The news industry’s problem has also been my problem. For the past seven years, I ran a team at Google focused on making the web ecosystem more hospitable to news publishers. We built products to make the production of expensive journalism cheaper (giving them cutting-edge AI document analysis and transcription tools), to make it easier for people to buy subscriptions, and to let publishers showcase their editorial viewpoints and thus find their audiences more effectively. In aggregate, these things delivered billions of dollars of value to publishers around the world.
But they did not fundamentally alter the fact that the internet had hollowed out the value of the daily newspaper. Back in the day, if you wanted to know a sports score, a stock quote, a movie showtime, where the garage sales were or what concerts were coming up, you looked in the newspaper. Now, the web allows you to find this information more quickly elsewhere. So, if consumers once had 20 reasons to buy a newspaper, now they had only one: news — the labor-intensive, expensive work of reporting and writing the news — which isn’t a thing advertisers are especially excited to be associated with.
To combat this turn of affairs, news publishers, first in Europe but increasingly around the world, began turning to regulators and legislators to restore their past dominance — or at least their profitability. And I had to figure out how Google would respond to