But there is 0% chance of Google/Facebook not complying.
> I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship
Not even close.
There are no ads on Google News.
There is an apparent glut of online news: supply exceeds demand and so the price has fallen.
This is the ironic part of the policy. You're right about the glut, and there was a glut in print 20 years ago, too. Google's definitely hurt businesses, but it's usually though disintermediating them (think Yelp). Google News and search don't really do that for news--snippets and headlines aren't the same as an article. I find it hard to believe that ABC's brand isn't strong enough for them to pull their content from Google and expect people to go to abc.net.au; I just don't think than can sell enough ads to give the content away.
There are very many news aggregators and most do serve ads next to the headlines they index. I assume that people typically link out from news aggregation sites more than into vertically-integrated services.
Perhaps the content producers / information service providers could develop additional revenue streams in order to subsidize a news aggregation public service. Micropayments (BAT, Web Monetization (ILP)), ads, paywalls, and public and private grants are sources of revenue for content producers.
I think it's disingenuous to blame news aggregation sites for the unprofitability of extremely redundant journalism. What happened to journalism? Internet. Excessive ads. Aren't we all writers these days.
Unfortunately they killed the "most cited" and was it "most in-depth" source analysis functions of Google News; and now we're stuck with regurgitated news wires and press releases and all of these eyewitness mobile phone videos with two-bit banal commentary and also punditry. How the world has changed.
So, as far as scientific experiments are concerned, it might be interesting to see what the impact of de-listing from free time sites X, Y, and Z is.
Do the papers in Australia and France now intend to compensate journal ScholarlyArticle authors whose work they summarize and hopefully at least cite the titles and URLs of, or the journals themselves?
They also risk losing that entire market as well. Let's be honest, nobody loves F or G. If a decent competitor stands up people will gladly switch, even more if they market it as "by Australians for Australians".
SV companies are big and great and all that, but to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.
For example: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/27/16550640/verge-tech-surv...
https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/amidst-techlash-m...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/opinion/tech-backlash.htm...
I read a similar one in the last 6 months tying it to politics. One was that Trump is ironically more tech-friendly than Sanders or Warren (~Nov 2019), despite tech workers generally not supporting Trump. The other oddity was that polls don't really show that there's a techlash, so why are Democratic frontrunners making it a talking point?
Refusing to do business in a country due to regulation isn't acting above the law. These companies have no requirement to conduct business in any given country.
The concept of forcing a foreign business to run a business it doesn't want to is a bit bizarre, and I doubt a court would support the concept, let alone the idea of holding the rest of the company hostage.
I think this is probably just your HN bubble; lots of the criticism of Google here is tinged with irrational bitterness, along with the classic tech culture distrust centralization and the power structures around control of data. I happen to align fairly strongly with the latter view, but neither of these have much purchase in the wider population, where Google remains wildly more popular than most institutions that you think of as benign or popular.
> to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.
How do you explain the situations as they played out in Spain (in 2014) and France? It seems a lot more delusional to me to ignore precedent and forecast based on wishful thinking about the power dynamic between these companies and states.
Nobody loves the media either. Across every market I’m aware of trust and respect for the media has been falling for over a decade.
Like how I promote telegram to my friends but I'm "forced" to use WhatsApp for some "niche majority"
I'm not trying to imply they are above jurisdiction, I am quite tired of hearing the "No one likes these guys" narrative though.
Are Australians really so nationalistic? I thought they would mostly choose whatever tool allows them to do what they want as quick as possible.
> SV companies are big and great and all that, but to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.
Google can follow the law by simply not indexing Australians sites anymore, or they don't have to service Australians. If they are told to share revenue, they can choose to simply shut down the revenue source instead, especially if the cost of revenue sharing exceeds the revenue they are generating. FB/G aren't charities.
When GDRP came online, many web sites in the states found that blocking out EU viewers was cheaper than complying. That isn't going against EU law.
These companies don't push themselves into politics everywhere (yet), but I'm sure that the more governments squeeze them the more they'll get involved.
