Newspapers can stop tech companies from scraping content

Published 1:30 am Friday, September 16, 2022

Regarding the recent editorial (“Google, Facebook ought to pay for news they use,” The Herald, Sept. 7), the editorial board bemoaned technology’s scraping of publishing companies’ content. However, the editorial fails to mention that any competent webmaster can configure a media company’s website from being crawled and displayed by technology companies.

Therefore, if the crawling and distribution of this content is “parasitic,” then why doesn’t a publishing company simply engage this five-minute configuration to stop it? Hint: Publishing company’s ultimately want the clicks these technology companies bring to their website.

Tim Schmitt

Stanwood