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Google: Open Letter to Australians

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452 pointsskissane415 comments

Google evil etc etc aside, they have been decent custodians of their users data. I don't really want to trust Google, but they behave much better than the Australian government, who recently admitted they spy on their citizens [0], can coerce citizens and companies to install backdoors into their companies software [1].

I trust Murdoch less than the government, and much much less than Google. Remember when Murdoch institutions illegally wiretapped celebrities, politicians, royal family members and relatives of dead British soldiers [2]?

0: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/aug/06/peter...

1: https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...

In regards to parent commenters [0] link, this is the story that got a journalist's home raided by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) because she received leaked information (that turned out to be 100% correct) that the Department for Home Affairs was planning to allow the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) to spy on Australian citizens.

Directly quoting from the linked article:

ASD powers have been a source of controversy for the government, after the AFP raided News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst’s home in June 2019 over a news report suggesting the home affairs department was seeking power for ASD to spy on Australians. Dutton had claimed the story was nonsense despite publicly confirming its substance.

The straight-up lying by one of Australia's highest ranked politicians bodes poorly, and goes hand-in-hand with Federal Police raiding a journalists home. Yet this seems to be the Government that the Australian people want.

What the Australian government does well is control information and controversy. The government is a quiet achiever in that regard.

Australians have been comfortable for a while, and are generally disengaged from politics. Most Australians I know are more aware of American politics than their own.

American politics that they're happy to mock, whilst the broth they're wallowing in is rapidly coming to the same temperature.

Yes but it's much harder to find out about Australian politics because we all spend our time as a minority on an American web and our media just aren't doing (can't do?) a great job.

And also because journalists could go to prison for reporting on it.

Which Australian media do you follow? I'd say that Crikey covers politics as well as the best newspapers do overseas, and most countries dream of having a TV show like 4 Corners.

The media is certainly getting smaller—everywhere, not just in Australia—and important things aren't getting reported. The answer to that is pretty boring, though: pay your subscription fees already.

If I may add:

theguardian.com/au

michaelwest.com.au

theconversation.com

themonthly.com.au

All do decent analysis of policy and economics and holding government to account.

Sorry but I just loved this turn of phrase and how well it sits with the issue. Thanks.

Over here in the UK, brits are doing the same.

American politics is a horrifyingly successful reality TV show. It provides the entertainment and conflict people crave, with the intellectual standards of professional wrestling.

Unfortunately real administration is boring - and should be boring. We want to avoid crises.

I hadn't thought about it that way before but I think you're right. American politics is very dramatic. High tensions, big consequences, subterfuge, conspiracy. It's got it all.

> Most Australians I know are more aware of American politics than their own

Gosh this is so true. My sister and I are Americans living in Australia, she recently posted celebrating Kamala being named Biden's VP and got 20+ negative/derogatory DMs from aussie men in her network. I can't believe they care so much.

Meanwhile, you rarely read much about Australian politics in social media besides satire (Batoota Advocate, etc).

How do you draw the conclusion that the Australian people want this behaviour? As far as I can tell none us want this but once elected the politicians fail to action what the people want. Over and over again...

I think his point was that if you’re unwilling to stop something, that is politically equivalent to wanting it.

I think ssss11's point was, if no matter who you vote for they do the same dastardly things, and the political system is set up to lock out newcomers not allied with either major party, then there's no way within the system to stop something by voting.

Yeah thats right, I think in Australia your vote basically means nothing.

You are certainly correct if you vote for the center-left or center-right parties. But that is true in all western states.

Are you familiar with French politics? For all the crap Americans give them about surrendering in the world wars, the french have had the courage to sideline both their center right and center left parties and now the biggest parties are nationalist and socialist.

This is not true. Federal senators are elected on a state wide basis with the top N candidates past the post (N depending on size of the state). This can result in Senators being elected with a very small % of the overall votes.

For the lower house, we've had many years of the balance of power in the hands of a small number of independents who get an outsized voice.

Yes, if you live in an non-swing electorate, that is strongly held by the incumbent, then you could argue that your vote doesn't matter, but only because there are more people voting for something else. Isn't that how things are meant to work?

All of this is true, but it ignores the fact that the two major parties pretty much agree on many important issues (such as government monitoring of internet traffic).

Also the fact that (especially with a hung parliament which we've had for years) independents get an outsized voice is a bit of a two-edged sword. It's far more luck than anything else that determines who's in that vote-tipping seat and sometimes they demand all sorts of special-interest stuff in order to let things through.

I’d genuinely like to know how everday citizens get their government to do the rght thing. It seems everywhere around the world they just do what benefits themselves. people protest, and get hit with rubber bullets, but nothing seems to change.

I've been wondering the same thing lately. The solution isn't with protesting in the street, even if you can topple the government, you just get more tyranny from the next crowd.

Unlike the Ron Popiel rotisserie oven, politics isn’t “set and forget”. There’s no magic system where, once established, good honest people can ignore politics and have effective government.

I would suggest to vote with your feet.

Pick a government you like and move there, instead of trying to change the government in the place you happen to be born in.

Voting with your feet also changes where you pay taxes. (Unless you are American, then you need to jump through some extra hoops to make sure your mother country doesn't get your money any more.)

I'm not sure this is a good idea. Why would anyone abandon their home/nation to jump ship into a culture they know nothing about -- except for government policy? Only in the US with it's state system is what you're describing practical.

The US is far from the only federal country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalism#Examples

You are not only jumping to a new government policy, but the whole package changes. Including culture etc. Yes.

Many people around the world are looking to migrate. If borders were more open, many more people would migrate. About why? You could go and ask some of them. (Or as an alternative, Googling for 'why do people migrate?' gives lots of results to studies etc.)

Politicians are indeed afraid of public outrage.

But there is none (relevant) enough.

Because most people care most about stability.

This may sound like a technicality, but what I said was that this is the Government that the Australian people want. Reason being that they voted it in … again. It's not as if the current government have changed their stripes since the election before last.

Australians have become, in my view (happy to be proven wrong), very conservative because of the fact we've had it so good for so long, and therefore are a bit weak / soft and will cling to whatever excuse is presented by politicians that will appear to keep the good times rolling a bit longer, no matter how illogical the premise or how much it sacrifices a future just too far away to be scary yet.

