Australia is tiny in the grand scheme of things but the average revenue per user is huge, there's still a lot of money on the table here, along with the domino effect.
The government will face huge amount of pressure and be forced to backflip within days if they actually go through with it, but perhaps that is what they want, to set up this narrative that these entities have far more power than any democratically elected government, which for the most part I think is entirely correct, these companies can make or break many governments on Earth.
And while I support them in what they are doing, in the back of my mind all I can think is that Rupert Murdoch probably pulled some strings to make this happen for his own benefit and it's corrupt all the way down.
From the article, it sounds like google will stop putting news websites in their search results altogether and still provide search results for other websites. I doubt they will have much effect on them because I doubt they make much money on news related searches. I've never seen an ad on the news tab. Also from the article, Facebook has also already said that if the law goes through, they will stop Australians from posting news in their news feed.
It might surprise a lot of people from other countries just how few competent politicians there are in the governing party. But the News Ltd and Nine/Fairfax duopoly run a kind of protection racket which helps them retain power, and it'll be the papers that come up with the talking points (they lobbied for the attempted double-dip "media bargaining code" in the first place).
I think there will be some difficulty about that, since a lot of people in Australia already know that News Ltd owns a majority share in the Liberal party (the balance being owned by the coal industry). Therefore, a lot of people will see this as Google sharing their interests insofar as harming News helps them.
Also, liberalism has been sufficiently successful in Australia that the argument "new business should not be compelled to serve interests of old business" will have some currency.
Whether these two sectors will be enough to win an election fought on this argument (widely expected in the second half of this year) remains to be seen.
The Liberal Party of Australia runs/is run by a think tank called "Institute of Public Affairs" which is in turn run by a bunch of rich people who take marching orders from Murdoch.
It doesn't become much more transparent than, say, senior members of the Liberal Party government travelling to the USA to visit Rupert but not any US politicians or diplomats.
News Corp may not own the title deeds for any property, but they have all the receipts for money paid and souls bought.
Yeah, not literal shares. It’s more that a lot of the staffers working for the conservative party (confusingly called the Liberal Party) come from the News Ltd media and mining companies, and a lot of executives of mining/resource companies and journalists and executives at the Nine/Fairfax and News Ltd. duopoly are ex-politicians, political staffers, etc. - lots of revolving doors between them.
For example, the current PM’s chief of staff came straight from Rio Tinto, previous PM Tony Abbot’s chief of staff (Peta Credlin) now has a show on Sky News, as does ex-PM Turnbull’s (Chris Kenny, from when Turnbull was opposition leader), who also writes for The Australian newspaper. On the other side of the duopoly, the chairman of Nine/Fairfax is an ex-Liberal Party treasurer (basically the most powerful cabinet minister apart from the PM), and they held fundraising events for the party at their studios during the last election.
So the media run positive stories about the Government, and downplay or fail to run stories about, for example, serious allegations of corruption against multiple cabinet ministers of the Government, while policy proposals from the opposition are scrutinised far more closely and savagely than actual policy from the actual Government, and often rubbished. The media runs character assassinations against opposition party leaders and MPs and puff pieces about the Government ministers, the PM’s wife and her fashion choices, etc. - it’s pretty shameless.
Then there are links between Government, the media and big business (again, mostly mining here) through a bunch of think tanks like the IPA (extreme far-right), the Sydney Institute, etc.
As long as environmental protections are kept weak enough for the miners, and tax cuts keep being promised for the wealthy, none of them rock the boat.
Being able to present something a certain way and it actually being that way are two different things. The nation is considering a law that says, if you link to news you have to pay X. Google is trying to figure out if the money they make from linking to news Y is greater than X. If Y < X, why would they continue linking to news?
It's not a strong arm tactic, just a simple cost-benefit move. And it's not a demonstration of market power either. The proposed regulation only applies to companies already deemed to have market power, so only such companies are considering reacting to the regulation this way. But if the law applied universally, you would obviously see the exact same calculation happen at companies that don't have market power. Most would come to the same conclusion as Google seems to have done: it's not worth it to link to news under these terms.
