I wonder how the quoted "royalty-style system" would work. If it's anything like reverse ads where Google and Facebook pay per click/impression, what's to stop them from simply boycotting Australian news sites?
Apparently they'll have to boycott all news sites. I hope they are able to challenge this law in the courts.
> "They can't discriminate between international and Australian news. So they can't turn off Australian news and just use international news. That's discrimination. This is a mandatory code, the platforms must participate. They could stop showing news media on their platforms completely – that is, no local or international media – but short of that, they are compelled."
“In 2019, Google stopped showing news snippets from European publishers on search results for its French users, while Germany’s biggest news publisher, Axel Springer, allowed the search engine to run snippets of its articles after traffic to its sites to plunged.“
This is the sad reality, this is why these companies can do whatever they want. There is always someone who sells out and forces everyone to give in.
It depends on if others follow. Australia and New Zealand are outliers when it comes to freedom of speech/expression anyway. They officially censor the media through a censorship office. I believe this doesn't affect the news directly, but movies and video games (I don't know about books) can't be published without government approval. That hasn't really had much of an effect for the rest of the world other than people making fun of Australia.
I really hope they just block all the news sites from their platforms. Let's see how they like it when thier traffic dries up. From other reporting I've read the law does say they have to treat domestic and international news the same so it could cause an issue with that approach.
Yeah, honestly, that's what I hope they do. The amount of entitlement and this holier than thou attitude among the media is pretty annoying. Figure out how to make money like any other business. And if you can't, we'll then I guess you don't matter that much.
I would 100% support this mindset if tech giants paid taxes where they make their money. I don't know what the situation is like in Australia but in Europe it's pretty insane. You can't abuse the system on one side and then argue the "efficient market hypothesis" on the other.
Google&friends are not making money and competing "like any other business".
Several big-enough companies use tax loopholes to avoid paying taxes or lobby the government themselves.
This is not specific to big tech though, it's a single point of failure of having a centralised government that is easily corrupted by rich corporations.
This reads like sealioning. You really can't see why an entity A that gives 1% in taxes is at an advantage in competing with an entity that gives say 20% in taxes?
but this behaviour (as said above) is not unique to tech. All sufficiently large, sufficiently multinational businesses effectively stop paying the full rate of tax
Have a look at these. If you can afford to pay lawyers to set schemes up like this, then you are at a competitive advantage against businesses which pay regular tax.
Take the billions of dollars that you've saved from BEPS and use it to subsidize your local products, or run ads attacking the competition, or taking them to court, or hire salespeople, or build new content. Simple.
Right and say BMW, VW etc are not doing the exact same thing?
There is trade imbalance between US and say Germany if both sides introduce equivalent measures it will hurt EU more than it hurts US.
BMW and VW are not doing the exact same thing. They pay taxes to the US IRS for their profits made in the US. The argument against Google and Facebook is based on their use of profit-shifting to avoid taxes on European profits.
> They pay taxes to the US IRS for their profits made in the US.
That's plain wrong. Every company only pays income tax in its country of residence. The only difference is that there might be a sales tax for physical goods.
>Every company only pays income tax in its country of residence.
That is not correct. Taxes are payable wherever the profits are made.
It is usually the case that the country where the company is headquartered will have a far greater proportion of profits compared to revenue because a lot of the things that add value happen there, but in the case of large tech companies, this is taken to the extreme, where not just profits, but even revenue itself is shifted from where the business actually happens.
For example, Google reported £1.6bn (US$2.1bn) in revenue and paid £44m ($58m) in corporation taxes (on profits of £231m ($303m) based on a 19% tax rate) in the UK for the 2019-20 financial year, but its actual UK revenue is estimated to be around £5.7b ($7.5b) for the same period.[1]
Whereas car companies have consumers as their customers and have to pay sales tax, AdWords expenditure by businesses is considered a business expense and is not taxed (in the UK). If they played by the same rules, they would have paid around £1.14b ($1.5b; based on 20% VAT) in tax in 2019-20, instead of £44m.
> Taxes are payable wherever the profits are made.
No, with regard to income tax that's simply wrong.
That said, public companies typically have subsidiaries in other countries and these subsidiaries have to pay corporate income tax in their country of residence (but also regardless of where the profits are actually made). This is often used to avoid (or delay) tax payments, especially if the subsidiaries are in low-tax countries.
But if the parent company Apple Inc. sold an iPhone in Germany, they wouldn't have to pay income tax in Germany, just like BMW AG doesn't have to pay income tax in the US.
That's wrong. It's also well known, western companys pay no taxes for factorys in 3rd world countrys since ever. Even they produce real things in a country.
Countries are competing in a market for tax revenue too. If a country wants more tax revenue from a business, they can either close the legal loopholes that allow the business to reduce the amount of tax that they pay or make their tax laws more competitive with those of other countries.
I like your comment, not sure if you are joking though. A few decades ago when I started reading William Gibson’s cyber punk sci-fi, I often wondered if the corporate run enclaves in his stories would anticipate real events.
If the police are defunded, I'd bet that private security companies would fill the void and we'd be well on our way to "Stephensonion" being the next "Orwellian"!
How does exploiting tax loopholes have anything to do with the success of news media? Arbitrary fines and taxes are one thing. Forcing Google and Facebook to help the news sets a completely new precedent.
Thats fair, and I would question anyone getting all their news from the Daily show or last week tonight. Its incredibly biased.
Australia's problem is that our news orgs are corrupt to the core, every journo is afraid to go against Murdoch in any way shape or form their careers are ended if they do.
So here we are, with this "comedian," doing a better reporting job than pretty much every single outlet in the country. With very few exceptions.
I hear the media say this all around the world all the time, and they of course always mean themselves... But is it true? There are many and many independent reporters with their blogs and twitters (do we call that media?), independent news sites (that probably is media) that are not with the mainstream media on these legal requirements, and actually in my country the mainstream media is so corrupt a half of the population simply does not care about them and get their news from other sources, like blogs and twitter.
An amusing angle on this situation. If you go back thirty or twenty years, it is hard to think of an industry better-positioned to capture the momentum of the internet than the news media.
(1) They had teams of people producing regular fresh content, to a high quality.
(2) They had existing subscriber bases, which could have been converted to other purposes (consider the online dating services offered by some of the UK newspapers.)
(3) They had existing economies of scale from business lines which were not dependent on the internet, buffering them against dot com downturns and the like.
(4) Several of them had other divisions producing other good content. e.g. motion picture rights.
(5) They had international presence, and internal connectivity.
(6) Many had existing consumer-connectivity through cable relationships.
Yet. None created geek-friendly workplaces, they were too tied to their cash cows, and they have done badly.
We just found a legislative way to break the Google search monopoly - more countries pass this sort of "pay to play" barrier, and Google says no, and then there's space for competitors.
There's nothing preventing the news from alternative models now. It just turns out employing a bunch of people to repost tweets isn't a profitable business and forcing other companies to pay them via the law doesn't work any better.
I can't imagine the population of any country would be too happy when google.com returns a "Service discontinued due to law blah blah blah" when they want to look up how to beat eggs.
> Media companies including News Corp Australia, a unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (NWSA.O), lobbied hard for the government to force the U.S. companies to the negotiating table amid a long decline in advertising revenue.
No it's a fairly well established meme in Australia that the Liberal Party is conservative.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Liberal Party themselves promote the meme to try to win conservative votes away from the actual (socially) conservative parties. It sort of makes sense. The leaders of the Liberal Party are usually some combination of lawyer/dopey/religious but their policies are significantly less partisan.
Most left wing parties in the world sit on the right side of the economic spectrum (with eg. North Korea being an exception).
For more info: https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2
Sure, right wing parties say they want to lower taxes (but rarely do so) and left wing parties say they want to increase them (and often do so) but we're talking more about brand marketing and appealing to voters than significant changes.
Right wing parties tend to be more authoritarian on some themes (gay marriage, drugs).
Left wing parties tend to be more authoritarian on other themes (hate speech, gun control, more regulations).
No one in politics really care about individual freedom if not to please voters close to the elections.
We definitely should adopt a different system to categorise political parties - but to me the Australian Liberal Party looks liberal enough for today's world.
How is introducing a regressive tax that removed other duties, levies and taxes "left-wing"?
How is being the only major party with MPs voting against same-sex marriage despite the public plebisciting for it "left-wing"?
I'll give you the other two though, but on the welfare package that Labor introduced following the GFC they (and of course News Corp) would not shut up about how terrible a thing it was, despite Australia being the only country to come out of the crisis mostly unscathed.
I didn't say they're left-wing so I have no idea who you're quoting there. I just said that they're not conservative, and I stand behind that.
On the plebiscite/postal survey though: the government in Australia isn't bound by the results of it. It's just a survey. The fact that the Liberal Party put the result into law[0] within 48 hours is their own doing, submitted by an LGBT member of the party no less.
A conservative party would fundamentally not do this.
You can scroll down in the linked Wikipedia article to see how everyone voted. You won't exactly see significant, genuine opposition. There was arguably more opposition from the left-leaning alternative, the Australian Labor Party, that had the most people abstain in the senate.
Wasn't it a Labor prime minister that called the Senate 'unrepresentative swill'?
> A conservative party would fundamentally not do this.
Experiences in Canada, Austria, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand (of particular relevance to Australia), Sweden, the UK where conservatives in power had at least some if not most of their representatives vote LGBT marriage in is evidence to the contrary. Or is it that they aren't really "conservative" either by some arbitrary yardstick?
And to say that they allowed its members to vote how they actually always wanted to vote (now there's a democratic deficit) within '48 hours' after delaying it for months and toddling around with a voluntary postal survey for BASIC CIVIL RIGHTS for months and months after years of intransigence is highly disingenuous.
This is a pretty misleading comment that ignores much of the context of the vote as well as the different parties that vote for it. It's easy to point to the vote totals of two parties (missing out the Greens and Nationals votes of course, because that doesn't fit the narrative) and skip the months of complaining from the Liberal Party before they demanded an antiquated and expensive (AU$80 million) plebiscite. The Liberal Party was forced by the voters to pass this amendment, and they certainly didn't do it without a fight.
> and skip the months of complaining from the Liberal Party
It was clear the economic right faction of the Liberals wanted a mandate from the people so that they could push past the socially conservative faction.
They were being blocked for months by the left - because it benefited the greens and labor politically to position the Liberals as anti-LGBT.
Yes, the left blocked holding a voluntary postal survey to enshrine basic civil rights because it’s dumb on its face, but the Liberals threatening to end the careers of the people who would vote isn’t?
All the Liberals would have needed to say is “conscience vote” and it would have been done. That aside, if passing basic civil rights would threaten the stability of the party, then that’s kind of a shitty party.
Yet the Liberals threatening their own MPs with ending their careers if they vote their conscience wasn’t playing politics?
And you do know that there was real damage done through the process? Gay people got messages of hate and exclusion as it provided excellent fodder for the grubs to come out of the woodwork to spike vile hatred. There was real damage done during the process when all Turnbull had to do was a snap of the finger and it’d not get put through the process that it did.
Also love the part where you seem to be completely ignorant of Howard legislating to make gay marriage unambiguously forbidden. In 2004.
> Yet the Liberals threatening their own MPs with ending their careers if they vote their conscience wasn’t playing politics?
Of course they were playing politics - why would you sacrifice party unity when you can shame your political opponents on the left and still get the outcome you want?
You don’t seem to understand that your allies playing politics with something you really care about is completely different from your opponents playing politics with the same topic.
> Also love the part where you seem to be completely ignorant of Howard legislating to make gay marriage unambiguously forbidden. In 2004.