Climate change and broadband as two divisive examples. They cost too much. Standing athwart history yelling Stop!

Giving me a choice of two or three mendacious, self-serving, incompetent cliques and then saying the one I grudgingly picked as the temporarily least appalling is what I /wanted/, is a bit of a long bow to draw.

Point soberly taken and understood through the scarring of experience. But then, what's the alternative to the cookie-cutter alternatives?

Start yet another micro political party doomed to the fringes? Even Nick Xenophon gave up after a few years.

Revolution? If you can't succeed as a political party how are you going to build a revolution? And does the ends justify the everything-in-between, along with the very high likelihood of potential failure and after-effects of such failure?

Maybe the silent majority have just done the maths already?

Never underestimate the huge authoritarian streak in Australia. The Wowsers have always been a powerful force in politics, and the average Aussie loves the smack of firm government.

Most of the problems in Aussie politics can be laid at the door of the Boomers, who vote in idiots because they don't understand the issues and are scared of change.

Is there an option to call an election void if no candidate gets enough votes? Have to rerun a special election, and maybe get a solid percent for a writein who actually has a different plan?

For any given political view espoused by members of a major political party, if you think "none of us" want it, you need to get out of your bubble.

There's a lot of voters out there who are quite okay with the government doing what they think needs to be done to ensure national security.

Yeah, ok fair call - there must be some who want this. “None” was too bold.

This is mostly true but it also comes with self deception/naivety that the people in charge won't do harm to civilians.

Given evidence to the contrary they prefer to imagine it as a lie.

So it's not correct today that they condone anything the people in charge are doing for national security they repress the existence of the things they don't condone.

> this seems to be the Government that the Australian people want.

I can assure you it’s not. The problem with Republics is that “one man one vote” does not translate into the majority getting what it wants. The loudest and most well organized political forces will get their way, even ones small in number or popular support. State security services have a long history of involvement in politics and media in the Anglo-sphere.

Australia is not (yet?) a Republic

That was probably the least useful thing to criticise in the comment you replied to.

I know, I know, pedantry is fun. But I don't think the Queen makes much of a difference to Australia's problems one way or another.

True, and the recently revealed correspondence from Sir John Kerr to Buckingham Palace confirms that quite often the Crown is only obliquely involved for fear of politicising the head of state.

Indeed she did make a difference in 1975 when her representative fired no other than the Prime Minister.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitution...

Yes, every once in a while. Hence my qualification with 'much of a difference'.

sure, we also have a couple of atomic bombs only. Not much difference there either.

Thanks. I had no idea what he was talking about lol.

The problem with Republics is that “one man one vote” does not translate into the majority getting what it wants.

You can say that again, mate. -- USA

It’s one remotely 1 man 1 vote: the Greens get the same number of votes as the Nationals but have 10% of the representation in the house.

Let me know when we have a Greens deputy PM.

Well, Germany has a saner voting system, but they also have problem. (The Kiwis have a similar system to the Germans, I think.)

> The problem with Republics is that “one man one vote” does not translate into the majority getting what it wants.

This is not a bug, it's a feature. Otherwise you let the big cities stomp over the towns and countryside.

>The straight-up lying by one of Australia's highest ranked politicians bodes poorly, and goes hand-in-hand with Federal Police raiding a journalists home.

As an aside, this is par for the course on our current government. They don't have policy, just lies and fearmongering.

(rant)

> they behave much better...

https://medium.com/@rossformaine/i-was-googles-head-of-inter...

> decent custodians of their users data

They cannot protect that data from law and enforcement no matter what. De-anonymized, aggregated, ephemeral... no matter which way you look at it, data they collect is a ticking time-bomb. And because they amass so much, others that have similar business models are forced to follow suit, so much so that it has heralded us into an era where companies like Facebook [0], FourSquare [1] build and promote spyware without remorse or regret.

Smartphones have only added to the problem. It is madness to claim anyone in big-tech is "well behaved". I'd wager that they're well-behaved only when it is convenient [2].

> I trust Murdoch less than the government, much much less than Google

Peak Silicon Valley?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16363694

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19341079

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17581988

The claim you're replying to is very specific, and starts off by acknowledging that Google does not live up to "Don't be evil" in general, so I don't think the Medium post (which indeed describes some pretty evil behavior) refutes it.

The claim is that Google does a much better job of protecting and securing your private information and not turning it against you than the Australian government - not that they do good things in general.

Yes, they monetize the browsing behavior they collect from you. Yes, they are able to use that to price products at $0 so others can't compete without also finding ways to monetize data. Yes, senior management will gladly take Xi Jinping's money. Yes, senior management will gladly sleep with subordinates. Even so, they are better custodians of user data than the Australian government or the Australian media.

And yes, they cannot protect their data from law enforcement - hence writing this letter telling the Australian voting public that if they don't want Australian law enforcement to compel Google to share certain data, they'd better stop this law.

Let me put this another way - if the Australian government ran a free email service, would you advise every Gmail user in Australia to switch?

The "don't be evil" was always widely misunderstood.

> Let me put this another way - if the Australian government ran a free email service, would you advise every Gmail user in Australia to switch?

False dichotomy? I think, as a technologist you'd agree we could do better than Gmail?

> The claim is that Google does a much better job of protecting and securing your private information

I concur, though (imo), it is a folly to assume Google would continue to uphold highest data-handling standards or could even keep all of the data secure despite employing world-class cryptographers and security researchers. [0] They may be better than most but their enormous cache is both a liability and a disaster waiting to happen.

If such laws mean they collect less data because they cannot stomach sharing it (nevermind whether for privacy or business reasons), that is a win? I think, we'd find out they don't care about privacy after all... just their bottom line.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22235756

> I think, as a technologist you'd agree we could do better than Gmail?

No, actually.

I mean, yes, as a programmer I agree that it's possible to violate people's privacy less than Google does. You simply don't write the privacy-violating code, simple as that.

But as an employed person in tech I don't know who's going to do it. Reliably running a secure email service is hard. Companies are pushed by all sorts of pressures. I think a lot of us have realized, since a week ago, that it's not as realistic as we hoped to do better than Chrome. You can have world-class software engineers working for decades on an excellent, privacy-focused browser, and someone will come along and say that you're not monetizing it enough and lay you off.