I'm sure I read somewhere, possibly also on Crikey, that News Corp practically wrote the legislation for the Australian Government, and that some amendments were necessary so that the state-funded ABC would not be excluded from the deal. I'll try to find reference to that. Edit, stinging Crikey article here[1]
Edit two, here's an article mentioning including state broadcasters in the code[2]
Stratechery did an in-depth breakdown of elements of the legislation[0]
> News Corp practically wrote the legislation for the Australian Government
That makes sense. It fits in with News Corps long war on news aggregating tech firms (Google, largely) and their several failed attempts to lead alternative services controlled by the traditional publishing industry (with themselves in the steering seat.)
So, having failed to compete, they’ve just decided to lobby government to put its finger on the scale to impose a plan as nonviable as their own prior commercial ventures: if they can’t succeed in the news aggregating portal business, they’ll make news aggregation and search a business in which success is brutally punished with terms that make the business completely nonviable.
Rupert Murdoch is really old. I don't think he's that involved any more. But yes he's created a self sustaining corruption engine.
It'd be very interesting to see google drop Australia. Watch us all start using duckduckgo. It'd be great if they did it. It's an election year and It'd be nice to see such a foolish move by our lazy government.
Where in the hell did you pull this nonsense from?
Also would like to see Google do it. Good riddance imo. It will rock the nation but will spur interior innovation which we sorely need seeing as housing and the mining booms are over.
From what I’ve read, apparently Rupert Murdoch still informs editors what direction to take on certain issues. But a lot of editors don’t need direct instruction all the time - I recall an interview - must have been an ex-editor of one of his papers who said they very quickly get into a pattern of thinking where their first thought on a story is “how would Rupert want this reported?”.
So while he probably wasn’t directly involved, I’m sure he had very strong input on what direction the people leading the lobbying effort should take.
But even if he wasn’t, I’ve also heard the son who still works there (the one who didn’t quit in disgust over the organisation’s editorial direction) is just as bad...
Murdoch putting his grubby hands all over a democratically elected country to try and further his own aims.
The Murdoch empire has far more sway over public discourse, and who gets into power than any of the big tech firms, but of course the Murdoch dominated press ignores that ...
I think Google is overestimating its value. If Australia no longer has access to Google, they'll just find alternatives, and then discover that they never needed Google after all.
Nobody said "Australia no longer has access to Google". Google could simply skip Australian news in search results - deplatforming only the news, maybe later reopen access under a new agreement with the willing newspapers.
But that could backfire and Google's power to deplatform a company or a whole market without recourse could be bad for their anti-trust lawsuits. They are benefiting from their powerful status of being a central internet infrastructure without wanting to be subjected to the rigors we set for other infrastructure, such as buildings, roads, energy and food. Would you agree to have the hypothetical 90% monopolist in road construction and operation ban your business or town, so you can eat your freedom and drive on unpaved roads?
> Nobody said "Australia no longer has access to Google"
That's not true: the article's title intentionally misled on that front, and the article body continued to raise fears about a "restricted" search product.
Well, they'd have to have some significant Australian nexus; Duck Duck Go is probably relatively safe from this but Bing would obviously be at risk. I suspect there would be some tendency to prefer the browser that is immune if this code is as unpopular as I imagine it will be.
I don' understand this point. Have any other search engines agreed to this pay-for-news-clicks scheme? Whoever is popular next will face the same pressure.
I think the Australian news media are overestimating their value. If Google no longer links to Australian news media, IMHO the Australian users won't bother to find alternatives, they'll simply read less Australian news as they will see them only when explicitly going to their sites.
I'm sure that USA and UK news media will work well enough for most searches and they will be happy to serve Australian users and earn money off of them by showing (Google-provided) Australia-targeted ads.
Is Google search how most people find their news? I’m not a typical user, so I really don’t know, but my sense is that people have a go-to source (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, aggregators like Apple News or yeah, Google News, or loading sites directly like NYT, Fox News, etc.) If they do use Google search, what are they searching for? Do they type “news”, or do they think, hmm, what topics am I interested in today, and search for those directly?
It's a substantial percentage of news site traffic - if you're interested in something in particular (as opposed to "what's new today") often people'll search for some topic (e.g. "impeachment" or "Arsenal game" or the name of some celebrity) and get linked to an article in a news site, so a significant percentage of news site traffic does come from search engine.