The term "conservative" is relative. What is considered "conservative" by the standards of one society may be considered "liberal" by the standards of another.
I think part of the confusion is that some wrongly judge the Australian Liberal Party by American political standards. Conservative parties in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, often make decisions which would be considered "liberal" in an American context, but are actually centrist (or sometimes even right-wing) in the context of their own countries. A good example is the Medicare levy surcharge was introduced by the Howard government, to penalise middle and high income earners that don't take out private health insurance; in the Australian context that was a conservative decision (it was designed to prop up private health insurers, and many on the Australian left viewed it as a threat to the public health system and a form of corporate welfare), yet when the US adopted more or less the same policy (an insurance mandate) as part of Obamacare, that was a liberal one.
The other issue is the ambiguity between "classical liberalism" vs "social liberalism"/"left liberalism"/"modern liberalism". The term "Liberal" in the name of the Australian Liberal Party is a reference to the former not the later. Classical liberalism has a huge amount of overlap with many versions of conservatism.
And even "conservatism" comes in many different forms, and different forms of conservatism can lead to very different policies. In the US, some conservatives argue for an aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East; others argue that the US should stay out of other countries' business. Both viewpoints are conservative, just the product of different versions of conservatism (neoconservative vs palaeoconservative). Similarly, while mainstream US conservatism combines "economic conservatism" (low and flat taxation, small and balanced government budget, low regulation, free trade, etc) with social conservatism, a significant minority of American social conservatives oppose economic conservatism (e.g. distributism, Catholic social teaching, Patrick Buchanan, The American Conservative magazine, etc)
> Conservative parties in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, often make decisions which would be considered "liberal" in an American context, but are actually centrist (or sometimes even right-wing) in the context of their own countries.
This is definitely true for fiscal issues or social welfare, and I think the example you provided is quite appropriate here, but compared to many places (particularly in the part of Europe where I live) I think the reverse is true about the US for social issues.
On certain social issues the US is more liberal than a number of European countries. The US achieved same-sex marriage nationally in 2015 (before Austria, Germany and Finland did), but five years later it still hasn't happened in Italy or Switzerland, and in a number of Central and Eastern European countries the popular and government attitude towards it is positively hostile.
Similarly, despite abortion being such a political hot potato in the US, Roe v Wade ensures that US abortion laws are on the whole more liberal than those of a number of European countries.
On the other hand, if you look at an issue like the death penalty, the US retains it federally and in a majority of states, while every European country has officially abolished it except for Belarus. Even in Russia, whose government often takes quite conservative stances on social issues such as LGBT rights, it is officially abolished (although you could argue that the frequency of extrajudicial killings in Russia means that true abolition has not yet been achieved in practice.) And, death penalty aside, the US approach to criminal law is far more punitive than that of many European countries, and US policing also tends to be a bit of an outlier in terms of aggressiveness and brutality.
I think on social issues it really depends on which particular social issues you are most concerned with.
Same-sex marriage is at least planned in Switzerland. However, I think taking this sole issue as a measure of overall LGBTQ acceptance is too simplistic. Switzerland has had civil unions since 2007 and just recently, about 60% of Swiss people voted for a law explicitly outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Switzerland is traditionally more slow-moving in terms of laws because of its insistence of making sure legislative changes are accepted by the population at large (with its initiatives and referenda), whereas in the US and many other countries, interested parties anywhere on the political spectrum can often quickly decide an issue if they happen to be in power.
This doesn't mean that the general attitudes of the population towards LGBTQ in Switzerland are or ever were worse than in the US. I have a feeling, that in general, attitudes tend to be very diverse in the US, with some areas / circles being totally in support and others in very strong opposition, whereas Switzerland tends to be a bit more homogeneous. Switzerland certainly doesn't have such a strong undercurrent of evangelical voters for which things like LGBTQ and traditional marriage (or also abortion etc.) are such a major driving factor (sure, those people exist, but they tend to exist more at the fringes). I also don't recall any debates about bakers not wanting to bake cakes for gay couples or any of that sort of nonsense.
That's not to claim that there is no homophobia in Switzerland, there certainly is. But I can't really believe that it's worse than the US.
Thanks for your comment. I am the GP commenter and in fact live in Switzerland, and this is one component of what I was implicitly referring to but I think your comment describes the situation more fairly than I implied. However, I think another aspect I might consider with respect to social conservatism are differences in immigration/integration and cultural diversity, as it seems both countries handle this somewhat differently given their relatively distinct histories.
> However, I think another aspect I might consider with respect to social conservatism are differences in immigration/integration and cultural diversity, as it seems both countries handle this somewhat differently given their relatively distinct histories.
Where does Switzerland stand on immigration and cultural diversity issues? I don't have your personal experience of the topic (and I'd love to hear you elaborate in more detail about that), but here are a few facts I know about:
* About a quarter of the Swiss population is foreign-born. That is very high by the standards of the Western world (the US is only around 13%), few Western countries would exceed that (Australia and New Zealand are the only ones I know of). So in that sense, Switzerland does have an openness to immigration which exceeds that of any other European country.
* Switzerland's rules around naturalisation are very tough. A lot tougher than most European countries, or most Western countries.
* In 2009 Switzerland amended its constitution (by popular vote) to ban new minarets on mosques. I think that's quite outrageous discrimination against a religious minority. In a country like the UK (for example), they'd probably never allow a referendum on such an offensive proposal. I think it violates the European Convention on Human Rights, as religious discrimination. But, the European Court of Human Rights declared a case against it inadmissible on the grounds that the complainant didn't have any personal plans to build a minaret. (If a Swiss mosque was to file a case, they'd at least get past that initial admissibility hurdle, but I'm not aware that they have.)
So overall I'd say Switzerland's record on immigration and cultural diversity is a mixed bag. There are some positive elements (the high percentage of foreign-born population) and some negatives (difficult naturalisation and Islamophobic constitutional amendments).
But before you try to say the US's record on these topics is better, just remember who is in the White House right now and what he has had to say on the topic of immigration and cultural diversity.
So it isn't entirely clear to me who actually comes out in front in a comparison of Switzerland and US on this topic. And, consider also there are 40+ other countries in Europe, some of which arguably do better (in some areas) than Switzerland does on these issues, others have their own serious problems in those areas.
Switzerland is just much more homogeneous, we do have 4 different languages (with associated cultural differences), but there has never been the sort of tensions or outright discrimination as there has been in the US with black people.
But, having lived in Switzerland for most of my life, I unfortunately feel that there is a very strong undercurrent of xenophobia, to the point that parts of it are even accepted among more left-wing circles.
If you look at the history of Switzerland, there have been multiple civil wars between Catholics and Protestants, from the 16th through to the 19th centuries. So tensions have certainly been there for much of Swiss history.
That ended in the 19th century, however, and in the 20th and 21st centuries, those religious tensions are not what they used to be. (That's not something unique to Switzerland; most European countries, religious tensions people used to kill each other over, nobody cares about any more. Here in Australia, my grandfather told me how as a Catholic in the 1940s, he couldn't get certain jobs because some employers refused to hire Catholics, and the law let them get away with that. But, I've never heard in contemporary Australia of someone refusing to hire a Catholic, indeed nowadays it would be illegal for a secular employer to do so.)
Certainly you are right, that however bad Catholic-Protestant tension may have been in Swiss history, it still was nothing compared to the treatment of African-Americans.
The US has a reputation as being more "conservative" than Europe. In some areas that reputation is justified, in others not. (And the situation is dynamic and changes over time.) If one wants to compare politics overall between the US and Europe, focusing on one single European country may not add that much, especially a country like Switzerland which is in some areas an outlier.
> Switzerland is traditionally more slow-moving in terms of laws because of its insistence of making sure legislative changes are accepted by the population at large (with its initiatives and referenda), whereas in the US and many other countries, interested parties anywhere on the political spectrum can often quickly decide an issue if they happen to be in power.
Ireland approved same-sex marriage in a national referendum in 2015. (A referendum was necessary because the opposite-sex definition of marriage was enshrined in the Irish constitution.) Five years later, Switzerland still hasn't had a national referendum on the topic. So I'm not sure if Switzerland's slowness on this issue has anything to do with its political emphasis on referendums.
And in the case of the US, it wasn't achieved nationally through legislative changes, but rather through a decision of the US Supreme Court. The US Supreme Court has a long history of being far more willing to get involved in heated social and political debates than equivalent courts in many other countries, whose constitutional court instead tries to dodge them and leave them up to the democratic process.
> This doesn't mean that the general attitudes of the population towards LGBTQ in Switzerland are or ever were worse than in the US
I don't know enough about the culture of Switzerland to disagree, so I will accept your point. But, it still represents an area in which the US legal system is to the left of Switzerland's, even if substantial pockets of US culture may be to the right of Switzerland on the same issue. Law, politics and culture are deeply interconnected, yet distinct.
Let's not pretend the liberal party is some bastion of LGBT rights, gay marriage was only passed after the politicians in Australia dragged each other through the mud for so long that the question was eventually put to a non binding plebiscite that they followed through on.
It's got multiple personalities, which are at battle with each other.
The party was founded as a party of social liberals (with conservative economics), but for the last 3 decades has been eaten from the inside by a socially conservative wing resulting in a misnomer. The conservatives could have their own party, but the Liberal name and the remaining perception of liberalism attracts votes, as shown by the "Australian Conservatives" party which broke away from the Liberals and couldn't attract enough votes to survive.
Well, it did back in the 18th century when the left/right split was first named and well into the 19th - it represented the split between monarchists and opponents in the French assembly after the revolution, and so the liberals made up most of the original left.
You see the after-effects in e.g. Norway, where the liberal party is literally named "Venstre" ("Left")
It's just that most places the liberals have been firmly out-flanked on the left since.
Technically probably correct, but it seems like the wrong comparison?
Compare them to the G20 or OECD or similar.
The Australian Liberal Party are pretty practical, they keep their nutters out of power, they didn't put forward a comedy prime minister, and they have a sense of duty towards the country.
But, they're definitely a conservative party. The Treasurer cited Reagan and Thatcher as his inspirations this week.
Yup. I was in Spain from March to May. It was annoying to be in the habit of typing "news.google.com" when trying to get news on COVID-19. It wasn't hard to bypass, but it was annoying.
It wasn't for me it's hard, in reverse. I no longer live in Spain, haven't for 10 years. But every time I go to Google News I get the message of it not being available in my country. My primary language in my Google account isn't Spanish, my address isn't in Spain, my Google Wallet has a non Spanish card on it, so on and so forth, yet I can only access Google News when I'm logged out.
Off topic but I had the same issue. Did you change your Google payment profile? (which has nothing to do with all the profile addresses you can set in various places)
Because you can't actually change your country on your Google payment profile. You need to create a new one and then switch the new one.
I had to do this to switch my US account to an EU account with the EU GDPR user consent options. Your Google account is tied to the payment profile country AFAIK.
The article says that European countries "tried and failed" to rein in the tech giants. Although I'm not sure if shutting down Google News is actually "tried and failed" so much as "tried and succeeded, but not according to first preference".
I mean, if you can't go to google news to get your news, maybe you do go directly to the website of some major news company (and get a monoculture).
While it's not the selling point politically, I think those lobbying for things like this are very much happy with any monoculture that results.
With services like Google News, people can get exposed to news from various media outlets, but by killing it through lobbying for absurd regulatory burdens on aggregators the well known larger outlets can choke out access to their competition. This of course is hampered to some extent by the reality that many will just rely on other users posting on social media for news updates, and if that too is choked out through regulation on platforms, many will probably just skip the news or reduce their consumption in favor of other things like entertainment.
I used to use Google News to find different articles from different companies whenever a news story interested me. It was good to get often very different points of view.