So, in fairness, I host my email with Fastmail (which happens to be headquartered in Australia, even). But I pay for it, because I understand that this is how I avoid them monetizing me, and frankly, requiring everyone to pay for email is both unrealistic (in part for the reason you described about Google pushing the price ceiling to zero) and unfair (not everyone can afford it). I'm also aware that Fastmail is almost certainly worse than Gmail at resisting highly-skilled targeted attacks from APTs etc.; I've just decided that that's not in my threat model. If I happened to become a high-profile target, I absolutely would switch to Gmail and Google's Advanced Protection.

Google only cares about their bottom line, it's true. So does Fastmail - and fortunately for me, their bottom line is improved by me paying them instead of them monetizing me. And governments care only about power. There is some pressure on both Google's bottom line and the Australian government's power to be at least somewhat responsible: both could collapse if there was a serious breach of public confidence. The question we have right now is which pressure is stronger. The question we have for the long term is how we make both of those pressures stronger - ideally strong enough to support someone who does want to do better than Gmail for free email or better than Chrome for a free browser.

Just some relevant context to that page, the person there left Google and is now running for office, so I would think twice about the claims they make.

> ...running for office, so I would think twice about the claims they make.

Google is among the highest spending tech lobbyists.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/09/google-is-techs-top-spender-...

I'm not sure how that's relevant to what I said? Just because Google lobbies doesn't mean this person doesn't have ulterior motives for making a whole page attacking Google.

I'm sorry I should have been clearer.

My point was Google has a lot to lose and lie about, too. Frankly, this letter by Google Australia comes off as a scare tactic than a honest plea.

Well, there's the issue of "can you really protect the data?" and then there's "who would you most trust to protect it?". Maybe you can make the case for Google in the second scenario, but if course you can't *really^ protect the data.

So, then it becomes, "what can be done to reduce the amount of data collected and the risk it isn't protected?"

That's where this law appears to be a step backwards.

> Google evil etc etc aside, they have been decent custodians of their users data.

They've been decent custodians to data they force users to give. It's like complimenting whoever stole my bike last year for taking good care of it.

And they lost all their data to foreign secret services (the NSA) once. Google never loosing data and taking "good care" of it is a myth that needs to die.

The only right way forward is to be parsimonius with data. Never pass it along, never collect it (if possible).

I just want to have a place where I can tick, "Google, please never ever collect any of my data".

But I don't have such a thing, not because it's impossible to create one.

Have you tried incognito mode?

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2020/06/03/google-p...

> I just want to have a place where I can tick, "Google, please never ever collect any of my data".

You are asking for a paradox.

They've been decent custodians to data they force users to give.

Fair enough.

It's like complimenting whoever stole my bike last year for taking good care of it.

I don't necessarily buy this argument. They collect a lot of data, and we could argue whether they need to collect so much data, but that is not necessarily 'stealing' your data.

I put an ENORMOUS amount of effort not to have Google involved in my life and for them not to have ANY of my data, and I constantly find myself failing.

So yes, I feel it's fair to call it stealing my data.

What data would they have on you? I'm assuming you're using a browser with tracking protection extensions, so what data are they stealing from you?

Interpreting your comment charitably, I assume you intended hyperbole when using the word force here, and in your comparison to actual force with respect to theft of private property.

Still, I think we should be careful with our words, especially lately as words are being redefined out of apparent expedience.

So, tedious or pedantic as it may be, I feel obligated to gently push back and point out that no force is being used in this circumstance, and that this situation is indeed not comparable to one in which actual aggressive force is being used, as in your bike theft example.

I meant 'force' as in "coercion or compulsion".

> I think we should be careful with our words

I agree, but this goes both ways. So first, you shouldn't assume I didn't mean a word I choose to use just because you disagree with the usage (though in itself disagreeing is fine of course). Second, don't change my word 'force' to 'aggressive force', a term I never wrote (giving the sentence a whole new meaning).

Lastly, there was no "aggressive force" involved in stealing my bicycle. Someone took it in the middle of the night without my agreement (=coerced me to "give" the bicycle to them) in the same way that Google takes my data without my agreement.

So if you agree with the usage of 'force' in the bicycle case, I don't see an issue of using the same verb in Google case.

Again, feel free to disagree, but please don't change my words:-)

Well, I have to make some assumption about your use of a word. In this case, the options I perceived were literal force or hyperbole. In the interest of responding to the "strongest plausible interpretation"[0] of your comment, I assumed the latter.

Since you reject that assumption, I'll respond to the former instead:

There's a clear difference between the two scenarios - one uses physical force (the stolen bike example), the other (Google) does not. For this reason alone, they are incomparable.

Regarding "aggressive force": I never claimed you used the phrase. I'm merely characterizing the stolen bike example. There are two kinds of force that can be used in this context - aggressive and defensive. Aggressive force is force used against a person or their property against their will; defensive force is force used in prevention of aggression. Stealing a bike is clearly an example of the former.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> but they behave much better than the Australian government, who recently admitted they spy on their citizens [0], can coerce citizens and companies to install backdoors into their companies software [1].

But Google has exactly this. First, it collects and saves all its users' data, and can build very detailed profiles of probably each of us. Second, and perhaps more importantly, all the information going through their systems is also piped to the NSA, i.e. spying by the US government. This is what Edward Snowden revealed.

Murdoch may have illegally wiretapped celebrities, but Google legally "wiretaps", well, everyone - on their "wires".

Murdoch's investigators illegally wiretapped anyone they could to get a scoop, including a murdered child. The process of doing so made it look like she was reading the messages and still alive.

> The process of doing so made it look like she was reading the messages and still alive.

My understanding is that this turned out to be untrue. Wikipedia isn't super clear on this point, but I think it backs me up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...

Wikipedia says the very opposite of what you're claiming.

It wasn't just News Group that hacked phones. Mirror Group Newspapers did as well: https://www.theguardian.com/business/commentisfree/2020/mar/...

> I don't really want to trust Google, but they behave much better than the Australian government,

If you ignore who does it worst in pracice, the most important argument becomes apparent:

The Austrialian government is a democratically assigned entity; one that has (or should have?) checks and balances in place; one that is closely monitored as your various references prove.