On the other hand, you're right that intuitively people probably won't consider that their local news sites must be accessible through google, if they want news, they do have a go-to source, whatever that is - so that supports an argument that Australian news sites overestimate their importance to Google; Google probably won't suffer much if it can't or won't link to them.
> I'm sure that USA and UK news media will work well enough for most searches and they will be happy to serve Australian users and earn money off of them by showing (Google-provided) Australia-targeted ads.
The law proposed is either a) pay existing media establishments to link to their content, or b) do not show any news at all, including from international sources. They won't be able to block local news and show international sources without facing penalties.
Not OP and very basically: Roughly the same situation occurred in Spain, Google stopped their Spanish News service and Spanish news media revenue went down a non-trivial percentage.
Didn't the same thing happen in Germany also? German news demanded a certain percentage of ad revenue from Google if they continue to copy content from them for their preview. Was that already solved? Ah yes, Google won this lawsuit. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-germany-publishers...
The EU is not Australia, so court cases in the EU have 0 impact on Australian ones, no?
Further, it seems that Google won through a technicality, that the European Commission hadn't been notified of the new regulation and on these ground the case was dismissed. That's very different from actually ruling on the underlying issue.
If Australian news was of the quality of the washington post, or Deutsche Welle, I'd pay for it.
But it's not, and Australians love talking about price signals.
The move by Murdoch to force Google to pay for linking to news articles, which are paywalled anyway, was always audacious and unlikely to succeed on first principles, because Google's indexing is not copyright violation. It is a service to help Murdoch's readers find Murdoch's articles. When customers click through, they end up on Murdoch web properties.
The fact that Murdoch's scheme got this far just shows how much power he has over the Liberal Party in Australia.
Thing is that most people mostly read only the headlines. The headlines themselves had value. People would scan over a newspaper's headlines, flipping the pages, being exposed to the ads. Now people just scroll through Google News reading the headlines and the first sentence or two, which is enough in most cases to get the idea that there was a murder or something.
So the newspapers don't get visitors just browsing through headlines anymore on their front page. That's the problem I believe that is real and partly killing the publishers.
I'm a Crikey subscriber so factor that bias in to your opinion of my reply.
Crikey is an Australian publication of limited circulation and had covered the developments of this legislation quite thoroughly since it cropped up in August last year, so most Crikey readers would know the context upon reading the headline.
Crikey being sensationalist link bait goes against their, generally, subscriber-only access.
It will be interesting to see how this whole thing will play out. Google and Facebook are major players and easy targets. But will the government and companies go after every single search engine like DDG?
Will there be "pirate" news search engines? Like for torrents.
I don't believe that every single news website in Australia agrees with this law. Some would want to be listed in the search results without getting money. Will there be an opt-in?
But "the protocol is purely advisory and relies on the compliance of the web robot" so maybe laws is needed to punish crawlers not following the exclusion standard?
There can't be. The way the law is written, if Google and Facebook serve any news links in Australia, even from non-Australian sites, Murdoch gets to shake them for unbounded amounts of money.
> if the code goes ahead, it will stop Australians posting news in their News Feed
Everything is fine, citizens, nothing to see here! Can we direct the usual "censorship" outrage onto censoring all the news?
Unfortunately this is a fight between two or more parties both of which have dirt on their hands. The "news" in question in Australia is mostly Murdoch propaganda. It's not great for FB/Google to profit off embedding other people's intellectual property but "information wants to be free" and we don't want precedents set for how and whether you can link to websites.
Edit: I agree with https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/08/28/google-facebook-accc-ch... "For the avoidance of doubt, it couldn’t happen to two nicer companies. There are sound policy reasons to loathe Google and Facebook — for their relentless accumulation and abuse of personal data, for their anti-competitive acquisitions of smaller rivals, for their tax dodging, for their complicity in the spread of highly damaging, often literally lethal misinformation and propaganda.
But their alleged theft of news content isn’t one."
Quite frankly I'm at a lose to understand why we think these partisan profit driven companies (news corps) should enjoy any sort of privileged status.
I quite happily move through life without them. I bump into their paywalls or adblocker checks and go else and still find myself more informed about nonsense i've no influence upon than is good for me.
Rupert Murdoch seems to be able to select the Australian prime minister; certainly, two former prime ministers whose parties dumped them between elections have gone on the record saying they believe he has a significant amount of power.
