates. But perhaps the most common (and legitimate) lament is that Google profits from others’ hard-earned content through its AdWords revenue model, which relies on precisely focused advertisements associated with specific searches. It’s as if the television networks had to produce shows, but another company got to sell the ads and make the profits.
Fairly or unfairly, many folks now view Google as the digital equivalent of Goldman Sachs: a giant vampire squid sucking on the face of humanity.
It’s not just Google, of course. When I read an essay online by clicking through from RealClearPolitics or another aggregating Web site, I have to watch an ad on that meta-site before passing through to the article. Once there, I read the article and view more ads that accompany the original content. At first blush, it seems like a win-win situation: The aggregating or search site gets paid for its service of curating or filtering the vast sea of sports, political, cultural, and special-interest information on the Web in the form of my page view. Ditto for the popular blogger who embeds her favorite YouTube links into her daily missive and reaps the benefits in advertising revenue. Meanwhile, the end-content provider also gets rewarded with traffic driven to its site, where it, too, can profit by showing ads. And isn’t Google or Yahoo or your friendly neighborhood blogger merely telling Web users the address of a place to visit? That’s not much different than the function of a phone book or a newspaper article that mentions the name of a store.
However, in this model, while the benefits are roughly equivalent—both the referring page and the destination page gain a viewer—the costs are certainly not. As in the parable of the little red hen who baked the bread all by herself, the unequal division of labor is fundamentally unfair. Consider a Web without click-through link references or search engines. To find a particular article, you would have to go to the Web site of The Chronicle or The New York Times, for instance, and browse the publication. In that Web reality, the primary content providers would enjoy the benefits of readers walking the aisles of their store, so to speak, for much longer than is now the case. Others may counter that many fewer people would ever walk into that store in the first place. Yet, in the end, those valid points are somewhat beside the point of what is fair.
We shouldn’t blame Google—or anyone else—for finding the most efficient way to make a buck in the relatively new media landscape of Web 2.0. Instead, we should change the rules so that primary content producers are compensated fairly. Of course, we can’t (and shouldn’t) go back to the old print model of copyright, royalties, and limited fair use. As techies are fond of saying, “Information wants to be free,” and likewise, “Information tends to replicate.” If you post a brilliant essay on your family blog and it goes viral, so that hundreds of other sites link to it and thousands read it, you should benefit from your talent (or luck)—especially if others are commercializing it. And if all my traffic for this essay comes from the fact that you referred your blog’s loyal cadre of readers to it, then you should be rewarded.
The second half of that model already exists. The click-through advertising approach is exactly how Google makes most of its money. Likewise, Amazon gives a cut of profits to Web sites that link to specific titles if a book buyer comes directly from that referring page. But the reverse is not true. If RealClearPolitics links to articles by reporters working for other outlets, the site doesn’t need to pay a dime, even though it would hardly exist without the costly content it curates for free. A simple solution is to make the click-through rule apply both ways. That is, sites that make their money by linking to other sites should give the primary content providers a cut.
To design such a system of “linkrights,” we would start by establishing a share rate, based on a ratio of the number of unique viewers who click through to the total number of unique visitors. For example, if you link to an article on your for-profit blog or search engine, and 100 of your 1,000 page viewers click through to it, then you owe the content provider 10 percent of your commercial revenue because 10 percent of your appeal is based on your piggybacking on the news organization that owns the copyright to the article. Let’s say, however, that you link to a whole bunch of other Web sites. Then the 10 percent of revenue (based on a total click-through rate that’s still 100 out of 1,000) is split among those providers according to the proportion of click-throughs that are going to each of them. So, in that case, The Chronicle or The Times might get only a portion of the 10 percent. Enforcement of such a law may at first seem like a nightmare, but Web traffic and e-commerce is actually much easier to keep track of than offline business. Determining who owes what would just mean a bigger role for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the agency charged with linking IP addresses to Web sites, possibly in coordination with domain-registry services like Go Daddy, Yahoo, or Google.
That approach differs from the “micropayments” idea suggested by many newspapers and magazines, in which users pay a small amount—as low as a quarter of a cent—to view content online. Another version of that idea imagines an E-ZPass for the Internet, which automatically bills you at minuscule rates as you surf through various paid sites. But such a user-pays model doesn’t really fit the medium. Television—with its free content paid for through advertising—is a better analogy to what would work on the Internet. And if there is one thing that the Internet is good at, it’s advertising.
Before scholars and Internet libertarians freak out, we should remember that most Web sites, and the relations among those sites, would be unaffected, since most are not for-profit ventures. You could still post your favorite articles on your blog with no worries about linkrights as long as you were not commercializing your Web page. In other words, even if you have 100,000 viewers for your essay on the scientific method, in which you link to many other sites to provide examples of your points, you still have nothing to worry about, as long as you are not charging folks to read your content or selling advertising space. Scholarship and the free exchange of ideas on the Internet can proceed unaffected. It doesn’t matter even if the sites you link to are for-profit. But the moment you make money in the process of referring to another page—whether through advertising or direct sales—you must share a percentage of that revenue with the page to which you refer. That royalty would be given to content providers even if they themselves aren’t selling anything.
For scholars, linkrights could bring in an automatic flow of revenue, if for-profit sites link to their work. In that case, universities (which host many sites) and researchers and writers (if they host their own Web sites) will need to pay out a proportion of their revenue to the downstream sites to which they, in turn, link. It sounds like a logistical nightmare, yes. But it is quite easy to track Web traffic. Most sites are doing just that already (and the Amazon or Google AdWords model already provides the technology). And since the ultimate downstream revenue collectors are organizations that are already filing with the IRS, thanks to their advertising revenue, compliance in a highly annotated medium such as the Internet does not pose a big problem.
While the numbers may need to be tweaked, the goal of linkrights is a return to market balance: You get what you pay for, and you pay for what you get. The establishment of linkright law would do much to restore order to the ether universe. Hey, it may even save old-media dinosaurs like this one, which provide a public service with their expensive reporting.