Google, a foreign private entity has no such checks and balances in place. We don't vote in general elections for the new CEO of Google, we don't elect representatives into the board, and we cannot lean on transparancy laws to look into the kitchen at that private entity.

So you are saying democracy is magic?

No.

I'm pointing out some differences between a private entity and a goverment, which the parent commenter either ignored, or forgot to mention when comparing said governement with said private entity.

So what? Democracy isn’t a sacrament, it doesn’t sanctify the government. Hitler was democratically elected. Democracy does not have moral valence as such.

Hitler got 33% of the vote in the last free and fair elections.

But I agree that democratic government doesn't automatically justify everything. Minority and fundamental individual rights are a problem. There are a lot of tricky issues with self referentiality if you think about independence movements for instance.

Yep, Hitler being elected Chancellor was well within the legal framework of the Weimar constitution (even if it was kind of a shady backdoor deal). Him rigging the 1933 election and later grabbing all the power through the Enabling Act wasn't.

I find the elected fascist to be an interesting thought experiment. If someone was fairly elected on a platform of genocide, would you comply? If someone doesn't, does that mean democracy is second to morality? And, if they don't, do they think that person should be allowed to stand on that plaform?

Duh, obviously democracy ranks way lower than morality.

Whether someone should be allowed to campaign for genocide depends on the laws of the country. In modern Germany platforms like that are explicitly forbidden. But the laws of the Weimar Republic were more value agnostic.

Hitler wasn't elected, in fact the Weimar Republic was mostly incapable of forming a working government during the time it existed. Like many before him Hitler was assigned his position in the hope that his failure to uphold his promises would also cripple his support in the population. His biggest grab for power was underlined by armed SA troops in the Reichstag, a lot of imprisoned or outright missing politicians and Göring fudging the attendance count to meet the minimum requirements for a legitimate vote.

The Nazi faction, led by Hitler actually 'won' the election because their party got the most votes, but not enough to have an absolute majority so they were going to have to make some kind of coalition.

A similar thing could easily happen today.

> The Nazi faction, led by Hitler actually 'won' the election because their party got the most votes, but not enough to have an absolute majority

The coalition Hitler lead had around 240 of 580 seats. They didn't have an absolute majority because they weren't even near having any kind of majority. Of course a hundred of the other seats were held by communists and those went up in flames after the Reichstag fire and the subsequent ban on left leaning political organisations.

> A similar thing could easily happen today.

The last time a German government tried to outlaw an opposition party it ended up with the courts throwing the case out for involving too many law enforcement moles.

True, and I absolutely support regulation where necessary. I strongly support regulation that require companies to handle user data in a confidential manner, for example. But that doesn't make all regulation automatically good; I strongly oppose regulation that requires companies to share sensitive user data with anyone who asks for it, for example. And forcing a company to do business it does not want to do, seems unreasonably oppressive.

In this particular case, if Google barely makes any money on linking to news sites, and the law says they need to pay a lot of money to link to those sites, then the obvious business decision is not to link to those sites at all, which will likely hurt news sites, because they get less visitors.

There are levels of regulation that will hurt the market, rather than help it, and this sounds like it might be one of those.

I recognise the right and need of democratic governments to regulate markets, but I also recognise that this can turn the government into an authoritarian seat of power, that serves power, rather than the people. This democratic accountability needs to work, needs to be used, needs to be obeyed by the government. So that makes it good that Google shares with the Australian public what's going on.

I'm not saying this specific law is any good (I think it is not). But I am saying that when we compare who is to allow or deny us access to news and knowledge, and who should be able to track our every move, a democratic elected goverment is better suited to do so, than a private entity.

That sounds completely contrary to the concept of a free press. If the government gets to decide access to news, then independent checks on the government can become impossible. It would be the end of a free press.

This is absolutely a big problem with democracy: on the one hand, it requires a free press to inform voters about the state of the country and the government, but on the other hand, there's no way to guarantee that the press will provide the necessary information; the press needs to be funded, but if the government funds it, the government controls it. If the people pay for it in a free market, then the press will publish what the people want to pay for, rather than what is necessary for them to know about their government.

What I meant was not that a democratic government has to be the free press, but that I has to keep laws, checks, balances and regulation to ensure that free press is possible.

And that a government is a better candidate to enable and ensure free press than a private entity: we can see this in action in e.g. China where either Google keeps away from, or companies self-censor to grab some Chinese cash.

Sorry for the confusion.

I don't quite understand what you mean. Are you saying that the Chinese situation, where the government is the entity that decides on access to the news, is a good one?

I think it's vitally important that press can exist and publish completely independently from the government. Yes, that does mean there need to be laws protecting the press from censorship and subtler forms of manipulation. But this particular piece of regulation looks like it's going to hurt access to the press by forcing Google News out of the country.

Furthermore, it sounds like only large news corporations can get money from this, which makes me wonder what that means for independent journalists and small news publications.

(Admittedly fake news is a big problem, but so is a government deciding what is true and what is false.)

Sorry for more confusion.

I think the Chinese situation is bad. But that was not my point. The point was that a government is the entity to protect, enable and allow free speech; a private entity is not.

The Chinese example shows that when a government does not allow, or protect free speech, the private entity cannot solve it either. Google cannot enable free speech in China: only the Chinese government could do that.

I used this example to show that relying on private entities to protect freedom is not a very good one: you need a government that enables them; even if "enabling" means "not interfering" or "pulling back".

> "The point was that a government is the entity to protect, enable and allow free speech; a private entity is not."

This is true in the ideal case. In practice, governments don't always enable and protect free speech. Even the idea that governments should do this is fairly recent, and constantly under attack.

> "Google cannot enable free speech in China"

This is true. But Google can warn people when free speech is under attack. And some companies do have a habit of fighting for free speech.

In the end, there is no single entity that can and should bear the entire responsibility of protecting free speech; it's up to everybody.

On the other hand, the government is a true monopoly (for good reason) so you can't just stop being their "customer" whenever you like.

You may end up spending your entire life oppressed by your fellow citizens who may be indifferent towards your needs.

So I think there is a good reason for not having the government directly run everything. It wouldn't even mean democratic control over everything. It would mean bureaucratic control, very indirectly influenced by a democratic choice between a handful of parties once every 4 or 5 years.