I used to work at Google. It wasn't often discussed, but when lobbying came up (including in formal contexts) the general attitude was "you can try to ignore Washington but Washington won't ignore you". The perception was very much that Microsoft had gone through the anti-trust trial not so much because of what they'd done but because for years under the Clinton administration they didn't grease the right wheels, in fact they barely had any presence in Washington, which left them politically exposed. The combination of no powerful friends, extremely vague laws and extremely empowered and political regulators was seen as a very toxic one. And that's especially remarkable because Google was (at that time) a company whose executives really didn't like Microsoft, they feared them and treated them as the biggest threat to their business. A lot had come out of the Linux/open source world, academia, UNIX vendors etc and they were really the last people who would give Gates a break, but nonetheless their conclusion was that lobbying was basically a requirement of doing business in the USA.
I'm going back here - eventually that changed and they came to fear Facebook more. But for instance the Google Toolbar was basically an anti-Microsoft play, as was Chrome.
Bill Gates kept politicians at arms length.
If Microsoft had given Washington a little attention, the antitrust lawsuit would never ever have happened.
Google has squelched antitrust investigations in US every single time through lobbying.
Even Apple would been in hot regulatory soup if they didn't buddy up to politicians.
Google is already the largest industry lobbyist stateside
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/09/google-is-techs-top-spender-...
This is said pretty regularly in the media in Australia, and honestly no one cares. Even big mining companies like BHP pay little corporate tax on shore, and after years of it being 'exposed', honestly the general public don't seem to care.
Nothing. Google isn't going to forego the entire Australian market or even an economy as large as the Eurozone. They'd just pay their x% tax and suck it up and consider it cost of doing business.
Google is a company, not a nation state and governments ought to stop kowtowing in front of companies. Reminds me of the story about the elephants and the rope
Australia has 25 million people.
That's about half the size of Spain. The GDP of Australia is roughly equal to the GDP of Spain.
The only thing they extracted were their manufacturing operations, GM and Ford still sell vehicles in Australia. They even have the Focus which Ford dropped for the American market! Unless Google and Facebook are going to close their offices but still provide service to Australia, that seems like an entirely different scenario.
https://www.goauto.com.au/news/cadillac/spied-cadillac-ct5-p...
https://www.goauto.com.au/news/holden/gm-has-lsquo-a-future-...
And then after that the companies will get involved in politics in those places so that it never happens again. This in turn increases the chance of regulatory capture and corruption.
Also, don't forget that increasing the cost of doing business will discourage others from trying. Oh, and there's also the US government too. They might just end up siding with Google and Facebook.
Sounds like a great reason to change the distribution of wealth and systematically reduce the power and influence of corporations.
We'll get anti-google/facebook/tech propaganda campaign like in the past. Remember the months/years of neverending anti-google "news"? Remember the months/years of neverending anti-facebook "news"? Followed by congressional hearings/etc. Notice how it all seemed to have stopped when google/youtube/facebook/etc decided to give state-backed "news" companies preferential treatment on their platforms?
> I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship
In purely business/financial terms, sure. But not in the media/political terms. You think these tech companies have more power than state backed news companies?
I think there’s an element of Australian politics that would push for homegrown stuff over google/fb.
While there’s some precedents with piracy website DNS entries removed from ISP dns, I doubt the gov would want to pick a fight with a multi billion (trillion?) dollar company who would actually fight back.
Google and Facebook are not cutting edge technologies. They are in the position of IBM in the 80s and Microsoft in the 90s, a legacy technology with huge market share being able to charge monopoly prices. A home grown alternative to google search is not beyond any university with a 100m budget.
I admit I hardly visit pirate sites, but I didn't even notice that happen. I just checked and the Pirate Bay is still available so I don't know what they're even blocking.
https://thepiratebay.org is working fine for me today, although I'm sure that address hadn't worked for a while until very recently, and it wasn't the same sort of blocking as those above.
I have a new computer. On my old one I changed to Google DNS when a lot of torrent sites were being blocked a few years ago, and suddenly they all worked again. Kind of silly saying access is blocked when changing one number on the computer unblocks them all.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but alternatives already exist for both.