Consequently, since his company owns the governing Liberal party, it's no surprise that his interests magically become the interests of the government and through them the country.
You are of course right. But there is very little media competition in Australia. In a best case scenario, the opposition wins the election expected later this year and drops this policy. But is that a likely scenario? I wouldn't bet a horse on it.
I can't understand the support for this scheme among readers here.
As I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong) The AUS government passed a law aimed at a making a specific search engine pay other private entities for including links to them among its results. Seems nuts!
Of course Google has to decide to either comply or pull out of the market, that's always their right.
>The AUS government passed a law aimed at a making a specific search engine pay other private entities for including links to them among its results.
True and i as Google would just say, hey if you want your link in our Australian search-result you have to pay upfront. Problem solved. If Australia has, for some time just white pages then the peoples will probably do something about it...in the meantime google get a butt-load of money, and Australia looses allot of it.
Who in Australia couldn't name at least one of Rupert Murdoch's news websites? No one needs to use Google to find their front pages. This will be an own goal, but even as it backfires it will help Murdoch since it will make it much harder for a new news media site to get established. Ftr, this law is by and for Rupert Murdoch.
The AUS government passed a law aimed at a making a specific search engine pay other private entities for including links to them among its results. Seems nuts!
I believe what the law actually says is that Google should to pay news providers when it displays content from their websites in search listings - eg when you search for a topic in the news and Google highlights some articles in the "Top Stories" section at the top of the results. The contention is that those links provide very little value to the news site and a heap of value to Google. If that is really the case then there's no reason why Google should get to access and display that data for free.
The point of search engines being able to index a site and display the link alongside adverts has always been that it's a mutually beneficial relationship - the site gets traffic, and Google gets sites to show ads next to. If people are no longer using Google to go to websites then that value proposition changes, and having your website in Google's index is no longer a benefit. If that's true then it's not unreasonable for site owners to suggest they should be paid for the 'raw materials' that Google makes money from. There is an argument that news sites could put up a robots.txt site to block Google, but that's a bit like saying burglary is OK if a house owner hasn't locked their doors...
If the news sites honestly assert "that those links provide very little value to the news site and a heap of value to Google" then they can't really object if Google and Facebook stops providing these links. As they are objecting, then it seems that this assertion wasn't really true and that their bluff got called.
Exactly, and the fact that they hadn’t exercised their power by blocking Google with robots.txt to try and bring them to the table was a huge indicator that maybe they weren’t being honest.
What they were saying was absolutely ludicrous. Somebody from News Ltd. said with a straight face that Google probably owes them $1bn a year - a full quarter of all Google’s Australian revenue across all their products! Either they’re crazy liars, or seriously extremely deluded as to how important their news results are to Google’s revenue...
> I believe what the law actually says is that Google should to pay news providers when it displays content from their websites in search listings
As far as I remember the more ludicrous part is that the code mandates that Google must include news results. That means that Google must pay for all news links. It couldn't, for example, decide to partner with some news orgs and not others. It also couldn't just remove news altogether. The penalties proposed are also insane. Billions if I recall.
Which then leaves them with either effectively being held hostage to pulling search entirely as described here.
Afaik, they're allowed to omit news as long as they also omit all news. They cannot simply omit Australian news and include international news. Therefore, the Australian google would not contain links to Washington Post or NYT.
This is probably to the advantage of the existing large players, since a new smaller player would find it much harder to get traction. We all know the domain name to Mr Murdoch's news websites, but we do not necessarily know the domain name to new media news websites. And we probably won't head off to NYT expecting to get decent coverage of Australian news for natural reasons.
The result is probably going to be a disaster, with fake news spreading as images on Facebook, which will be somewhat trusted since everyone knows you can't find the source in Google and you can't link to it on Facebook, so the fact that you can't confirm it doesn't mean you can call it refuted.
Seems like a good thing for everyone.
People can still find the news sites and consume the news.
The news sites can start to disentangle from the attention economy and clickbaity headlines in favor of more in-depth analysis that give actual value to users.
News on facebook and google search highlight, is just bad news.
Does Google want out entirely of Australia, or just for Google News?
This article seems to confuse the two, as if the user never used Google. (What's that bit about "yellow pages for internet"? Does he describe catalogues from the 90s? What?)