Both government and voluntary agreements between individuals and companies have their place. What governments should do is make sure that our interaction with Google and other tech giants is indeed voluntary and transparent.

Turns out it's surprisingly hard to stop being a Google customer, if not impossible. I advise you to check the series by Kashmir Hill if you haven't yet: https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-l...

From the article, it doesn't sound _too_ hard to not be a customer of any of the companies (and I was Google-free for a long while until I had to use an Android for work purposes); what is difficult is not interacting with any customers of these companies in addition to not interacting with the companies themselves. This person didn't use Signal, for instance, because it is hosted on AWS. That's like saying you'll stop visiting shops that have Verizon Business internet or similar, which to me seems very different from just trying to cut Verizon out of your life.

> It wouldn't even mean democratic control over everything. It would mean bureaucratic control, very indirectly influenced by a democratic choice between a handful of parties once every 4 or 5 years.

Even direct democratic control would be a nightmare. In practice the bureaucratic layer probably tempers the worst excesses.

That's probably true as long as a particular bureaucracy isn't too corrupt.

I trust Google way less. They want to take content from publishers and monetise it while giving very little back resulting in an unsustainable media model. Google does the equivalent of wiretapping every day then sells data to advertisers, far more lucrative than anything News Corp has ever done.

I don't especially like News Corp but their media properties are key to providing an alternative view to liberal news coverage across English speaking countries. In any case the solution to all of this is breaking Google up into its component parts and making them pay tax.

> can coerce citizens and companies to install backdoors into their companies software [1]

No, no it can't. I don't know how the media managed to get this so wrong and how so many people just accepted it without questioning it.

The law explicitly limits, and limited from the start, the effect that a government request could have [0]: a request cannot introduce a "systemic weakness".

Some relevant quotes of what a systemic weakness can entail:

- "one or more actions that would render systemic methods of authentication or encryption less effective"

- [when targeting a particular person] "any act or thing that will, or is likely to, jeopardise the security of any information held by any other person."

Note that this is a restriction on the "effect" that a notice can have. It's not just the the government can't ask for this, it's that the government can't ask for anything that would result in this.

So no, there are no backdoors.

What there is, is a a requirement to assist when it can be done in a way that doesn't have any of these effects. For example if the government wanted to intercept WhatsApp messages, it could require that WhatsApp introduce a hard-coded identifier into the app and if a user matches that identifier, then copies of every message would be sent to the Australian government. This doesn't introduce any systemic weakness and doesn't compromise anybody else's data, so should be permitted.

And I don't see how the above could be considered a "backdoor", as it requires that the app be pushed through the app store, a capability that WhatsApp already has.

[0]: http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997...

Any property of a system that makes it possible to intercept the communication of specific users is, in and of itself, a systemic weakness.

I agree and were a company to not already have that capability and the government were to request it, such a request would be legally worthless per the aforementioned law.

However pretty much every closed-source communication tool already has this systemic weakness, so the government doesn't have to ask for it to be introduced. WhatsApp, Facebook, Google etc. can all, today, as we speak, choose to push out an app update with code to send plaintext copies of a specific person's messages to Australian law enforcement/intelligence. There's nothing new here.

Open-source tools though do not have this vulnerability. Signal for example has reproducible builds and the Australian government cannot require it to remove them so that it can covertly intercept individuals' messages.

My point here is that contrary to reporting in the tech media, the law doesn't and cannot require that any backdoors be introduced. It can only require that existing ones be used.

> they have been decent custodians of their users data.

I very strongly disagree. I will explain below, but first want to comment on:

> but they behave much better than the Australian government

Yes, sure, I agree. But this is a function of impact, to me. A government has much greater ability to negatively impact me than a corporation does, in that a government can outright decide to murder or imprison me, while it would take much greater effort for a corporation to do so.

So, yes, of course I trust Google more than I do any government.

But, with that said, as far as companies having my data go, Google is exactly the company I don't want to have my data. Here's why:

Why do we care if any company has our data? I think (at least for me, personally), two reasons immediately spring to mind: the data could leak to criminals who will use it to try and defraud or blackmail me, and the company might sell my data.

But why do I care if companies sell my data? If its just those two reasons, then it really just boils down to increasing the risk of hacks/leaks, but that doesn't sound like the complete picture to me. No, I also care about a company itself directly misusing my data, not just selling it to someone else (why would they want it?). So we need to define what we mean by "misusing".

For me, it means using the data against me, which, in the case of companies, typically means using it to psychologically trick me into giving them money. This is exactly the business Google is in. Their bread and butter is in figuring out ways of making me click on adverts in order to spend money on something I wouldn't otherwise have (or would have bought elsewhere). Google's entire business is built around the very reason I don't want companies to have or sell my data!

Of course Google tries to put a positive spin on it, like they are only trying to show me the most relevant things based on my interests, in order to tell me about things I didn't know about but want to know about. I don't buy it for a minute. As long as Google show me adverts for (or even have them on their platform) outright scams[1], malware or exploitative garbage like Raid Shadow Legends, I cannot believe their motives are anything but to do whatever makes consumers pay their clients money (so that they in turn keep spending money on Google). If that happens to match up with something that benefits the consumer, great, but if it also happens to be detrimental to consumers, Google doesn't care. The very fact that they willfully keep serving adverts (and don't have a way to report them, certainly don't act on reports) for actual blatant SCAMS and fraud, malware and exploitative content is proof of this.

So, no, Google have not been decent custodians of their users data, they are the very company we want to protect our data from in the first place. The fact that there are worse actors does not change that.

[1] Recent HN post about this very subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24175924

Google evil etc etc aside, they have been decent custodians of their users data

Maybe, but can you guarantee they will be good custodians tomorrow, even if they are good custodians today? Privacy is a unique problem, in the sense that it only takes one incident (intentional or not) to ruin reputations/lives etc. The best course of action is not to look for good custodians, it is not collect even one piece of data that is not absolutely necessary.

> who recently admitted they spy on their citizens [0]

The linked article is about planned changes that haven't yet been legislated - "Details of the new powers – which will require legislation – are not contained in the strategy"

I also don't understand why it's necessarily bad...?