I guess you could say search engines are nonessential like music and entertainment are nonessential. Somehow people end up wanting both anyways.
Context: left = progressive, right = conservative. I think those terms switch in some countries so figured id mention.
For the ABC, on two separate occasions I reported some pretty egregious incorrect reporting and both times retractions occurred over a month later.
Contrast this to the retractions I've gotten from the private sector. A reporter on a News Corp website replied to my email in under 10 minutes (!!) and issued a retraction. A reported for Fairfax similarly retracted a point in an article the following day after a complaint.
So, the contrast is stark and revealing. ABC and SBS will lie to you with impunity and zero oversight, while the private sector at least has the decency to correct themselves in a reasonable period of time.
Imagine if you woke up and G was not available in your country?
You switch to an alternative: Bing, DDG etc..
Alternatives that many Aussies may not have really been aware of.
And now, 100% of G's user base is being 'conditioned' on competitors' products - their default behavior, the icons they click, the default search engine for browsers changing over.
And for most people - DDG/Bing is probably just as good as Google.
A month later, G comes back to Australia, how many people bother to switch back? How many people have come to 'be fine' with something else? How many people resent G?
Does the Aussie Gov, which will realize that 'search' is an essential aspect of operating ability, will even allow government workers to use a service from someone who will drop it instantly, and sign a service contract with Bing? Corporations who see it as an existential flaw and require everyone to have 3 search solutions 'at the ready'.
For FB obviously it's a different story, however, a smart politician would paint FB as a 'foreign enemy' and turn the tide of populism against them as well. Because Aussie didn't 'ban' them, FB/G pulled out themselves, denying people their service, most people would 'blame them'.
FB has some seemingly essential aspects in terms of communication, but I think that people would soon discover that it's not essential at all.
It would be a disaster for both of them.
The other risk is that this disaster becomes contagious.
If G 'shuts down' in Australia - what does the UK government do? The EU gov? If they are smart they react with legislation forcing more 'choice' in search on every level.
I think the media conglomerates overestimate their importance to Australian customers - for countries like France there's a language barrier, but the vast, vast majority of searches by Australians can be served well without needing any content from the Australian news companies. If linking to your content is expensive, and linking to other content is cheap, then it's perfectly reasonable and generally legal to prefer cheap sources whenever possible.
Google pulling out of any regular nation would be existentially damaging.
MS/Bing would weaponize this to the nth degree - they already have service contracts with businesses and corporations around the world and they'd be in a global push to 'drop Google' for the inherent risk of pullout they just witnesses.
This would be the #1 talking point for their massive global salesforce.
Why are you quoting the words "pulls out" next to an actual quote from my comment? I didn't use it in my comment, and neither did anyone else in the comment thread. Google refusing to play ball here could take any number of forms, from the extreme hardball of simply refusing and tying it up in the courts (and getting fined and perhaps blocked), to just blacklisting links to the companies that the government is extorting them on behalf of. The latter wouldn't even be "hardball"; companies that are explicitly disagreeing with Google's terms for inclusion aren't included in their results, in the same way that robots.txt allows for.
> Google pulling out of any regular nation would be existentially damaging.
There's plenty of precedent for this level of targeted reduction in service as a response to gov't demands. They shut down Google News in Spain, removed French news links under very-similar demands, etc etc. None of this has had the ripple effect you're describing, and is evidence in favor of the fact that Google is concerned about a broader ripple effect: Why else would they give up all the revenue from referral to these sites instead of paying a portion of the revenue in protection money?
+ " They shut down Google News in Spain, removed French news links under very-similar demands, etc etc. None of this has had the ripple effect you're describing"
The 'ripple effect' is happening right now in Australia.
Second - it doesn't matter that much where the tit-for-tat is - it would be existentially disastrous for Google or FB in either sense.
If a corporation was 'out' of a major, regular western nation for any reason I think the CEO's job would be in serious trouble, even Zuck.