I now just spend a little time on Apple News+ to skim what is happening. While I am locking myself more into a mono culture just looking at US news, I decided that I needed to greatly decrease the amount of time I spent on the news every day.
The world situation is what it is. I try to accept the world as-is, invest as little time as possible understanding the world and concentrate on my own productivity, fellowship with friends and family, and generally appreciating culture and nature.
News watching is an addiction that too many of my friends have.
Danish news have never been on Google News, even though Google News launched in Sweden and Norway. Back around 2005-2006, the Danish newspapers fought hard to forbid "systematic deep linking" to their news.
We're still able to find Danish news by Google search though, it's only the aggregation that Danish media is afraid of, as they are afraid to loose out on a lot of income on the ads they show while people browse their websites.
Doesn't the news you choose to read tell Google a lot about you?
Google is very good about shuttering projects that doesn't make them money. I'm sure if they're still running the service. It's making them money some how.
Brand recognition? Customer goodwill? Not everything needs to be outright profitable. Google has a lot of money to spend on sending small gifts in random directions. Source: as a Googler I got paid to literally "go find some vulnerable projects on Github and send a PR to patch them"[1]. Google does not make money in any way from things like that, but keeps doing them, just because they can.
It's not that hard to monetize interest in damn near _anything_ (as long as it is not clearly illegal, I guess). For the two examples you've posted, maybe advertise flights/vacations to Singapore if you show a persistent interest in Singapore, and market model rockets, space flight simulator toys, really all sorts of consumer-grade commodity products adjacent to the space industry.
The big publishers are asking for $600m to $1b (roughly 10% - 15%) of Google and Facebook's local revenue. I doubt news earns them anywhere near that amount.
This is not about Google News, this includes Google Search.
> Mr Sims said if Google took a similar approach to its actions in Spain when it was asked to pay for news on its Google News tab, it would be irrelevant because the code covered news content in Google's primary function, search.
And lose the billions of revenue over a few million in news payments?
Of course not. Good on the Australian Government for putting them in a position where they actually have to contribute rather than taking their toys home and pouting
> News Corp has suggested the number is closer to $1 billion.
I highly doubt these companies will fork over a billion dollars each to just stay in Australia. Australia needs Google more than Google needs Australia.
Murdoch's empire is fading fast in Australia. The Australian, Foxtel, the print papers are all on their last legs. Their streaming offering Binge is laughably bad - it's only 1080p and works on barely any devices. They could well be done here too.
"In the first instance, the Government has announced that the mandatory code of conduct will apply to Facebook and Google. However, the Treasurer may also make subsequent instruments in the future designating other platforms where fundamental bargaining power imbalances with Australian news businesses emerge." https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20EM%2...
I agree that a country could easily go without Google Search, there's enough competitors in that space and they all do mostly the same thing that people would quickly switch with no issues.
The bigger problem would be Australians giving up YouTube, and to a lesser extent Android if Google Play Services is withdrawn.
There's no real competitor to YouTube, and especially during the virus where everyone's at home with nothing to do going without it would be a major pain point for many Australians. The country wouldn't collapse but it would be a big deal.
That's all assuming Google withdraws entirely from the country of course.
The tele providers would love that the play store went offline and get replacements. It is quite silly that they ship with Google Play as default actually I guess they are forced by Google.
Youtube on the other hand would be a caltural loss due to the network effect even if replacements would be plenty.
They already "pay money" to develop and maintain it, you think it has zero value for them? It is a loss leader to keep you stuck on the Google brand and make Google the default for every type of search. That has enormous value. And this probably applies to Google search as well. They will just simply fight this until it goes away, because it will have implications for all other content, because why would news be special? What about blogs? What about any other original content?
But I think this could be bad for competition too. How can someone enter the market for search if you have to jump through so many hoops? Google will try to work a deal that works well for them and tries to lock out competition as well by making the startup cost high.
My hope is that it ends up forcing them to be more friendly to publishers in how they send them traffic and how they appropriate their content. But I don't think money should change hands to let them use the content.
Business idea: Get GPT-3 to churn out newsy-sounding stories for next to nothing and host them in Australia where the government forces other companies to pay you for them. Free money.
Another flailing grasp at new media as Rupert Murdoch's tabloid empire loses its grip on the future.
I am only disappointed that our government would be complicit.
Make no mistake, I am no new media fan boy. In fact I hope this has the side effect of cleaning up the misinformation that spins around Facebook et al. But it is still sad to see such an obvious manipulation of our government.
> I am only disappointed that our government woild be complicit.
Hell, Uncle Rupert is the reason why we've had more of the coalition in power than we otherwise would have. Why would they bite the hand that feeds them when they can bite of a piece of Google's pie and regurgitate it into Murdoch's ugly maw instead.
Google, shut down Google News the second this passes, please. I don't want a single cent to go to the conglomerate that was at least partially responsible for bringing us Trump, Johnson and Morrison. And Bush, Thatcher and Howard.
Hmmm... been downvoted and flagged. Here's my personal playlist I made for the day when Rupert Murdoch finally bites the dust, just a collection of ideas for those who read this article and are pushed to finally make their own if his actions over 89 hate-fuelled years haven't been enough already: "Fanfare for the Common Man", "Beautiful Day", "I gotta feeling", "Celebration", "Walking On Sunshine", "We Are The Champions", "Holiday", "Heal the World", "Lovely Day", "Another One Bites The Dust", "Don't Stop Believin'", "Chariots Of Fire".
Don't you think "we are the champions" is way overplayed? I suggest "Don't stop me now" if you want to stick Queen. Or maybe "I'm Still Standing" by Elton John if you want something a more gloating in this context.
It doesn't look like a flailing grasp to me. It looks to me like the press has way too much power and influence and uses it to get policy bad for the public but good for the press.
This idea that the press is dying just because its revenue is drying up isn't rooted in reality. The press has enough influence to just make the public give it money, bypassing the whole "sell stuff" part of the model. For example, Canada just gave the press, as an industry, $595 million of the public's money for some reason.
No, the press is more powerful than ever. And why? Because if you have something nice and the press hates you, you're very likely to lose that nice thing.
The Australian media landscape is a highly unethical duopoly that undermines democracy. And the alternative seems to be people getting their "news" from wellness gurus and radio shock jocks.
On the one hand News Corporation and Fairfax Media can rot in hell, but I'm almost as afraid of what would happen to the national discourse in the resulting power vacuum.
> On the one hand News Corporation and Fairfax Media can rot in hell, but I'm almost as afraid of what would happen to the national discourse in the resulting power vacuum.
Someone's gonna fill in, and most probably it will be Russian or Chinese propaganda.
> I am only disappointed that our government would be complicit.
I think I'm OK with the government going along, provided media companies have the choice on if they require payment for this sort of reuse of their content. Assuming it is optional, it will be interesting to see which companies charge. It will also be interesting to see if Google and/or Facebook think it is worth paying.
Personally, I go directly to the news sources I'd be willing to pay for and avoid all the crap. And search engines for research, to find older articles. I could see a business case for papers and similar to opt out of the news aggregators, but it would seem to be suicide to opt out of search as for all intents and purposes your domain would cease to exist.
The problem is that there is no standard form of microtransaction on the internet. I'd happily pay 2 cents to read an article, which is a lot more than the website would receive in advertising revenue, but not $10/month in subscription fees.
We basically need an aggregator of all of those 2 cents, since individually the payment fees will be extreme.
The main benefactor would be News Corp Australia. Apart from some snippets of tolerable local coverage it's all a big pile of shit that stinks from Uncle Rupert's ugly head down.
Misinformation and conspiracy theories are what they peddle. This single company controls 70% of the newspaper market and lies, misleading and cheating are part of their DNA. I hope they don't see a single red cent out of this and if it takes the shutdown of Google News then so be it.
My first instinct was this is a bad move. But given how Google is so quick to kill projects that don't make them money. (And they're still running the service... for now at least) Paired with how I personally detest how they pushed AMP giving them more control and more user data. I can't say I'm convinced they didn't do this to themselves. Nor am I convinced this isn't somehow better.
I'm sure at the very least the results will be interesting.
Is this about copyright? Aka "If you copy more then X words, your violate the authors copyright" so that one has to negotiate with the author about copying more then X words?
Or do they force Google and Facebook to publish those snippets and pay for them? Making media kind of state controlled? If so, who decides which news have to be included?
It’s about News Corporation’s exceptionally close ties to the party that currently holds the majority in Australian federal parliament. This grants them the opportunity to use Australia as a licensing model test venue, as well as hoping to normalise the idea as acceptable rather than farcical in at least one western laissez-faire capitalist democracy in the hope this can be leveraged into others.
Also about journalism's complete failure to adapt to a changing business landscape and find a different business model.
In one way, this is good. It will fail miserably, and demonstrate to newspaper CEO's that "Big Tech" is not stealing their revenues. Then they can move on to try something different.
If the system fails, and consequently newspapers fail, while tech companies thrive, how will that demonstrate to newspaper CEOs that big tech isn’t stealing their revenue?
Because newspapers are failing anyway, and tech companies are thriving anyway. So if this system fails, nothing changed.
If this system works, and suddenly Australian newspapers are viable while newspapers elsewhere are still struggling, then it will prove that forcing tech to pay for content works, and that therefore tech was probably stealing media's revenue.
It doesn't seem necessary for tech to be stealing revenue from publishing for this system to function. If I hold a gun to your head and say give me a thousand bucks, and you do, I'll be a thousand bucks richer, whether or not I was stealing your revenue.
Reading Google's point of view on what happened in Spain they had yet another model over there:
"Legislation in Spain requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not."
Maybe it is similar to that? I wonder who defines what "news" are? If part of this text I am writing ends up quoted on a website owned by someone in Spain, I would be forced by law to send them an invoice?
No, copyright union will send the invoice on behalf of you, just as in music royalties. They will have to pay the copyright union, even if you choose not to receive it yourself.
> For every A$100 spent on online advertising in Australia, excluding classifieds, nearly a third goes to Google and Facebook, according to Frydenberg.
This from the Treasurer of Australia.
I hope he understands that the same holds true for every A$1000 spent, too.
But the local Murdoch outpost's eagerness for this to happen certainly explains the motivation here.
I suppose this includes the search engine. So if these people don’t want their thing to turn up in text results, why not update the robots.txt and close shop the next month?
I have no sympathy for Google and even less for Facebook. But that’s a shitty argument to make. It makes me want to create a client side google news clone, but that actually steal all the article content and remove all ads. Try blocking that.
> Mr Sims said if Google took a similar approach to its actions in Spain when it was asked to pay for news on its Google News tab, it would be irrelevant because the code covered news content in Google's primary function, search.
So it seems like the ultimatum is: pay Australia media companies ~$1b or don't list any news media (including international news) on Google Search for Australian users. Interesting dilemma.
Mr Sims here is ACCC chairman Rod Sims. The same who rammed through so many terrible decisions around the NBN, just as one example, including the POI decision which in one fell swoop eradicated all bits of ISP competition that had arisen in the ADSL2+ space. Funny thing for a "Competition and Consumer Commission" to do, yet here we are. Internode's blood is on his hands.
Well I agree re the PoI, but internode did pretty well, they got a $100M exit; lots of other ISPs and suppliers hit the wall. It was a nightmare decision to go from what, 7 POIs to over 200? Made no sense at all. Mind you the entire NBN from soup to nuts has been and remains a disaster.
Sent from my faulty HFC NBN (gone down 4 times in the last 2 days)
That's what I wondered too. From the article, it seems like they're only targeting Facebook and Google for now. To apply the law equally, it seems like it should affect all websites that link to or copy the meta description tag of a news site.