Countries face internal security threats. For example, in the UK, the 7/7 bombers were British, ditto the Manchester and London Bridge attacks. In fact most terrorists who attack Britain are British. Are MI5 not meant to spy on Brits?

> can coerce citizens and companies to install backdoors into their companies software

Google is a company.

>I don't really want to trust Google, but they behave much better than the Australian government, who recently admitted they spy on their citizens

It is really about if you trust Australian gov or the US gov.

Australian here. Fuck News Corp, one of the most corrupt entities in Australia that directly collude and interfere with our elections for the benefit of themselves and Big Coal.

I hope Google don’t fuck around.

>corrupt entities in Australia

They have also seriously damaged the media in the US and the UK. Its no wonder all 3 countries are having serious issues with news.

That's an anglo-centric perception. Which countries has Google News been banned in? Spain. China. Germany briefly until Google told the news orgs they'd never pay, so could license their content for free or disappear from News and search.

Newspapers trying to screw Google out of money by pressuring politicians is not an Australia or News Corp specific problem. It's happening everywhere. Really, all it reveals is how cravenly controlled by journalists supposedly independent politicians really are. We always "knew" it, but now we know it.

The comments you were replying to are about News Corp, who have done done very specific damage to the Us, UK and Australia specifically.

As far as I know they operate in those 3 places. I'm not aware of any operation they have in Germany.

I don't know why this gets a so downvoted, it's correct. There was/is a huge pressure made by French and German media owners.

You're not wrong, but News Corp doesn't hold a lot of power in FR or DE.

Meanwhile Fox News is still poisoning minds in the US, and basically calling the shots in Australia. Plus all the UK hacking, etc.

I'll give a shit about what AFP or Deutsche Welle are doing when they start becoming a tool of the US GOP that openly pushes for invading Iran.

Because it's a fact that contradicts the leftist "English speaking countries bad, EU civilised and good" narrative. That's a reliable way to get downvoted on HN.

lol Australian here as well: Thats like saying "Go Darth Vader! I can forgive the fact you slaughtered hundreds of Jedi and children, because you're way more redeemable than the emperor..."

Both orgs are to a degree, evil. why do we have to settle on which evil we support?

> Both orgs are to a degree, evil. why do we have to settle on which evil we support?

Because the decision has a huge effect on our lives. I already see hailstorms in the summer where I live, so I'm definately in the renewables camp. It's still easier to hide from Google than hiding from the weather changes that affect me even when I'm inside my comfortable apartment.

When things are open again, I want to make a movement where we steal, deface, or destroy any Daily Telegraphs / Herald Suns distributed in cafes and restaurants. Calling Murdoch Media news is actively damaging society.

Obviously the Australian government is trying to make google pay just because Murdoch told it to. But the pretense is bizarre - that google has to pay Murdoch because it steals his content.

Google doesn't republish News Corp content! It just lists headlines with URLs that readers click to go through to News Corp! Google is giving News Corp 70% of its traffic.

Bizarre.

What's to stop google from simply ceasing to index News Corp at all?

The fact that it doesn't, and instead runs a scary PR campaign, tells me there's something going on that I don't understand. But what?

I imagine Google would rather continue to serve up those search results if possible. And if they did omit the search results their argument that they treat content fairly falls apart.

> And if they did omit the search results their argument that they treat content fairly falls apart.

Why? That's just the same as respecting robots.txt, isn't it?

Not indexing news content in order to avoid submitting to the proposed new law is itself prohibited under the new law.

Conspiracy theory time: that's what this is really about. Murdoch (Fox etc) know that they are next after Facebook gets done banning qanon nonsense. If Google audited the accuracy of Murdoch owned sources, it would have good reason to start delisting them. Murdoch knows he can't afford that. So this isn't about getting 1p per 1000 views or something. It's about being assured a high search result placement for his disinformation.

Google delisting high-clickbait sources because their claims are blatantly false is something that would never happen.

Are you sure? They're all under pressure, even twitter which was basically the wild west has started adding "get the facts" links, Facebook just closed all those groups.

"What are you doing about misinformation?" is a question execs might like to have an answer to...

So Google will either pay up, or exit Australia long enough until the law gets overturned - whichever is cheaper. For massive companies like Google, presenting them with silly fines and taxes is like a truck finding a little speed bump.

Google paid up when the competition regulators in the EU fined them €1.5bn, didn’t they?

Europe is a much bigger market than Australia. Many companies don't do business there.

That was a fine for breaking the rules, not an involuntary contract.

Link to the new legislation or description thereof?

Concepts paper and draft legislation published by the ACCC: https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/news-m...

HN discussed this when the draft legislation was published: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24006150

This law is the latest iteration of newspaper's attempts to turn Google into an ATM for the industry.

The first attempt was in Germany. The law said search engines must pay newspapers to index their content. However it didn't specify what the price should be, so Google simply negotiated a fee of zero and the law was in effect nullified.

The second attempt was in Spain. It is the same law, but this time they added a clause that said the fee can't be zero. So Google News was shut down in Spain and the law was in effect nullified again.

The third attempt is in EU and Australia. In Australia it's the same law, but this time it says the fees both cannot be zero and that you aren't allowed to shut down your service. In the EU the assumption is Google can't pull out, so if a Spain-style law is passed at the Commission level then Google have to pay up.

What comes next? My guess - either this is the point where Google breaks or they pull out of Australia completely. They did it on principle for China, once, and that was a drastically larger market. But it's not the same company it once was.

It may be that Google/FB just decide indexing news isn't worth it. Bing can serve loss-making news queries. Or someone would set up a news-focused search engine in the USA that doesn't have any legal presence anywhere else. Indexing news is a much more tractable problem than indexing the entire web especially with advances in AI-driven NLP. However, there's the question of how to get people to pay for it.

edit: apparently the law is a bill of attainder and names who it applies to specifically, note these laws are unconstitutional in the USA (at least theoretically).

How can government tell you what services you must provide? That's ridiculous.

In the Americans with Disabilities Act, US law states that if you're going to create a place of public accommodation, there are certain minimum standards you must adhere to, to support those with disabilities. So you must install ramps and elevators for the mobility-impaired, offer audio-only interfaces for the blind, sign for the hearing impaired, and so on. These apply pretty broadly.