The article is not entirely clear and requires some context. It is not just Google News, but also Google Search. People will often type in breaking news stories into Google Search to get information.
It does not apply to products like Google Mail and Google Maps since they aren't platforms to get eyeballs onto content written for Rupert Murdoch.
The suggested alternative is that instead of serving up Google Search in Australia (i.e. the thing produced by crawling websites), they might serve up an entirely opt-in service. Think of sites like the old dmoz.org. It will suck about as much as it sounds like it will suck. If they do that, I would expect Australian web search traffic to go mostly to the new Google Services Directory and spread gradually to Bing and Duck Duck Go and Yahoo. Microsoft and Yahoo will probably actively strive to avoid becoming the universal default, because as long as they aren't big enough they won't attract the burdens of this law.
Let's be clear: despite the implication of the headline, this isn't google planning to stop indexing free resources nor planning to stop offering free searches.
This solely refers to published news which, not surprisingly, many journalists consider the important part of the web.
A common economic aphorism is "if you want less of something, tax it." Google is responding to regulatory+market signals as intended. Other countries have tried the same thing (e.g. Spain) and found that they haven't liked the results.
Separately, the news sites trying to restrict people from forwarding articles in their own feeds is nuts.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadAustralia is tiny in the grand scheme of things but the average revenue per user is huge, there's still a lot of money on the table here, along with the domino effect.
The government will face huge amount of pressure and be forced to backflip within days if they actually go through with it, but perhaps that is what they want, to set up this narrative that these entities have far more power than any democratically elected government, which for the most part I think is entirely correct, these companies can make or break many governments on Earth.
And while I support them in what they are doing, in the back of my mind all I can think is that Rupert Murdoch probably pulled some strings to make this happen for his own benefit and it's corrupt all the way down.
Also, liberalism has been sufficiently successful in Australia that the argument "new business should not be compelled to serve interests of old business" will have some currency.
Whether these two sectors will be enough to win an election fought on this argument (widely expected in the second half of this year) remains to be seen.
It doesn't become much more transparent than, say, senior members of the Liberal Party government travelling to the USA to visit Rupert but not any US politicians or diplomats.
News Corp may not own the title deeds for any property, but they have all the receipts for money paid and souls bought.
For example, the current PM’s chief of staff came straight from Rio Tinto, previous PM Tony Abbot’s chief of staff (Peta Credlin) now has a show on Sky News, as does ex-PM Turnbull’s (Chris Kenny, from when Turnbull was opposition leader), who also writes for The Australian newspaper. On the other side of the duopoly, the chairman of Nine/Fairfax is an ex-Liberal Party treasurer (basically the most powerful cabinet minister apart from the PM), and they held fundraising events for the party at their studios during the last election.
So the media run positive stories about the Government, and downplay or fail to run stories about, for example, serious allegations of corruption against multiple cabinet ministers of the Government, while policy proposals from the opposition are scrutinised far more closely and savagely than actual policy from the actual Government, and often rubbished. The media runs character assassinations against opposition party leaders and MPs and puff pieces about the Government ministers, the PM’s wife and her fashion choices, etc. - it’s pretty shameless.
Then there are links between Government, the media and big business (again, mostly mining here) through a bunch of think tanks like the IPA (extreme far-right), the Sydney Institute, etc.
As long as environmental protections are kept weak enough for the miners, and tax cuts keep being promised for the wealthy, none of them rock the boat.
Sounds like they'd be complying with the law, not trying to strong-arm anyone.
It's not a strong arm tactic, just a simple cost-benefit move. And it's not a demonstration of market power either. The proposed regulation only applies to companies already deemed to have market power, so only such companies are considering reacting to the regulation this way. But if the law applied universally, you would obviously see the exact same calculation happen at companies that don't have market power. Most would come to the same conclusion as Google seems to have done: it's not worth it to link to news under these terms.
I'm sure I read somewhere, possibly also on Crikey, that News Corp practically wrote the legislation for the Australian Government, and that some amendments were necessary so that the state-funded ABC would not be excluded from the deal. I'll try to find reference to that. Edit, stinging Crikey article here[1]
Edit two, here's an article mentioning including state broadcasters in the code[2]
Stratechery did an in-depth breakdown of elements of the legislation[0]
[0]https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargainin...
