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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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Technology
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I don’t have a ton of knowledge in this area, but this seems like it should run afoul of antitrust regulations?
Who should be regulated, Google or Reddit? Reddit updated there robots.txt to disallow everything. As it's their site, I guess it's also their right to determine that. They then made a deal with Google, which I guess is also not abusing a dominant position by Google, as Reddit could have made a deal with anyone.
Yeah but reddit made a deal with google because google’s the big player.
It’s hard to say, but I’d lead toward Google on this one. How does reddit benefit from only being indexed by one search engine? Google must have offered them something more, to make it in reddit’s best interests.
In other words, this deal naturally benefits only google, at the cost of value to reddit and to the public. So google must be doing something that makes it worth it to reddit. Could be threat of punishment: “You give us exclusive crawl access, or we don’t crawl you”.
In 2023, Reddit decided to start charging exorbitant amounts for API access, making it non-viable for free 3rd party apps to access its content, citing things like AI crawlers "stealing" their (users') content.
In 2024, Google announced an agreement with Reddit to access the API, citing things like enhanced up to date search results. I don't recall having seen whether they pay for it, or how much, but possibly they do.
It would stand to reason, that if Reddit has managed to get a single dime for API access, and they keep thinking free access to their users' content is "stealing", then Reddit would be interested in making it as hard as possible to access the content without paying.
That could've been part of the agreement: "You give us cheap/free API access, or we don't crawl you".
Reddit tightening things down while trying to sell API access, just happens to benefit Google.