But there is 0% chance of Google/Facebook not complying.
> I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship
Not even close.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.