[1]https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/08/28/google-facebook-accc-ch...
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/nov/25/google-and-fac...
I find that a good sign that Crikey doesn't get too editorially involved in the journalism.
That makes sense. It fits in with News Corps long war on news aggregating tech firms (Google, largely) and their several failed attempts to lead alternative services controlled by the traditional publishing industry (with themselves in the steering seat.)
So, having failed to compete, they’ve just decided to lobby government to put its finger on the scale to impose a plan as nonviable as their own prior commercial ventures: if they can’t succeed in the news aggregating portal business, they’ll make news aggregation and search a business in which success is brutally punished with terms that make the business completely nonviable.
Where in the hell did you pull this nonsense from?
Also would like to see Google do it. Good riddance imo. It will rock the nation but will spur interior innovation which we sorely need seeing as housing and the mining booms are over.
So while he probably wasn’t directly involved, I’m sure he had very strong input on what direction the people leading the lobbying effort should take.
But even if he wasn’t, I’ve also heard the son who still works there (the one who didn’t quit in disgust over the organisation’s editorial direction) is just as bad...
The Murdoch empire has far more sway over public discourse, and who gets into power than any of the big tech firms, but of course the Murdoch dominated press ignores that ...
But that could backfire and Google's power to deplatform a company or a whole market without recourse could be bad for their anti-trust lawsuits. They are benefiting from their powerful status of being a central internet infrastructure without wanting to be subjected to the rigors we set for other infrastructure, such as buildings, roads, energy and food. Would you agree to have the hypothetical 90% monopolist in road construction and operation ban your business or town, so you can eat your freedom and drive on unpaved roads?
That's not true: the article's title intentionally misled on that front, and the article body continued to raise fears about a "restricted" search product.
However, I exclusively use DuckDuckGo, personally.
I'm sure that USA and UK news media will work well enough for most searches and they will be happy to serve Australian users and earn money off of them by showing (Google-provided) Australia-targeted ads.
On the other hand, you're right that intuitively people probably won't consider that their local news sites must be accessible through google, if they want news, they do have a go-to source, whatever that is - so that supports an argument that Australian news sites overestimate their importance to Google; Google probably won't suffer much if it can't or won't link to them.
The law proposed is either a) pay existing media establishments to link to their content, or b) do not show any news at all, including from international sources. They won't be able to block local news and show international sources without facing penalties.
Further, it seems that Google won through a technicality, that the European Commission hadn't been notified of the new regulation and on these ground the case was dismissed. That's very different from actually ruling on the underlying issue.
The fact that Murdoch's scheme got this far just shows how much power he has over the Liberal Party in Australia.
Crikey is an Australian publication of limited circulation and had covered the developments of this legislation quite thoroughly since it cropped up in August last year, so most Crikey readers would know the context upon reading the headline.
Crikey being sensationalist link bait goes against their, generally, subscriber-only access.
'crap' judgement is up to the reader.
Will there be "pirate" news search engines? Like for torrents.
I don't believe that every single news website in Australia agrees with this law. Some would want to be listed in the search results without getting money. Will there be an opt-in?
There is a opt-out[0].
But "the protocol is purely advisory and relies on the compliance of the web robot" so maybe laws is needed to punish crawlers not following the exclusion standard?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
There can't be. The way the law is written, if Google and Facebook serve any news links in Australia, even from non-Australian sites, Murdoch gets to shake them for unbounded amounts of money.
Everything is fine, citizens, nothing to see here! Can we direct the usual "censorship" outrage onto censoring all the news?
Unfortunately this is a fight between two or more parties both of which have dirt on their hands. The "news" in question in Australia is mostly Murdoch propaganda. It's not great for FB/Google to profit off embedding other people's intellectual property but "information wants to be free" and we don't want precedents set for how and whether you can link to websites.
Edit: I agree with https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/08/28/google-facebook-accc-ch... "For the avoidance of doubt, it couldn’t happen to two nicer companies. There are sound policy reasons to loathe Google and Facebook — for their relentless accumulation and abuse of personal data, for their anti-competitive acquisitions of smaller rivals, for their tax dodging, for their complicity in the spread of highly damaging, often literally lethal misinformation and propaganda.