What makes you think Bing or DDG wants to pay news companies to share their link and drive traffic to these companies? If anything, forcing revenue sharing would cause a small search engine like DDG out of business as it tries to scale up. If you wanted to start up a search engine today, imagine what these extra costs would do?
> If they are smart they react with legislation forcing more 'choice' in search on every level.
In your anti-google crusade, you are missing the point. It makes no sense for search engines to pay news or any company to drive traffic to those companies. If anything, the news companies/etc should be paying search engines if you really think about it. It isn't a Goolge vs Bing/DDG/etc issue. It's a Google/Bing/DDG/etc vs news/media companies issue.
If these news websites don't want to be part of google search, then they can easily exclude themselves via robots.txt.
IMO decisions like that require power to be concentrated in limited hands.
what australia, france, spain, and anybody else who is trying to enforce revenue transfers from facebook and google to their local media companies is trying to do is called a state-funded media, but that's apparently a bad look. so instead of collecting taxes and then distributing that tax revenue to the companies they want to subsidize, they're trying to pretend this is still some sort of free-market, independently funded media. a newspaper that's staying afloat because of government-mandated payments from big tech companies isn't any more independent than one being funded directly by the state.
Oftentimes governments seek to redress one party whose work is being taken advantage of by another party whether that's from a principle of fairness, a desire to maintain the health of both parties, more mercenary reasons, etc. Doing this outside of the narrow regime of taxes and subsidies is not only not uncommon. It's entirely normal.
Also, it's worth mentioning that the most trusted media organisation in Australia is state funded so it can't be that much of a bad look.
The first thing they could do is fine them. Google and FB might say "ha! but we don't have bank accounts in Australia!" and the government will simply collect from companies in Australia that have outstanding bills from Google for e.g. Adwords or Google Cloud.
Google can still run their websites to be reachable from Australia, but they wouldn't be able to do business in Australia. And what's the point of running an ad tech empire if you can't make money off of it?
Less pithily: Google crawls the web, offering a standard set of terms on which it does so. No website is compelled to accept these terms and have their links displayed on google.com, even if they're public-facing. The mechanism by which you can opt out, fully or partially, is a robots.txt file specifying to the crawler what it can and can't crawl and display. Australian media companies are saying that they don't accept Google's linking terms; they proposed counter-terms of licensing fees for linking, and Google can refuse them. As the two sides have failed to agree to terms on which the media sites can be linked to by Google, they fall neatly into the category of a website blocking robots.txt
that's not a fine.
That's a great way to get a law passed ;)
I'm not saying that I believe the Australian government has a legitimate case or anything, just that between "Google can do whatever it likes" and "all of Google's websites are blocked at ISP levels", there are a few levels of escalation that they can pick.
so the issues is using content in google news or in snippets shown in google search results. i commented before that i seldom leave news or the main search anymore because of these snippets.
why isn't it fair that the ads revenue is shared with these news publishers if their content is taken?
2. Google could just stop showing them. See Spain where this killed the newspapers.
This is entirely a case of publishers wanting their cake and Google's too.
i don't believe that publicly funded journalism is a bad thing, or that taxes are a bad thing. i just think a sneaky end-run around the normal systems of taxation and subsidy are a bad thing. Google and Facebook should be subject to heavy taxation, and local journalism should be supported through public funding. What these countries are trying to do is good, in spirit.
i just think the government should not be in the business of deciding how much one independent private company pays another independent private company, and i don't think governments should be passing laws just for the purpose of being able to issue fines. if the government wants to redistribute wealth, they should do it through taxation, and they should be honest about what they're doing.
They can also just drag this out in court for a long time until everyone forgets, they restructure how their money works, and then they'll share the useless info freely.
Just my take on the situation.
+ Firefox doesn't use the system DNS by default anymore (Defaults to the DoH provider, usually Cloudflare)
+ Chrome doesn't use the system DNS by default anymore (Defaults to Google's)
+ Businesses often set the default DNS to use Google's, not their ISPs.
Yet suggest they should give up their participation in military or US border security, two areas that are unlikely to be larger than their business in Australia (or, other times, the EU), and there’s no shortage of people explaining what a stupid trade-off that would be.