“Discrimination in this context will be considered to occur if the news content of a registered news business is disadvantaged in comparison to other news content in terms of the crawling, indexing, ranking, display, presentation or other process undertaken by the digital platform on any service provided by the digital platform, on the basis of the registered news business' participation in the code.” https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20EM%2...
Actually the law seems to ban Google from “discriminating” based on this mandatory agreement entirely, including banning them from algorithimically burying their results.
Aka: show and pay News Corp or GTFO out of Australia. Sad.
Reporter A spends 50 hours researching and writing about a topic. She publishes it on her own blog.
Now I scrape this text (as summary) and display it on my own "Latest news" blog and the original author does often not even get a click-through. I do not think that is fair towards the original author.
I can't even downvote on this site, but I think it is because your post seems to say Google News copies news without a link to the source, which is not the case.
If the reporter lives from ads on her blog then she needs traffic, because more traffic is more income.
So bringig traffic to the blog is a big value, so she should pay for this service. But she doesn't, because search engines are free.
News sites can block google and other bots any time on their sites with robots.txt, but they don't because they want the traffic for free, while they even demand money from those who bring the traffic.
>News sites can block google and other bots any time on their sites with robots.txt, but they don't because they want the traffic for free, while they even demand money from those who bring the traffic.
I was feeling different about this topic until you brought this up. I think this is a really good argument. Yes, google scrapes and gets value from what they scrape without paying, however you can block this as a publisher if you don't want this.
The problem these attempts try to adress is that it's not a real choice: doing that would likely end your business, while boycotting would have little effect on google/Facebook. So it's a power struggle where one side doesn't really have a choice, because the other side has all the power.
> So it's a power struggle where one side doesn't really have a choice, because the other side has all the power.
You do have a choice though. You can choose not to use google ads and stop performing SEO and drive business in alternative ways. Further, there are more search engines than just google. If your business model depends on google it may be time to rethink that strategy. Any competent marketing strategy would rely on diversified channels anyway.
The search engines also receive value in being an index or directory that people can use to lookup articles. The situation here is somewhat unique because Google is in a position to reap all of the benefit from this relationship by just scraping the content and displaying it directly to the user.
A comparable scenario would be something like the phone book or yelp where these directories have value to users but they simply refer users to the businesses advertising in the directory.
Isn't that pretty much all news works? After all, investigations are a rarity, and most stories in media outlets are basically sourced/paraphrased from elsewhere. If one site/network/paper finds something interesting like this, you bet anything that every other outlet will have their own story on the subject online in the next few minutes.
To some degree it's also how aggregator sites like Reddit and Hacker News work. Maybe even with anti paywall methods, archivers, etc getting the story in plain text format.
Have you seen what Murdoch-owned media publish these days? It's biased clickbait and gossip, there is nothing quality about News Corp content. Look at the front-page of news.com.au and you'll see what alleged News Corp quality news looks like.
There are much better news sources out there not crying about Google (and writing quality investigative journalism) like; crikey.com.au, abc.net.au, theguardian.com.au, theconversation.com/au, independentaustralia.net, michaelwest.com.au.
We weren't discussing the uniqueness of low-quality content or clickbait, nor were we even discussing politics. We are discussing the introduction of changes which will largely benefit News Corp who owns 70% of newspaper circulation, Rupert Murdoch isn't even Australian. It boggles my mind an American media mogul (with clear historically proven cases of political bias) cannot only have plenty of influence in the USA, but also here in Australia.
We talk about Google and Facebook being these influential corporate conglomerates (and they are), how bad monopolies are and all the while, News Corp continues to get favours from the Australian government, if it's not millions in no strings attached money, it's laws like these which should not even exist in their current form. And the kicker here is: News Corp doesn't even pay tax in Australia. Thanks to some clever accounting (which others are also guilty of), they pay no tax on their profits and they are expecting us to feel sorry for them? Shouldn't the fact they don't even pay tax be good enough.
There are a lot of clickbait/low-quality news sites, but the ones not owned by Rupert Murdoch or big media companies aren't complaining to the Australian government about how unfair it is Google is linking to their news and providing free snippets. Things get even crazier when you realise that many news sites in Australia (especially News Corp) are already paywalled, many of the links from Google to the news stories results in a paywall notice asking you to pay. You essentially get a headline and an opening paragraph. Sometimes the headlines are clever, but they're not worth paying for. So, are they asking Facebook and Google to pay for the privilege of being able to link to their own site for free, which they are subsequently monetising through ads and subscriptions? None of this makes sense.
I agree that good quality journalism is worth paying for, which is why I personally have both a Crikey subscription as well as a Guardian subscription. I would never pay for the Courier Mail or Australian, the content is subpar and often republished news from other sources. Even former Fairfix news which Nine Entertainment purchased have gone downhill since the purchase.
I'm in the same boat, I pay for the guardian, a couple of smaller newspapers and the Australia institute just trying to even out the balance a little bit since Murdoch and what I would now call the extreme right have over 90% of newspaper of newspaper circulation Australia. A really sad state of affairs, the Australian at least used to have some decent conservative articles with a considered opinion but now it's just rabid and unreadable trash.
He may not be Aussie any more, but he was born here to a father involved in news media so it's not really a surprise to me that Australia is one of the places he has an iron fist over media. I mean, he ran media here from the 60s to the 80s before renouncing AU citizenship for US in order to make inroads there.
The state of news media in Australia is utterly dire and I cannot wait for Newscorp to collapse.
His Australian media properties have been losing money for years, long before the recent collapse of advertising revenues. He only runs them as a vanity project, because he enjoys the political power it gives him in his former homeland.
How the Guardian is an alternative to someone who consume Murdoch media? The Guardian is a far left leaning paper while people who read news.com.au wants something more towards the centre or even right.
Well, Murdoch always support the liberals/conservatives but if he doesn’t get what he wants then he starts enthusiastically encouraging a good stabbing/knifing (rolling the prime mister).
Honestly if Google and Facebook de-listed News Corp that'd probably hurt News Corp more than the tech giants. Their print publications are already circling the drain internationally. I think they should call their bluff.
Murdoch is the Australian Bezos - except he has way more political clout in a larger area of the world, and has been running his empire for 30+ years. Bezos is building those relationships with his expansions, and he's obviously got more cash to fund them - but Murdoch's empire shouldn't be underestimated.
His organization also has significant clout in the US and UK where he owns big media corporations. He's long influenced British politics, and through Fox US politics. This bill looks to be sponsored, and crafted by Murdoch.
Weird way of putting it. People in North America who pay attention to politics have known about Murdoch for decades because of Fox News, before they bounced Bezos' name around nearly as freely.
> Well, this is easy: remove the news. Also deals with all accusations of bias at the same time.
Not so easy, since if you do that, you've just given an opening to a competitor that people will start using when they want to search for a news article.
> A competitor who would be equally obliged to pay rent for the news. That’s a pretty big regulatory hurdle for a startup to cross.
Maybe, but Google's interest is in maintaining its search monopoly, not creating opportunities for its destruction in fits of pique.
I'm also skeptical about how much of a hurdle this would actually be, since businesses typically have to pay suppliers (e.g. by licensing content). These rules probably only seems like a big thing because SV tech businesses have been weirdly allowed to opt out of paying in situations like this for a long time. It's not like the necessity of paying royalties prevented Netflix from taking off.
"Fits of pique" like being extorted for $1 billion dollars per year? That's something like 4% of their global profit that they're being asked to fork over for the privilege of continuing to provide a just one search functionality in a small and isolated market. They'll just disable news searches in Australia lol.
Would this payment also apply to a news startup which shows links from other news agencies and shows up on google. Is google obliged to pay this news site under the law? If so I just found my new internet startup and paying client.
I don't see any reason why Google itself couldn't simply spin off a competitor. They wouldn't have to own it. They could simply provide know-how, discounts on infrastructure, investment, and/or acquire the company at a later date.
Seems cheaper and more fruitful than simply forking over $1B. Then again, the risk to doing so might be scarier than a billion-dollar fine, especially if you factor in that the move (if discovered) would piss off legislators.
$1 billion / year is a lot of money. They'll just not serve news results for Australian-origin searches. Most searches are not for news, and news searches are not product searches and probably don't draw much ad money. People can use Bing for their news until the government wises up and adds Microsoft to their list of applicable companies (currently just Facebook and Google), at which point I'm sure Microsoft will also disable news search results in Australia.
That's assuming that they won't coming back begging once they realize that they need Google much more than Google needs them. Ad revenue from news sites from Australia is a slice of a slice for Google. For the news company, it's probably 90% of their traffic.
Is it ordinarily the case for competition law in Australia to require someone with monopoly power to do business with someone when their prices increase dramatically?
I'm not an expert, but I'm not sure if that applies here. Google isn't in the business of making news, and isn't competing with these news companies directly. If you get 90% of the traffic to your portfolio from my blog, does that make me a monopoly too?
I don't get it - isn't that giving them exactly what they claim to want?
"You say we are unfairly dominating? Fine we'll leave and let competitors take our place." Not competing at all in a market (barring reciprocial cartel territory divisuon) is the exact opposite of anti-competive behavior. They aren't even existing there to harm them!
At worst it would be monosopy and again they provided the remedy, reducing their "buying share" of the market to 0%.
It is essentially the ultimate calling of a bluff by not sticking around to be their scapegoat.
> Media companies including News Corp Australia, a unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (NWSA.O), lobbied hard for the government to force the U.S. companies to the negotiating table amid a long decline in advertising revenue.
Not really. There's never been a lot of search ads on news search terms and news carries with it headaches that Google might be relieved to be rid of. Most likely scenario is that Google just deletes news from Australian searches, and Australians just find another aggregator for their news, which will probably be another large American platform that doesn't pay publishers
> There's never been a lot of search ads on news search terms
The searches don't need to convert themselves in order to be valuable; if they affect user behavior enough, they'll affect it for commercial queries too. Ie, if someone switches to Bing because they never get good results on Google, they'll probably just switch to Bing period, instead of jumping back to Google for their commercial queries.
It's $1 billion / year, and it's just news searches in Australia. Some database queries will figure out whether it's more profitable to pay up or to disable news searching in Australia, and I'd bet it's gonna be disabling news searches.
It's very possible that the math works out to be , but I disagree that the value of "disabling news searches in Australia" is tightly captured in a database. It's going to require some non-trivial modeling of the effect of removing news on the habits of Australian searchers, and how that may affect commercial queries: it's a very non-trivial part of most people's usage of Google.
Some relevant things to consider:
1) The Australian market provides Google about ~$5B/yr in revenue, so a 20% revenue loss would be required
2) The global PR impact of disabling news searches, even in a local market
3) The future costs of setting the precedent of giving in to rent-seeking mafia tactics from a specific government; if they think it's likely to embolden other governments to do the same thing, it may be worth drawing a bright line despite the revenue costs
I'm just imagining, similarly to how some search results in the US have a "some search results removed for copyright infringement" footer, many search results in Australia having a "some search results removed for news content" footer. The interesting thing is that since this _explicitly_ only applies to Facebook and Google, any company repackaging Google or Bing search won't have this restriction, at least until they get big enough to be worth rewriting the law for.
1.30 The Government has announced that the code will apply to Facebook and Google. Accordingly, the Treasurer is expected to make an instrument specifying Facebook Inc. and Google LLC as designated digital platform corporations.
Called out by name as the only two companies the law applies to.
There's a lot of countries moving this direction. The problem is, Google is more powerful than most countries these days. Google can afford to cut a country off and let them suffer until they relent.
All of these countries need to unify on this requirement at the same time. Google can cut Australia off, but can they cut off Australia, France, and Spain off? What about Australia and the entire European Union?