We can argue whether Australia's legislation is a good thing, but "if you are going to operate here, these are the standards you must follow" is not beyond the pale.

There's a difference between having to comply to certain standards when opening a new service, and being forced by government to retain a service that is unprofitable.

It's Australia. Try looking into some of the weird and gross stuff the Federal government does.

Thanks sjy

That is utterly false

The Australian government isn't forcing Google to index content, and I suspect what op suggested is what will happen and News corp will beg for reindexing

I don't get it... if News Corp doesn't want to be indexed can't they just set their robots.txt accordingly? It doesn't seem like they'll be able to successfully argue this.

What this law gives them is a way to force all their competitors (e.g. Fairfax) to join their boycott, by being able to negotatiate a single, mandatory price for the industry that their competitors won't be allowed to undercut.

I'll just note that robots.txt does not affect indexing. It is used for traffic management and will not hide pages from Google. [1]

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en

> But the pretense is bizarre - that google has to pay Murdoch because it steals his content.

That's not exactly the pretext. The Australian regulation is being proposed under the office of competition; it's effectively a proposed anti-trust regulation.

It's not alleging that Google is engaging in some sort of copyright infringement or "theft" of proprietary News Corp property, but rather that it's abusing its market position.

From some of the terms of the proposed law (namely information regarding treatment of paywalls and coverage of news-adjacent content like sports), I think that one claim to unfairness is "Google makes it hard for News Corp to have a profitable paywall because it directs people to other sources." That's not particularly convincing to me, but I'm not an Australian regulator.

And surprisingly, not one mention of Murdoch.

Let's be honest - this is old media trying to push their weight to keep margins. Facebook and Google have effectively replaced both clickbait and tabloid news sources, as well as the well-resourced, quality journalism by taking ad revenue off their hands.

Google could easily setup a news sourcing hub themselves and self-cite news rather than relying on their external data feeds.

This is political. Neither Google or Facebook is going to be paying a cent here.

I find Google citing data safety annoying.

> And surprisingly, not one mention of Murdoch.

"The law would force us to give an unfair advantage to one group of businesses - news media businesses - over everyone else who has a website, YouTube channel or small business."

This wording doesn't suggest that Murdoch would have a better advantage than any other 'news media business'. Is there anything in the new laws to suggest, apart from capital/resources, that this is set to benefit any particular Australian media business over another?

> Google could easily setup a news sourcing hub themselves and self-cite news rather than relying on their external data feeds.

So they'd be paying for news content from established media enterprise, or paying journalists to write their own - as opposed to leaching off them. Seems like a win?

I agree with your broader point, though it should be noted that public broadcasters (namely ABC and SBS) will not be able to make use of certain rights under the new legislation (namely the forced arbitration system). So it does give slightly more favour to private media organisations -- though you could argue allowing the ABC or SBS to exercise those powers would violate their own charters (their duty is not to be competitive with other media).

Where in their charter does it say that it is one of their duties not to be competitive with other media?

The only mention in the charter (it's really short) is:

> (2) In the provision by the Corporation of its broadcasting services within Australia:

>(a) the Corporation shall take account of:

>(i) the broadcasting services provided by the commercial and community sectors of the Australian broadcasting system;

It's a Murdoch/Nine/7West continuous whinge that ABC/SBS compete "unfairly", yet when it comes to actual community needs (eg emergency broadcasting, rural and regional reporting etc), they do squat in return for their spectrum and cable licenses.

It's not that the charter says "you cannot be competitive with other media", it's that their charter doesn't say "you should be competitive with private media". The ABC and SBS exist to provide both information and entertainment with a specific focus -- not to try to be the most highly-rated channel in Australia. As a result, the ABC or SBS using the new powers under the proposed legislation wouldn't fall under their charter -- because the purpose of the legislation is to rectify an (alleged) power imbalance in the agreements between news companies and digital media.

On balance (reading my comment again), I should probably have phrased it as "it is not their duty to compete with privately-owned media" rather than "[it is] their duty not to".

Open comment from an Australian to google:

"Pay your f#$king tax like the rest of us or shut the f%$ck up."

This comment stands apart from any and all implications of their special interest policy pleadings above which are all pretty tedious in comparison.

Google don't pay tax for profit made selling in Australia. To hell with them and literally any case they have to make.

Be that as it may, News Corp doesn't pay tax in Australia either, and I don't see why Google should have to pay what is effectively a tax to them!

Make them pay tax by all means, but why should it go straight to news corp?

To hell with "them"? Are you saying Australians should cut off their nose to spite their face?

I think you missed the whole point of this letter. Let me clarify:

"Oi mate, the government wants to force us to fuck you royally. We don't want to. Please help stop yourself getting fucked. Cheers, cunt."

And here is another Australian who says "Oi mate, Google don't want to pay taxes for profits they made in Australia. They don't want to invest in schools, universities, infrastructure or anything else through reasonable taxation. Google are fucking over Australians".

But it's orthogonal.

It's like you're saying you want to be fucked by both Google and the government.

Why do two wrongs make a right, to you? Again: cutting off your nose to spite your face.

No, I want Google to pay taxes for profit they earned in Australia.

Or-tho-go-nal.

Cutting off your nose to spite your face does not stop your face from doing whatever it did to make you spite it.

Non sequitur. Orthogonal. Unrelated. Irrelevant.

You can be against google fucking you and the Australian government fucking you. These are not mutually exclusive.

Google is a for profit entity which is legally bound to optimize value for shareholders. Therefore they will follow whatever taxation laws there are. Same with Amazon, MSFT, Apple etc.

Change the tax laws. Google isn’t doing anything wrong (morally yes, legally no). It’s how public corporations work.

I think you missed the /whole/ point of the comment.

You are starting from the premise that google care about australians. This is a demonstrably false assumption. They don't pay their tax. They would destroy australians in a heartbeat for more money. It's not opinion, they've shown that themseleves. That is just a sad fact.

Now re-read your comment and tell me if there is any good reason anyone should care about what google says when they claim to be on the side of "australians" when we know they are not. No framing, nor spin from the PR agency here changes that.