I guess the tech crowds’ priorities are clear: drone targeting? So what? This is strictly business!
A bit of taxation to maybe rescue the journalism a democracy depends on? To the barricades! We will gladly give up 100% of earnings to take a stand against the injustice that is...taking 5% of earnings.
I do think that journalism plays a role in a healthy democracy. I assume that at some point, journalism will settle into a new equilibrium and play the role that it's always played, without the messianic complex that journalism as a whole is currently afflicted with (and so dramatically fails to live up to).
There used to be this fantasy that hobbyist bloggers would fill in where professional journalism fails. Here's a map "news deserts" where the latter has happened: https://www.usnewsdeserts.com. There is no map of the former, because bloggers tend to get up too late to attend boring 9am meetings of the residential refuse working group.
You might be under the impression that relevant news will somehow "diffuse" to get to you. That's a common idea among what's called "low-information voters", who tend to never read any news themselves and extrapolate from there.
It's wrong because they miss that the information that gets to them is simply second-hand journalism: It's full of holes and sometimes has (brown) stains. But the parts of it that are accurate almost invariably originate from professional news sources.
>You might be under the impression that relevant news will somehow "diffuse" to get to you.
I am under no such impression. I am challenging the idea that "journalism" is "critical" for a democracy to function. It only seems critical to me insofar as "function" is defined as "people vote in the way journalists expect them to".
The time from about 1740 to 1800 was for newspapers what the 2000s was for the internet.
1787: US Constitution (first democracy)
1789: French Revolution (2nd)
1832 (to 192x): British Reform Act (expanding right to vote)
> I am under no such impression.
Then how does information about, say, laws being passed, or viruses going around, or wars being lost or won get to you? And if it doesn't get to you, how do you decide whom to vote for?
> It only seems critical to me insofar as "function" is defined as "people vote in the way journalists expect them to".
This is just superficial, cynical, contrarian ignorance. Power in the US has been flipping between the parties quite freely, so the press either changes their opinion just as often as the electorate, or their influence is rather limited.
Unless you watch C-SPAN all day and read every law yourself, you'll neither not be informed, or you'll get your information from people who do some of that reading for you (and, if you're lucky, also ask questions, send & litigate FOIA requests, call experts, speak foreign languages etc). Professional journalism is the closest you can get to the source of information unless you do it all yourself. Your 4chan pals or that YouTube bro yelling at his webcam can't and won't do that legwork, either. So what you like about them isn't that they are better informed––they add one step of transmission and can therefore only decrease information content, never increase. What you like is their capability to pre-digest the news, remove anything that might challenge you, and regurgitate the rest in a form that doesn't conflict with your conspiratorial mindset.
>This is just superficial, cynical, contrarian ignorance. Power in the US has been flipping between the parties quite freely, so the press either changes their opinion just as often as the electorate, or their influence is rather limited.
No, I'm merely pointing out that when one party wins professional journalism recoils into a state of utter confusion. Recall the famous quote from a writer for The New Yorker about knowing only one person who voted for Richard Nixon in 1972.
>What you like is their capability to pre-digest the news, remove anything that might challenge you, and regurgitate the rest in a form that doesn't conflict with your conspiratorial mindset.
I actually very much dislike the journalist who tries to tell me what to think about a certain topic or event, though I see that you're attempting to attribute this behavior only to the "4chan youtube bro", which is a little strange since most journalists today - especially, it seems, mainstream ones - have explicit online personae that reflect a certain worldview and work for news orgs who attempt to "explain" the news to you. This isn't reporting - it's advocacy and opinion journalism where they attempt to inoculate "opinion" by claiming they're just "explaining".
In real life that happens through peer networks as much as the news.
I'm pretty sure, for example, that the Times gets criticised for this at least ten times as often as the Republican Party does, even though the latter was not only the origin of the lie the NYT fell for, but the actual group of people making the decision to go to war.
Only Google shutting down Reader has a worse <magnitude of mistake>/<longevity of criticism> ratio.