I think the media companies are in the wrong. Google is providing a beneficial arrangement, and the media companies are demanding that google pays them.
Google has been bleeding the media dry. One of the graphs shown yesterday during the antitrust hearing was about how Google has shifted it's original business model of showing ads on third party sites (where they have to give most of the revenue to those sites, funding those sites) to a business model of showing ads predominantly on it's own sites, where it keeps all of the ad revenue.
Every single year, Google's ad business shifts more revenue from the "shares with third party sites" segment over to the "keeps all of it" segment. So while Google Search used to heavily fund news, every year, Google's cut gets bigger, and news orgs' cut gets smaller.
The second graph here is what was shown in the hearing, and shows the numbers pulled from Alphabet's reports: https://medium.com/beyond-devices/googles-increasing-relianc... "Google Network Members" effectively refers to website owners like news publishers which display ads.
> One of the graphs shown yesterday during the antitrust hearing was about how Google has shifted it's original business model of showing ads on third party sites (where they have to give most of the revenue to those sites, funding those sites) to a business model of showing ads predominantly on it's own sites, where it keeps all of the ad revenue.
Do you have a link to the graph? My understanding was that Google's original business model was "provide a search engine, and show ads on it", and showing ads on third-party sites is newer?
(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)
The graph is in the link above. The revenue shift is constantly moving away from sites where Google shares revenue with other sites, such as news publishers, and increasing on Google's own properties, which do not get shared with news publishers.
This explains why journalism is running out of money while Google is worth over a trillion. By lifting their content and keeping users (and ad views) directly on Google, Google profits at content producers' expense.
Re: "originally", I was probably wrong there. DoubleClick in 2008 was where Google absorbed this side of the ad business, I believe. But it was the side that was fundamental to journalism.
There was a time when Google could argue it's ad platforms was sponsoring the free web and all, but that's increasingly no longer the case.
"journalism" is running out of money because there is no journalism anymore, it is activism, and propaganda disguised as "journalism"
They are losing money not because of Google, but because they are in a Twitter echo chamber feeding off each other and aliening large parts of their audience
I don't think that's a fair characterization. Would you say that Ford bled blacksmiths and carriage makers dry? Technology moves on. Newspapers are dying because their business model blows in the current infoscape. People spend most of their attention on things other than news, and news is the ultimate information commodity.
> Every single year, Google's ad business shifts more revenue from the "shares with third party sites" segment over to the "keeps all of it" segment.
The linked article shows that the "keeps all of it" portion has been growing faster than the "shares with third party sites" portion. I don't think it's fair to say that they shift revenue from one to the other.
> So while Google Search used to heavily fund news, every year, Google's cut gets bigger, and news orgs' cut gets smaller.
This is not shown by the data in the linked article. Clicks and CPC are slightly down for "shares with third party sites" but that does not say anything about news sites in particular.
Google will outlast the EU. Tensions have been high for years and Brexit seems to have less repercussions than initially thought. On top of that you have Germany strong arming France into giving weak nations billions. Its shaky from the weakest to the strongest countries.
> Brexit seems to have less repercussions than initially thought
There are still agreements. Let's see in 2021. The question if the UK requires quarantine of its tourists coming back from Spain will be overshadowed by the question if the tourists get there in the first place.
> you have Germany strong arming France into giving weak nations billions
You think Germany is the one strong arming France into this? Germany has always been one of the countries most against fiscal transfers.
Brexit seems to have less repercussions than initially thought because it hasn't happened yet! The UK is still in the single market and the customs union till end end of the year.
So... if all countries at once said "Pay us for listing news.com" at the same time... and google said "go stuff yourself" and de-listed news.com globally...
How would that be different than 1 country at a time?
If Google refused to list news that they had to pay to list... across the board... Seems like it's simply making the process easier for Google as it'll be a one time fight.
I feel like this is going to backfire. What if Google just dualists Australian media from search results because they don't want to pay royalties? What if they start charging the media companies to be included in search results in order to cover the cost?
Yes and I hope they do. It's a bad law. If you have your news open and accessible on the internet without users having to authorize themselves then it's public information at that point.
Block it by a paywall. But they wouldn't do that because they would stop showing up in search engines. Google is providing a free service by directing traffic to these companies.
Reminds me of the LinkedIn case about bots crawling their website.
They don't even need a paywall. If they don't want to be listed on Google they can always use robots.txt.
We've been through this in Germany. Publishers demanded to be paid for Google usage of results and news snippets. Google thankfully didn't give in to such a ridiculous demand and gave publishers the option to de-index them or keep listing them for free. Obviously all of them opted for the latter.
Australia is not the first country to pass a law like this. Spain and France have both done some version of this as well. There's going to be a point where enough countries stand up to them that they can't just withdraw without substantially hurting their own business long-term.
I haven't noticed any affect from Spain and France doing this. Recent earning shave been great. As long as they have the US they'll fine. And I don't see Asian ex-China and Eastern Europe pulling this any time soon
I think the EU and Australia massively over estimate the amount of money their "news" links bring to google.
For google this will be a pure economics game, and when they passed the other laws Google looked at the numbers and noped out.
The same will be true for Australia.
I do not see the UK, US, or any of the emerging economies pulling this, so the EU and Australia will alone in this battle and the amount of money being demanded it seems to me most likely exceeds google profit, so they will just end the service to the nations, and blacklist the sites from search
Search will be fine because 3rd party sites will be indexed so it will be a 2 hope, and given the incestuous nature of "news" today where every story is written more or less than same on 100+ sites all over the globe I am sure people will find the news they are looking for just fine with out those sites in the index
The Eu and Australia are massively overplaying their hand
And who would be daft enough to take a niche which involves paying to advertise for others?
They can unite and tantrum all they want but it won't change the underlying reality any more than fervent demands for a "good people only" backdoor encryption won't exist.
They could any time they wanted to, googlebot respects robots.txt prohibitions. They want google to direct traffic to their websites and they want google to pay for the privilege...
I feel like this is the weakest take on the argument.
They want google to pay for re-hosting /lifting any content (previews, headlines, etc.). Linking is just caught in the crossfire, if it's even mentioned.
If we are being honest, the majority of people read headlines and don't bother with more than the first paragraph or summary of the article. This is all displayed on Google properties where users don't even leave the Google infrastructure.
Is Google providing a service? Definitely. Does online news depend on Google? Definitely. Is Google's relationship with them abusive? Definitely.
Isn't this something the publishers can just stop with a robots.txt? Or do they want Google to continue to link to them and just charge them for it? I hope Google just drops them from the index.
It's definitely the latter. They still want to be indexed of course and I'd assume they'd rather be included in Google News and paid for it rather than not included.
I hope Google and Facebook recognize the value they get from news publishers and understand the value society gets from journalism and they do more to support that journalism that benefits everybody.
I recognize the value I get from news publishers and try to support them. It would never in a million years occur to me that, when I tell someone "here's this neat article I read about new studies on the minimum wage", I owe the newspaper for being allowed to do that.
Sure. If telling people about the news is making you money, why not share some of the profit from doing that with the newspaper? If you don't do that, aren't you in effect killing the golden goose?
Do you give money to the construction workers who built the road every time you drive to work? Even if it is taken for granted as a common good doesn't make the monetization model wise or justified.
A taxation model by "lottery" which randomly takes everything from an unlucky N people a year would work terrible in so many ways. Wanting a funding model that isn't terrible doesn't mean they don't want a functioning government.
This seems absurd. Companies typically pay Google to drive traffic through ads, but in this case they are legislating that Google pay them for driving traffic? This sounds like the store paying the customer to take its product. Wouldn't the obvious solution be for Google to just stop listing these news sites? Am I missing something here?
You can make a case that Google wouldn't make any money if they didn't have content. They have trained the market into believing we need them and to pay them unholy amounts of money to be on top of all search results. But without content and search results, no one uses Google.
I'm wondering if this will cause a further reduction in traffic to certain Murdoch publications. The only profitable parts of their newspaper divisions seem to be centered around gambling.
I think it is wrong that these platforms promote certain content and even pay for the articles. This is how you get an unhealthy, nepotistic media landscape.
A year or two from now: Australia doesn't have mainstream news anymore after Google and Facebook ban links to them from its properties to avoid paying "for news".
It’s now been a year or two since various HN commenters proclaimed that Australia had “nuked its tech industry from orbit” when the new encryption laws came in, but that doesn’t seem to have come true. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18616303
Lots of the comments here are criticising this decision on the basis of News Corporation's very clear political involvement. While I share their sentiment regarding News Corporation and their blatant partisanship, I would like to highlight that Facebook is not an apolitical entity. My view is that anyone concerned about the blatant partisan politics of the Australian news media should be equally concerned about the political overreach of big tech. The latter being far more equipped for the propagation of information benefiting their own agenda.
Completely spot on. They are both two sides of failure: one creating the garbage and the other that takes center-stage in its distribution.
What the Australian government can do about News Corp becomes a question of media freedom, whereas Facebook and Google peddling it doesn't introduce that ethical or legal complication.
I could be wrong here though -- happy to be corrected.
The two aren't comparable. News Corporation is political in the sense that they effectively decide who wins the next election in countries like Australia and the UK and all the political parties have to seek out their favour and pursue policies that meet with their approval to win. Facebook is political in the sense that they refused to use their power to tilt the last US presidential election towards the candidate the mainstream media wanted. That the media considers the latter to be the threat to democracy says a lot about who they think should actually control the country.
It would be extremely foolish to think that Facebook is an organisation without its own political agenda. Even this article itself contains an extremely politicised statement from the managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand, criticising the Australian government for their intervention in the free market. These companies make decisions like any other to maximise their power and profit. Unlike most companies however, they're in a position to use information to leverage their position. I presume your post is talking about Clinton?
Alphabet Inc. has made almost $27mil in campaign contributions, including contributing $1.6mil to Clinton's campaign in 2016. They've spent almost $89mil in lobbying since 1990. These big tech companies obviously have a stake in our democracy and choose to take an active role. Thinking they're impartial is incredibly naive.
> That the media considers the latter to be the threat to democracy says a lot about who they think should actually control the country.
I think they're both a threat to democracy. I believe that the Australian government should do all it can to limit the influence that multinational corporations have on our local political landscape, categorically. The only thing I fear more than partisan local media organisations, are partisan international media organisations that wield even more power. I don't for one second trust Facebook's own hidden agenda any more than I trust News Corporation's.
Read about political history in those countries. The Cameron govt's press department was run by people from News Corp. Blair's meeting with Murdoch pre-97 was infamous. Cameron's meetings pre-2010 are infamous. Brown had numerous personal, and secret, meetings with Murdoch (and failed to convince Murdoch of his merits).
I don't go in for the conspiracy theories around Murdoch at all btw. But it is fairly clear that he has a substantial amount of contact with/control over politicians...it is just factually true (something that isn't obvious to people outside the UK, journalists are heavily involved in politics in the UK...going from journalism into politics and then back again or into PR/lobbying is done frequently).
None of your points are evidence of the earlier claim.
Your post follows the pattern of the earlier one that I replied to: you echo the mantra that Murdoch has control over politicians, and you again leap from claim into statement of truth without evidence, "it is just factually true".
Occasional meetings with politicians is not evidence of control, nor the higher claim given earlier in the thread, of deciding the outcome of elections.
> That the media considers the latter to be the threat to democracy says a lot about who they think should actually control the country.
A man who, when asked about whether or not he will accept the next election's result, responds with 'We'll see', is objectively a pretty serious threat to democracy.
Simply voicing that opinion (and never following through on it) makes him a threat to, at minimum the public perception of the legitimacy of democracy - since democracy is one of those things that only works when people believe in it.