But their alleged theft of news content isn’t one."
I quite happily move through life without them. I bump into their paywalls or adblocker checks and go else and still find myself more informed about nonsense i've no influence upon than is good for me.
Consequently, since his company owns the governing Liberal party, it's no surprise that his interests magically become the interests of the government and through them the country.
You are of course right. But there is very little media competition in Australia. In a best case scenario, the opposition wins the election expected later this year and drops this policy. But is that a likely scenario? I wouldn't bet a horse on it.
As I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong) The AUS government passed a law aimed at a making a specific search engine pay other private entities for including links to them among its results. Seems nuts!
Of course Google has to decide to either comply or pull out of the market, that's always their right.
True and i as Google would just say, hey if you want your link in our Australian search-result you have to pay upfront. Problem solved. If Australia has, for some time just white pages then the peoples will probably do something about it...in the meantime google get a butt-load of money, and Australia looses allot of it.
And maybe just maybe Australia makes his own search-engine (which would be a good thing)
Because that's what the proposed law says the government would do.
I believe what the law actually says is that Google should to pay news providers when it displays content from their websites in search listings - eg when you search for a topic in the news and Google highlights some articles in the "Top Stories" section at the top of the results. The contention is that those links provide very little value to the news site and a heap of value to Google. If that is really the case then there's no reason why Google should get to access and display that data for free.
The point of search engines being able to index a site and display the link alongside adverts has always been that it's a mutually beneficial relationship - the site gets traffic, and Google gets sites to show ads next to. If people are no longer using Google to go to websites then that value proposition changes, and having your website in Google's index is no longer a benefit. If that's true then it's not unreasonable for site owners to suggest they should be paid for the 'raw materials' that Google makes money from. There is an argument that news sites could put up a robots.txt site to block Google, but that's a bit like saying burglary is OK if a house owner hasn't locked their doors...
Can't agree with your analogy though, that just isn't how the web functions.
Seems like a pretty clear business-to-business issue that should in no way involve the gov.
What they were saying was absolutely ludicrous. Somebody from News Ltd. said with a straight face that Google probably owes them $1bn a year - a full quarter of all Google’s Australian revenue across all their products! Either they’re crazy liars, or seriously extremely deluded as to how important their news results are to Google’s revenue...
As far as I remember the more ludicrous part is that the code mandates that Google must include news results. That means that Google must pay for all news links. It couldn't, for example, decide to partner with some news orgs and not others. It also couldn't just remove news altogether. The penalties proposed are also insane. Billions if I recall.
Which then leaves them with either effectively being held hostage to pulling search entirely as described here.
This is probably to the advantage of the existing large players, since a new smaller player would find it much harder to get traction. We all know the domain name to Mr Murdoch's news websites, but we do not necessarily know the domain name to new media news websites. And we probably won't head off to NYT expecting to get decent coverage of Australian news for natural reasons.
The result is probably going to be a disaster, with fake news spreading as images on Facebook, which will be somewhat trusted since everyone knows you can't find the source in Google and you can't link to it on Facebook, so the fact that you can't confirm it doesn't mean you can call it refuted.
This article seems to confuse the two, as if the user never used Google. (What's that bit about "yellow pages for internet"? Does he describe catalogues from the 90s? What?)
It does not apply to products like Google Mail and Google Maps since they aren't platforms to get eyeballs onto content written for Rupert Murdoch.
The suggested alternative is that instead of serving up Google Search in Australia (i.e. the thing produced by crawling websites), they might serve up an entirely opt-in service. Think of sites like the old dmoz.org. It will suck about as much as it sounds like it will suck. If they do that, I would expect Australian web search traffic to go mostly to the new Google Services Directory and spread gradually to Bing and Duck Duck Go and Yahoo. Microsoft and Yahoo will probably actively strive to avoid becoming the universal default, because as long as they aren't big enough they won't attract the burdens of this law.
This solely refers to published news which, not surprisingly, many journalists consider the important part of the web.
A common economic aphorism is "if you want less of something, tax it." Google is responding to regulatory+market signals as intended. Other countries have tried the same thing (e.g. Spain) and found that they haven't liked the results.
Separately, the news sites trying to restrict people from forwarding articles in their own feeds is nuts.