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wow, the gall of Microsoft to point fingers is laughable.
I’d prefer the USA never copy Australia on anything, but maybe that’s just me.
So no higher minimum wage? No universal public healthcare? No longer life expectancy? No higher human development index? No effective Covid-19 management?
It seems pretty crazy that somebody would be able demand payment for somebody linking to their site. The Australian proposal doesn't initially go very far, I think only certain media organizations would be able to demand payment, and only certain tech giants would have to pay.
It is a gross mischaracterisation to frame the issue as "linking to someone else's site". That is not what is causing this dispute. Through cloaking news links and a tandem of redirects, Google is collecting data on readers of other sites in quantities that no single one of those sites ever could. As such, the advertisers would rather deal with Google. That is what is at issue. It is not simply "linking to someone else's site". As someone in another thread commented, Google's PR is seriously disturbing. They are treating the public as if they were idiots.

I wish the laws to were for the benefit of users to curb the collection of data, but unfortunately the fight is over who gets to profit from data collection. In some sense it is better for users to not have one company gathering so much data. Better it be an array of different news media sites. Then there is the argument that society needs news media, who employ journalists, more than it needs Google, who refuses to hire journalists but wants all the ad sales revenue that normally goes to their employers.