He knows how to play the media that's for certain. For a grand total of $0 he was able to have his face on television and plant a seed of doubt against his opponents integrity. So much so that all some people can talk about is Trump. Meanwhile Bloomberg spent record amounts on campaigning and all I remember was that he was the stop and frisk guy
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] thread> "They can't discriminate between international and Australian news. So they can't turn off Australian news and just use international news. That's discrimination. This is a mandatory code, the platforms must participate. They could stop showing news media on their platforms completely – that is, no local or international media – but short of that, they are compelled."
https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/facebook-a...
I don’t disagree with this but it feels like this will open a hornets nest.
This decision is crony capitalism at its worst.
Google&friends are not making money and competing "like any other business".
I don't understand this. Can you explain, please?
This is not specific to big tech though, it's a single point of failure of having a centralised government that is easily corrupted by rich corporations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shifti...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich
Take the billions of dollars that you've saved from BEPS and use it to subsidize your local products, or run ads attacking the competition, or taking them to court, or hire salespeople, or build new content. Simple.
That's plain wrong. Every company only pays income tax in its country of residence. The only difference is that there might be a sales tax for physical goods.
That is not correct. Taxes are payable wherever the profits are made.
It is usually the case that the country where the company is headquartered will have a far greater proportion of profits compared to revenue because a lot of the things that add value happen there, but in the case of large tech companies, this is taken to the extreme, where not just profits, but even revenue itself is shifted from where the business actually happens.
For example, Google reported £1.6bn (US$2.1bn) in revenue and paid £44m ($58m) in corporation taxes (on profits of £231m ($303m) based on a 19% tax rate) in the UK for the 2019-20 financial year, but its actual UK revenue is estimated to be around £5.7b ($7.5b) for the same period.[1]
Whereas car companies have consumers as their customers and have to pay sales tax, AdWords expenditure by businesses is considered a business expense and is not taxed (in the UK). If they played by the same rules, they would have paid around £1.14b ($1.5b; based on 20% VAT) in tax in 2019-20, instead of £44m.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/07/google-uk...
No, with regard to income tax that's simply wrong.
That said, public companies typically have subsidiaries in other countries and these subsidiaries have to pay corporate income tax in their country of residence (but also regardless of where the profits are actually made). This is often used to avoid (or delay) tax payments, especially if the subsidiaries are in low-tax countries.
But if the parent company Apple Inc. sold an iPhone in Germany, they wouldn't have to pay income tax in Germany, just like BMW AG doesn't have to pay income tax in the US.
This is not true for the media. A functioning, critical, and trustworthy media is very important to society.
Profit ≈ importance is just flat out wrong in general.
(Not saying I agree with this govt intervention)
Even the "fair and unbiased" govt funded ABC is a total toothless joke.
https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=HtV-2X4BjQI
> Even the "fair and unbiased" govt funded ABC is a total toothless joke.
> https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=HtV-2X4BjQI
I don't know much about the Australian media, but I do know a citation to a random youtube comedian does not convincingly support such a statement.
Australia's problem is that our news orgs are corrupt to the core, every journo is afraid to go against Murdoch in any way shape or form their careers are ended if they do.
So here we are, with this "comedian," doing a better reporting job than pretty much every single outlet in the country. With very few exceptions.
Climate change protests https://youtube.com/watch?v=HTAzb7UbJ6M
Darling river fuck up https://youtube.com/watch?v=gNbSazIqVYA
Fatty mc fuck face https://youtu.be/WmJ7CSRRCDM
Misinformed journalism https://youtube.com/watch?v=3tTqyZQsG5A
(1) They had teams of people producing regular fresh content, to a high quality.
(2) They had existing subscriber bases, which could have been converted to other purposes (consider the online dating services offered by some of the UK newspapers.)
(3) They had existing economies of scale from business lines which were not dependent on the internet, buffering them against dot com downturns and the like.
(4) Several of them had other divisions producing other good content. e.g. motion picture rights.
(5) They had international presence, and internal connectivity.
(6) Many had existing consumer-connectivity through cable relationships.
Yet. None created geek-friendly workplaces, they were too tied to their cash cows, and they have done badly.
So do you mean that a news aggregator's publishing of abstracts increased or decreased visits to the full story on the original site?
I rarely google to find a serious publication. Perhaps it would be a good thing if Google stops indexing news sites.
> Media companies including News Corp Australia, a unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (NWSA.O), lobbied hard for the government to force the U.S. companies to the negotiating table amid a long decline in advertising revenue.
They banned firearms, introduced the GST and made same-sex marriage legal. They've now introduced the largest welfare package in Australian history.
In comparison to most governments in the world, they're probably considered center-left at worst.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Liberal Party themselves promote the meme to try to win conservative votes away from the actual (socially) conservative parties. It sort of makes sense. The leaders of the Liberal Party are usually some combination of lawyer/dopey/religious but their policies are significantly less partisan.
Sure, right wing parties say they want to lower taxes (but rarely do so) and left wing parties say they want to increase them (and often do so) but we're talking more about brand marketing and appealing to voters than significant changes. Right wing parties tend to be more authoritarian on some themes (gay marriage, drugs). Left wing parties tend to be more authoritarian on other themes (hate speech, gun control, more regulations). No one in politics really care about individual freedom if not to please voters close to the elections.
We definitely should adopt a different system to categorise political parties - but to me the Australian Liberal Party looks liberal enough for today's world.
How is being the only major party with MPs voting against same-sex marriage despite the public plebisciting for it "left-wing"?
I'll give you the other two though, but on the welfare package that Labor introduced following the GFC they (and of course News Corp) would not shut up about how terrible a thing it was, despite Australia being the only country to come out of the crisis mostly unscathed.
On the plebiscite/postal survey though: the government in Australia isn't bound by the results of it. It's just a survey. The fact that the Liberal Party put the result into law[0] within 48 hours is their own doing, submitted by an LGBT member of the party no less.
A conservative party would fundamentally not do this.
You can scroll down in the linked Wikipedia article to see how everyone voted. You won't exactly see significant, genuine opposition. There was arguably more opposition from the left-leaning alternative, the Australian Labor Party, that had the most people abstain in the senate.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_Amendment_(Definition...
> A conservative party would fundamentally not do this.
Experiences in Canada, Austria, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand (of particular relevance to Australia), Sweden, the UK where conservatives in power had at least some if not most of their representatives vote LGBT marriage in is evidence to the contrary. Or is it that they aren't really "conservative" either by some arbitrary yardstick?
And to say that they allowed its members to vote how they actually always wanted to vote (now there's a democratic deficit) within '48 hours' after delaying it for months and toddling around with a voluntary postal survey for BASIC CIVIL RIGHTS for months and months after years of intransigence is highly disingenuous.
It was clear the economic right faction of the Liberals wanted a mandate from the people so that they could push past the socially conservative faction.
They were being blocked for months by the left - because it benefited the greens and labor politically to position the Liberals as anti-LGBT.
All the Liberals would have needed to say is “conscience vote” and it would have been done. That aside, if passing basic civil rights would threaten the stability of the party, then that’s kind of a shitty party.
Yes, the left did block enshrining basic civil rights in order to play politics.
> All the Liberals would have needed to say is
The Libs don’t care about gay rights and they still got the job done.
And you do know that there was real damage done through the process? Gay people got messages of hate and exclusion as it provided excellent fodder for the grubs to come out of the woodwork to spike vile hatred. There was real damage done during the process when all Turnbull had to do was a snap of the finger and it’d not get put through the process that it did.
Also love the part where you seem to be completely ignorant of Howard legislating to make gay marriage unambiguously forbidden. In 2004.
Of course they were playing politics - why would you sacrifice party unity when you can shame your political opponents on the left and still get the outcome you want?
You don’t seem to understand that your allies playing politics with something you really care about is completely different from your opponents playing politics with the same topic.
> Also love the part where you seem to be completely ignorant of Howard legislating to make gay marriage unambiguously forbidden. In 2004.
How does that help your case at all?
They were dragged kicking and screaming across the line for same-sex marriage.
The GST reduced the tax payable on luxury items, so in essence was a more regressive sales tax.
I think part of the confusion is that some wrongly judge the Australian Liberal Party by American political standards. Conservative parties in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, often make decisions which would be considered "liberal" in an American context, but are actually centrist (or sometimes even right-wing) in the context of their own countries. A good example is the Medicare levy surcharge was introduced by the Howard government, to penalise middle and high income earners that don't take out private health insurance; in the Australian context that was a conservative decision (it was designed to prop up private health insurers, and many on the Australian left viewed it as a threat to the public health system and a form of corporate welfare), yet when the US adopted more or less the same policy (an insurance mandate) as part of Obamacare, that was a liberal one.
The other issue is the ambiguity between "classical liberalism" vs "social liberalism"/"left liberalism"/"modern liberalism". The term "Liberal" in the name of the Australian Liberal Party is a reference to the former not the later. Classical liberalism has a huge amount of overlap with many versions of conservatism.
And even "conservatism" comes in many different forms, and different forms of conservatism can lead to very different policies. In the US, some conservatives argue for an aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East; others argue that the US should stay out of other countries' business. Both viewpoints are conservative, just the product of different versions of conservatism (neoconservative vs palaeoconservative). Similarly, while mainstream US conservatism combines "economic conservatism" (low and flat taxation, small and balanced government budget, low regulation, free trade, etc) with social conservatism, a significant minority of American social conservatives oppose economic conservatism (e.g. distributism, Catholic social teaching, Patrick Buchanan, The American Conservative magazine, etc)
This is definitely true for fiscal issues or social welfare, and I think the example you provided is quite appropriate here, but compared to many places (particularly in the part of Europe where I live) I think the reverse is true about the US for social issues.
Similarly, despite abortion being such a political hot potato in the US, Roe v Wade ensures that US abortion laws are on the whole more liberal than those of a number of European countries.
On the other hand, if you look at an issue like the death penalty, the US retains it federally and in a majority of states, while every European country has officially abolished it except for Belarus. Even in Russia, whose government often takes quite conservative stances on social issues such as LGBT rights, it is officially abolished (although you could argue that the frequency of extrajudicial killings in Russia means that true abolition has not yet been achieved in practice.) And, death penalty aside, the US approach to criminal law is far more punitive than that of many European countries, and US policing also tends to be a bit of an outlier in terms of aggressiveness and brutality.
I think on social issues it really depends on which particular social issues you are most concerned with.
Switzerland is traditionally more slow-moving in terms of laws because of its insistence of making sure legislative changes are accepted by the population at large (with its initiatives and referenda), whereas in the US and many other countries, interested parties anywhere on the political spectrum can often quickly decide an issue if they happen to be in power.
This doesn't mean that the general attitudes of the population towards LGBTQ in Switzerland are or ever were worse than in the US. I have a feeling, that in general, attitudes tend to be very diverse in the US, with some areas / circles being totally in support and others in very strong opposition, whereas Switzerland tends to be a bit more homogeneous. Switzerland certainly doesn't have such a strong undercurrent of evangelical voters for which things like LGBTQ and traditional marriage (or also abortion etc.) are such a major driving factor (sure, those people exist, but they tend to exist more at the fringes). I also don't recall any debates about bakers not wanting to bake cakes for gay couples or any of that sort of nonsense.
That's not to claim that there is no homophobia in Switzerland, there certainly is. But I can't really believe that it's worse than the US.
Where does Switzerland stand on immigration and cultural diversity issues? I don't have your personal experience of the topic (and I'd love to hear you elaborate in more detail about that), but here are a few facts I know about:
* About a quarter of the Swiss population is foreign-born. That is very high by the standards of the Western world (the US is only around 13%), few Western countries would exceed that (Australia and New Zealand are the only ones I know of). So in that sense, Switzerland does have an openness to immigration which exceeds that of any other European country.
* Switzerland's rules around naturalisation are very tough. A lot tougher than most European countries, or most Western countries.
* In 2009 Switzerland amended its constitution (by popular vote) to ban new minarets on mosques. I think that's quite outrageous discrimination against a religious minority. In a country like the UK (for example), they'd probably never allow a referendum on such an offensive proposal. I think it violates the European Convention on Human Rights, as religious discrimination. But, the European Court of Human Rights declared a case against it inadmissible on the grounds that the complainant didn't have any personal plans to build a minaret. (If a Swiss mosque was to file a case, they'd at least get past that initial admissibility hurdle, but I'm not aware that they have.)
So overall I'd say Switzerland's record on immigration and cultural diversity is a mixed bag. There are some positive elements (the high percentage of foreign-born population) and some negatives (difficult naturalisation and Islamophobic constitutional amendments).
But before you try to say the US's record on these topics is better, just remember who is in the White House right now and what he has had to say on the topic of immigration and cultural diversity.
So it isn't entirely clear to me who actually comes out in front in a comparison of Switzerland and US on this topic. And, consider also there are 40+ other countries in Europe, some of which arguably do better (in some areas) than Switzerland does on these issues, others have their own serious problems in those areas.
But, having lived in Switzerland for most of my life, I unfortunately feel that there is a very strong undercurrent of xenophobia, to the point that parts of it are even accepted among more left-wing circles.
That ended in the 19th century, however, and in the 20th and 21st centuries, those religious tensions are not what they used to be. (That's not something unique to Switzerland; most European countries, religious tensions people used to kill each other over, nobody cares about any more. Here in Australia, my grandfather told me how as a Catholic in the 1940s, he couldn't get certain jobs because some employers refused to hire Catholics, and the law let them get away with that. But, I've never heard in contemporary Australia of someone refusing to hire a Catholic, indeed nowadays it would be illegal for a secular employer to do so.)
Certainly you are right, that however bad Catholic-Protestant tension may have been in Swiss history, it still was nothing compared to the treatment of African-Americans.
> Switzerland is traditionally more slow-moving in terms of laws because of its insistence of making sure legislative changes are accepted by the population at large (with its initiatives and referenda), whereas in the US and many other countries, interested parties anywhere on the political spectrum can often quickly decide an issue if they happen to be in power.
Ireland approved same-sex marriage in a national referendum in 2015. (A referendum was necessary because the opposite-sex definition of marriage was enshrined in the Irish constitution.) Five years later, Switzerland still hasn't had a national referendum on the topic. So I'm not sure if Switzerland's slowness on this issue has anything to do with its political emphasis on referendums.
And in the case of the US, it wasn't achieved nationally through legislative changes, but rather through a decision of the US Supreme Court. The US Supreme Court has a long history of being far more willing to get involved in heated social and political debates than equivalent courts in many other countries, whose constitutional court instead tries to dodge them and leave them up to the democratic process.
> This doesn't mean that the general attitudes of the population towards LGBTQ in Switzerland are or ever were worse than in the US
I don't know enough about the culture of Switzerland to disagree, so I will accept your point. But, it still represents an area in which the US legal system is to the left of Switzerland's, even if substantial pockets of US culture may be to the right of Switzerland on the same issue. Law, politics and culture are deeply interconnected, yet distinct.
The party was founded as a party of social liberals (with conservative economics), but for the last 3 decades has been eaten from the inside by a socially conservative wing resulting in a misnomer. The conservatives could have their own party, but the Liberal name and the remaining perception of liberalism attracts votes, as shown by the "Australian Conservatives" party which broke away from the Liberals and couldn't attract enough votes to survive.
You see the after-effects in e.g. Norway, where the liberal party is literally named "Venstre" ("Left")
It's just that most places the liberals have been firmly out-flanked on the left since.
Technically probably correct, but it seems like the wrong comparison?
Compare them to the G20 or OECD or similar.
The Australian Liberal Party are pretty practical, they keep their nutters out of power, they didn't put forward a comedy prime minister, and they have a sense of duty towards the country.
But, they're definitely a conservative party. The Treasurer cited Reagan and Thatcher as his inspirations this week.
https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9609...
https://support.google.com/paymentscenter/answer/9028746?hl=...
Because you can't actually change your country on your Google payment profile. You need to create a new one and then switch the new one.
I had to do this to switch my US account to an EU account with the EU GDPR user consent options. Your Google account is tied to the payment profile country AFAIK.
The weird part is, I am not Dutch, do not speak Dutch, and have never been to the Netherlands.
I mean, if you can't go to google news to get your news, maybe you do go directly to the website of some major news company (and get a monoculture).
With services like Google News, people can get exposed to news from various media outlets, but by killing it through lobbying for absurd regulatory burdens on aggregators the well known larger outlets can choke out access to their competition. This of course is hampered to some extent by the reality that many will just rely on other users posting on social media for news updates, and if that too is choked out through regulation on platforms, many will probably just skip the news or reduce their consumption in favor of other things like entertainment.
I now just spend a little time on Apple News+ to skim what is happening. While I am locking myself more into a mono culture just looking at US news, I decided that I needed to greatly decrease the amount of time I spent on the news every day.
The world situation is what it is. I try to accept the world as-is, invest as little time as possible understanding the world and concentrate on my own productivity, fellowship with friends and family, and generally appreciating culture and nature.
News watching is an addiction that too many of my friends have.
We're still able to find Danish news by Google search though, it's only the aggregation that Danish media is afraid of, as they are afraid to loose out on a lot of income on the ads they show while people browse their websites.
Google is very good about shuttering projects that doesn't make them money. I'm sure if they're still running the service. It's making them money some how.
[1]: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/03/operation-rosehub....
https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/facebook-a...
> Mr Sims said if Google took a similar approach to its actions in Spain when it was asked to pay for news on its Google News tab, it would be irrelevant because the code covered news content in Google's primary function, search.
(from the sibling commentor's link: https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/facebook-a...)
I can't wait to see what will happen. I highly doubt Google will pay the black mail. Will they just shut off Google for Australia?
And lose the billions of revenue over a few million in news payments?
Of course not. Good on the Australian Government for putting them in a position where they actually have to contribute rather than taking their toys home and pouting
> News Corp has suggested the number is closer to $1 billion.
I highly doubt these companies will fork over a billion dollars each to just stay in Australia. Australia needs Google more than Google needs Australia.
Murdoch's empire is fading fast in Australia. The Australian, Foxtel, the print papers are all on their last legs. Their streaming offering Binge is laughably bad - it's only 1080p and works on barely any devices. They could well be done here too.
All upside, as far as I see it.
From a privazy perspective it would be awesome for Google to block Australia like some US news sites block european users bc. of GDPR.
The bigger problem would be Australians giving up YouTube, and to a lesser extent Android if Google Play Services is withdrawn.
There's no real competitor to YouTube, and especially during the virus where everyone's at home with nothing to do going without it would be a major pain point for many Australians. The country wouldn't collapse but it would be a big deal.
That's all assuming Google withdraws entirely from the country of course.
Youtube on the other hand would be a caltural loss due to the network effect even if replacements would be plenty.
But I think this could be bad for competition too. How can someone enter the market for search if you have to jump through so many hoops? Google will try to work a deal that works well for them and tries to lock out competition as well by making the startup cost high.
My hope is that it ends up forcing them to be more friendly to publishers in how they send them traffic and how they appropriate their content. But I don't think money should change hands to let them use the content.
I am only disappointed that our government would be complicit.
Make no mistake, I am no new media fan boy. In fact I hope this has the side effect of cleaning up the misinformation that spins around Facebook et al. But it is still sad to see such an obvious manipulation of our government.
Hell, Uncle Rupert is the reason why we've had more of the coalition in power than we otherwise would have. Why would they bite the hand that feeds them when they can bite of a piece of Google's pie and regurgitate it into Murdoch's ugly maw instead.
Google, shut down Google News the second this passes, please. I don't want a single cent to go to the conglomerate that was at least partially responsible for bringing us Trump, Johnson and Morrison. And Bush, Thatcher and Howard.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kxw0
This idea that the press is dying just because its revenue is drying up isn't rooted in reality. The press has enough influence to just make the public give it money, bypassing the whole "sell stuff" part of the model. For example, Canada just gave the press, as an industry, $595 million of the public's money for some reason.
No, the press is more powerful than ever. And why? Because if you have something nice and the press hates you, you're very likely to lose that nice thing.
On the one hand News Corporation and Fairfax Media can rot in hell, but I'm almost as afraid of what would happen to the national discourse in the resulting power vacuum.
Someone's gonna fill in, and most probably it will be Russian or Chinese propaganda.
I think I'm OK with the government going along, provided media companies have the choice on if they require payment for this sort of reuse of their content. Assuming it is optional, it will be interesting to see which companies charge. It will also be interesting to see if Google and/or Facebook think it is worth paying.
Personally, I go directly to the news sources I'd be willing to pay for and avoid all the crap. And search engines for research, to find older articles. I could see a business case for papers and similar to opt out of the news aggregators, but it would seem to be suicide to opt out of search as for all intents and purposes your domain would cease to exist.
We basically need an aggregator of all of those 2 cents, since individually the payment fees will be extreme.
Fake news is free. Real news is behind paywalls.
Misinformation and conspiracy theories are what they peddle. This single company controls 70% of the newspaper market and lies, misleading and cheating are part of their DNA. I hope they don't see a single red cent out of this and if it takes the shutdown of Google News then so be it.
I'm sure at the very least the results will be interesting.
Or do they force Google and Facebook to publish those snippets and pay for them? Making media kind of state controlled? If so, who decides which news have to be included?
Or what is this about?
In one way, this is good. It will fail miserably, and demonstrate to newspaper CEO's that "Big Tech" is not stealing their revenues. Then they can move on to try something different.
If this system works, and suddenly Australian newspapers are viable while newspapers elsewhere are still struggling, then it will prove that forcing tech to pay for content works, and that therefore tech was probably stealing media's revenue.
"Legislation in Spain requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not."
https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9609...
Maybe it is similar to that? I wonder who defines what "news" are? If part of this text I am writing ends up quoted on a website owned by someone in Spain, I would be forced by law to send them an invoice?
This from the Treasurer of Australia.
I hope he understands that the same holds true for every A$1000 spent, too.
But the local Murdoch outpost's eagerness for this to happen certainly explains the motivation here.
I suppose this includes the search engine. So if these people don’t want their thing to turn up in text results, why not update the robots.txt and close shop the next month?
I have no sympathy for Google and even less for Facebook. But that’s a shitty argument to make. It makes me want to create a client side google news clone, but that actually steal all the article content and remove all ads. Try blocking that.
> Mr Sims said if Google took a similar approach to its actions in Spain when it was asked to pay for news on its Google News tab, it would be irrelevant because the code covered news content in Google's primary function, search.
So it seems like the ultimatum is: pay Australia media companies ~$1b or don't list any news media (including international news) on Google Search for Australian users. Interesting dilemma.
Sent from my faulty HFC NBN (gone down 4 times in the last 2 days)
However, that is just complete speculation as I haven't seen the actual law, and the afr.com article is behind paywall for me.
Aka: show and pay News Corp or GTFO out of Australia. Sad.
Now I scrape this text (as summary) and display it on my own "Latest news" blog and the original author does often not even get a click-through. I do not think that is fair towards the original author.
[0]: http://gakuran.com/daily-mail-used-my-photos-without-permiss... [1]: https://expertphotography.com/the-daily-mail-stole-my-photos... (Note this guy eventually got paid by chasing)
So bringig traffic to the blog is a big value, so she should pay for this service. But she doesn't, because search engines are free.
News sites can block google and other bots any time on their sites with robots.txt, but they don't because they want the traffic for free, while they even demand money from those who bring the traffic.
I was feeling different about this topic until you brought this up. I think this is a really good argument. Yes, google scrapes and gets value from what they scrape without paying, however you can block this as a publisher if you don't want this.
You do have a choice though. You can choose not to use google ads and stop performing SEO and drive business in alternative ways. Further, there are more search engines than just google. If your business model depends on google it may be time to rethink that strategy. Any competent marketing strategy would rely on diversified channels anyway.
A comparable scenario would be something like the phone book or yelp where these directories have value to users but they simply refer users to the businesses advertising in the directory.
To some degree it's also how aggregator sites like Reddit and Hacker News work. Maybe even with anti paywall methods, archivers, etc getting the story in plain text format.
Exercise your consumer choice.
Have you seen what Murdoch-owned media publish these days? It's biased clickbait and gossip, there is nothing quality about News Corp content. Look at the front-page of news.com.au and you'll see what alleged News Corp quality news looks like.
There are much better news sources out there not crying about Google (and writing quality investigative journalism) like; crikey.com.au, abc.net.au, theguardian.com.au, theconversation.com/au, independentaustralia.net, michaelwest.com.au.
We talk about Google and Facebook being these influential corporate conglomerates (and they are), how bad monopolies are and all the while, News Corp continues to get favours from the Australian government, if it's not millions in no strings attached money, it's laws like these which should not even exist in their current form. And the kicker here is: News Corp doesn't even pay tax in Australia. Thanks to some clever accounting (which others are also guilty of), they pay no tax on their profits and they are expecting us to feel sorry for them? Shouldn't the fact they don't even pay tax be good enough.
There are a lot of clickbait/low-quality news sites, but the ones not owned by Rupert Murdoch or big media companies aren't complaining to the Australian government about how unfair it is Google is linking to their news and providing free snippets. Things get even crazier when you realise that many news sites in Australia (especially News Corp) are already paywalled, many of the links from Google to the news stories results in a paywall notice asking you to pay. You essentially get a headline and an opening paragraph. Sometimes the headlines are clever, but they're not worth paying for. So, are they asking Facebook and Google to pay for the privilege of being able to link to their own site for free, which they are subsequently monetising through ads and subscriptions? None of this makes sense.
I agree that good quality journalism is worth paying for, which is why I personally have both a Crikey subscription as well as a Guardian subscription. I would never pay for the Courier Mail or Australian, the content is subpar and often republished news from other sources. Even former Fairfix news which Nine Entertainment purchased have gone downhill since the purchase.
The state of news media in Australia is utterly dire and I cannot wait for Newscorp to collapse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_News_C...
The quality of these properties is categorically just worse than the independents, and there are a lot of them.
There's certainly some bias showing here, but it's not in the parent post.
> pay Australia media companies ~$1b
This is Rupert Murdoch, isn't it.
Not so easy, since if you do that, you've just given an opening to a competitor that people will start using when they want to search for a news article.
Maybe, but Google's interest is in maintaining its search monopoly, not creating opportunities for its destruction in fits of pique.
I'm also skeptical about how much of a hurdle this would actually be, since businesses typically have to pay suppliers (e.g. by licensing content). These rules probably only seems like a big thing because SV tech businesses have been weirdly allowed to opt out of paying in situations like this for a long time. It's not like the necessity of paying royalties prevented Netflix from taking off.
"Fits of pique" like being extorted for $1 billion dollars per year? That's something like 4% of their global profit that they're being asked to fork over for the privilege of continuing to provide a just one search functionality in a small and isolated market. They'll just disable news searches in Australia lol.
Seems cheaper and more fruitful than simply forking over $1B. Then again, the risk to doing so might be scarier than a billion-dollar fine, especially if you factor in that the move (if discovered) would piss off legislators.
If this is being done on purpose to make a case, it's a goddamn genius move - next level chess.
Google could be in a tight spot.
"You say we are unfairly dominating? Fine we'll leave and let competitors take our place." Not competing at all in a market (barring reciprocial cartel territory divisuon) is the exact opposite of anti-competive behavior. They aren't even existing there to harm them!
At worst it would be monosopy and again they provided the remedy, reducing their "buying share" of the market to 0%.
It is essentially the ultimate calling of a bluff by not sticking around to be their scapegoat.
> Media companies including News Corp Australia, a unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (NWSA.O), lobbied hard for the government to force the U.S. companies to the negotiating table amid a long decline in advertising revenue.
The searches don't need to convert themselves in order to be valuable; if they affect user behavior enough, they'll affect it for commercial queries too. Ie, if someone switches to Bing because they never get good results on Google, they'll probably just switch to Bing period, instead of jumping back to Google for their commercial queries.
Some relevant things to consider:
1) The Australian market provides Google about ~$5B/yr in revenue, so a 20% revenue loss would be required
2) The global PR impact of disabling news searches, even in a local market
3) The future costs of setting the precedent of giving in to rent-seeking mafia tactics from a specific government; if they think it's likely to embolden other governments to do the same thing, it may be worth drawing a bright line despite the revenue costs
Called out by name as the only two companies the law applies to.
Australian news media: No, come back!
I don't see how their demand work out well for them.
All of these countries need to unify on this requirement at the same time. Google can cut Australia off, but can they cut off Australia, France, and Spain off? What about Australia and the entire European Union?
Every single year, Google's ad business shifts more revenue from the "shares with third party sites" segment over to the "keeps all of it" segment. So while Google Search used to heavily fund news, every year, Google's cut gets bigger, and news orgs' cut gets smaller.
The second graph here is what was shown in the hearing, and shows the numbers pulled from Alphabet's reports: https://medium.com/beyond-devices/googles-increasing-relianc... "Google Network Members" effectively refers to website owners like news publishers which display ads.
Do you have a link to the graph? My understanding was that Google's original business model was "provide a search engine, and show ads on it", and showing ads on third-party sites is newer?
(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)
This explains why journalism is running out of money while Google is worth over a trillion. By lifting their content and keeping users (and ad views) directly on Google, Google profits at content producers' expense.
Re: "originally", I was probably wrong there. DoubleClick in 2008 was where Google absorbed this side of the ad business, I believe. But it was the side that was fundamental to journalism.
There was a time when Google could argue it's ad platforms was sponsoring the free web and all, but that's increasingly no longer the case.
They are losing money not because of Google, but because they are in a Twitter echo chamber feeding off each other and aliening large parts of their audience
I don't think that's a fair characterization. Would you say that Ford bled blacksmiths and carriage makers dry? Technology moves on. Newspapers are dying because their business model blows in the current infoscape. People spend most of their attention on things other than news, and news is the ultimate information commodity.
> Every single year, Google's ad business shifts more revenue from the "shares with third party sites" segment over to the "keeps all of it" segment.
The linked article shows that the "keeps all of it" portion has been growing faster than the "shares with third party sites" portion. I don't think it's fair to say that they shift revenue from one to the other.
> So while Google Search used to heavily fund news, every year, Google's cut gets bigger, and news orgs' cut gets smaller.
This is not shown by the data in the linked article. Clicks and CPC are slightly down for "shares with third party sites" but that does not say anything about news sites in particular.
There are still agreements. Let's see in 2021. The question if the UK requires quarantine of its tourists coming back from Spain will be overshadowed by the question if the tourists get there in the first place.
> you have Germany strong arming France into giving weak nations billions
Rather the other way around.
Brexit seems to have less repercussions than initially thought because it hasn't happened yet! The UK is still in the single market and the customs union till end end of the year.
How would that be different than 1 country at a time?
If Google refused to list news that they had to pay to list... across the board... Seems like it's simply making the process easier for Google as it'll be a one time fight.
Block it by a paywall. But they wouldn't do that because they would stop showing up in search engines. Google is providing a free service by directing traffic to these companies.
Reminds me of the LinkedIn case about bots crawling their website.
We've been through this in Germany. Publishers demanded to be paid for Google usage of results and news snippets. Google thankfully didn't give in to such a ridiculous demand and gave publishers the option to de-index them or keep listing them for free. Obviously all of them opted for the latter.
For google this will be a pure economics game, and when they passed the other laws Google looked at the numbers and noped out.
The same will be true for Australia.
I do not see the UK, US, or any of the emerging economies pulling this, so the EU and Australia will alone in this battle and the amount of money being demanded it seems to me most likely exceeds google profit, so they will just end the service to the nations, and blacklist the sites from search
Search will be fine because 3rd party sites will be indexed so it will be a 2 hope, and given the incestuous nature of "news" today where every story is written more or less than same on 100+ sites all over the globe I am sure people will find the news they are looking for just fine with out those sites in the index
The Eu and Australia are massively overplaying their hand
They can unite and tantrum all they want but it won't change the underlying reality any more than fervent demands for a "good people only" backdoor encryption won't exist.
They want google to pay for re-hosting /lifting any content (previews, headlines, etc.). Linking is just caught in the crossfire, if it's even mentioned.
If we are being honest, the majority of people read headlines and don't bother with more than the first paragraph or summary of the article. This is all displayed on Google properties where users don't even leave the Google infrastructure.
Is Google providing a service? Definitely. Does online news depend on Google? Definitely. Is Google's relationship with them abusive? Definitely.
That's odd, usually companies pay Google to host their content via GCP
Hoo boy am I glad I don’t get value from that. Oof. Dang. Look at that. Oh boy.
A taxation model by "lottery" which randomly takes everything from an unlucky N people a year would work terrible in so many ways. Wanting a funding model that isn't terrible doesn't mean they don't want a functioning government.
In a way, yes. There are lots of usage taxes around driving that help fund road construction.
Answers and image search should be opt in for copright holder.
What the Australian government can do about News Corp becomes a question of media freedom, whereas Facebook and Google peddling it doesn't introduce that ethical or legal complication.
I could be wrong here though -- happy to be corrected.
Alphabet Inc. has made almost $27mil in campaign contributions, including contributing $1.6mil to Clinton's campaign in 2016. They've spent almost $89mil in lobbying since 1990. These big tech companies obviously have a stake in our democracy and choose to take an active role. Thinking they're impartial is incredibly naive.
> That the media considers the latter to be the threat to democracy says a lot about who they think should actually control the country.
I think they're both a threat to democracy. I believe that the Australian government should do all it can to limit the influence that multinational corporations have on our local political landscape, categorically. The only thing I fear more than partisan local media organisations, are partisan international media organisations that wield even more power. I don't for one second trust Facebook's own hidden agenda any more than I trust News Corporation's.
Big claims require big evidence, and here you haven't given any.
I don't go in for the conspiracy theories around Murdoch at all btw. But it is fairly clear that he has a substantial amount of contact with/control over politicians...it is just factually true (something that isn't obvious to people outside the UK, journalists are heavily involved in politics in the UK...going from journalism into politics and then back again or into PR/lobbying is done frequently).
Your post follows the pattern of the earlier one that I replied to: you echo the mantra that Murdoch has control over politicians, and you again leap from claim into statement of truth without evidence, "it is just factually true".
Occasional meetings with politicians is not evidence of control, nor the higher claim given earlier in the thread, of deciding the outcome of elections.
A man who, when asked about whether or not he will accept the next election's result, responds with 'We'll see', is objectively a pretty serious threat to democracy.
Simply voicing that opinion (and never following through on it) makes him a threat to, at minimum the public perception of the legitimacy of democracy - since democracy is one of those things that only works when people believe in it.