Google "on the side of small players" is just vomit-making. They never have been anything other than brutal to small players in any action they have taken in business in any single way. Really. Google take everything they can, whenever they can, however they can. Ask small players who has had business squashed. Want to sell apps in the android store who have their REVENUE taxed by google while google don't pay their tax to the government. Then if you manage to make profit after paying a revenue tax to google you find you just did google's market research for them. That's one example, there are plenty.

Google are foul. This open letter foul. Even if you agree with any points the PR agency is useing to try and influence you it still foul.

The policy discussion about what constitutes good policy for Australia comes after we acknowledge how awful google are. And after we have agreed to place the intrerests of Google precisely last after every single Australian who pays their tax.

"NO representation without taxation!"

> You are starting from the premise that google care about australians

I'm absolutely not. Complete misunderstanding of everything I'm saying.

"Hey that guy is about to stab you!" -"fuck you you're a .. aaaaaargh I'm being stabbed!"

> They would destroy australians in a heartbeat for more money. It's not opinion, they've shown that themseleves. That is just a sad fact.

Also 100% irrelevant.

> Now re-read your comment and tell me if there is any good reason anyone should care about what google says

Only if they are right.

Don't cut off your nose to spite your face. A fact (if indeed it is) said by the stupidest evilest entity, is true even if they said it.

Feynman has a great bit about that. No matter who says it, if it's right it's right, if it's wrong it's wrong.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

But go ahead, be fucked by both google and the gov, if you prefer being doubly fucked.

The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.

As a fellow Australian, we must compel our government to change the laws so that the many large corporations that operate in this country, not just Google, pay an appropriate amount of tax.

Google complies with all the relevant laws.

If Australians want Google to pay more taxes, they should change the tax laws to make them pay more taxes.

Tax law is what's written in acts and statutes, but also what's developed in case law.

Google's lawyers will claim that Google is compliant with tax law, but until these complex tax avoidance schemes go through the courts we won't know.

Most tax authorities use courts as a measure of last resort, and will prefer to add clarifications to the law and negotiate settlements with avoiding companies rather than spending millions on legal fees for court cases.

Some companies see a regulation and say "that's the bare knuckle minimum expected behaviour that we cannot go below". Other companies see a regulation and say "how far beyond that can we go before we get fined?"

Is this what Google is complaining about, changing laws?

If this law was a tax, you would be correct, but this is a law to force Google to pay news corp

In some sense, yes.

"Multinational makes money dance through 13 countries to pretend that Google Ireland is an absolutely different entity to Google Australia".

Google can legitimately fuck off. The amount of money they have stolen from states throughout the world is measured in billions. And some people have the gall to come and say "bUt It'S lEgAL!1".

Honestly, I'd rather have Facebook have the money than most governments.

> Google complies with all the relevant laws.

Yeah, they use every loophole the system provides to pay the least amount possible. If I used every loophole to take advantage of a system and make it do what I want, I'd be labelled a criminal. I'd be called a hacker. But since it's a big company and the system isn't a computer, well... I guess it's OK then.

They're hacking the system and you're fine with it because "technically they're complying with relevant laws". Just because something is legally possible doesn't mean it's right.

No you wouldn’t. This is what an accountant does for you.

The loopholes are part of the laws.

I am very glad that I moved to a country, Singapore, that in general has sane and simple laws that don't suffer nearly as much from loopholes as most other countries.

We definitely do need to close up loopholes that multinationals use to avoid paying tax here (and really, everybody should have a look at Michael West’s Top 40 Tax Dodgers [1] - apparently Google avoids being on the list by directly booking a fair bit of their Australian profit offshore, but wouldn’t be that high compared to the likes of Chevron, Exxon and others). But we need to keep in mind that this proposed bill has been pushed for pretty much solely by a single American company that controls 70% of our media and also doesn’t pay tax!

In this case, I’d prefer Google wins - tax reform can come after. Or we could use it as a compromise - “OK, we’ll drop the News Corp Subsidy Bill, but in return you stop the tax avoidance”

1. https://www.michaelwest.com.au/australias-top-40-tax-dodgers...

I agree multinational corporation taxation is sorely in need of updating but this isn't taxing Google. This is just robbing Google and giving the proceeds to News Corp. The Australian people don't get anything from this, it's literally just taking money from one multinational and giving it to another. What would be hilarious is if Google just delisted News Corp in the US and UK and charged them a premium for adwords to offset the theft in the Australian market.

> Google don't pay tax for profit made selling in Australia.

And why should they if they don’t operate in Australia?

If I, as a European, sell something to an Australian from which I profit, should I be paying an Australian tax on this sale?

What if you as a European (company) employ 1000 Australians in Australia and have Australia specific resources (including sales) in Australia and use those Australian resources exclusively for Australia.. are you still not operating in Australia?

Completely forgot in the other comment but your product would be subject to GST, which is a tax. I can't imagine Google paying GST %s on their Australian ad sales, but it's a starting point.

Actually, yes. If you have more than $75k in revenue per year, you are legally obligated to register for, charge, and pay GST[1] -- our equivalent of VAT -- and you have to register as an Australian business (though for most overseas companies the additional taxes are minimal). If you aren't GST registered then Aussies have to do pay for it during the customs process[2]. If I wanted to sell things to customers in the EU in large enough volume, I would probably have to do something similar. Paying taxes (or more generally, following the law) is simply something that businesses have to do if they wish to have access to a country's market -- you also have to follow our consumer laws and other relevant regulations (for instance, this is why Steam has to provide much more lenient return policies here -- we have very strong regulations on warranties and return policies and they were fined for non-compliance in the past).

Not to mention that Google employs lots of people in Australia (Google Maps was first developed in the Sydney office), has a subsidiary incorporated in Australia, and sells many millions of dollars worth of products in Australia. They are no less of an Australian company than Woolworths.

[1]: https://www.ato.gov.au/Business/GST/Registering-for-GST/ [2]: https://www.ato.gov.au/Business/GST/In-detail/Rules-for-spec...

Link to the draft law is below [0].

Quoted from that page:

>The code also includes a set of ‘minimum standards’ for:

>providing advance notice of changes to algorithmic ranking and presentation of news; appropriately recognising original news content; and

>providing information about how and when Google and Facebook make available user data collected through users’ interactions with news content.

This sounds great to me. Australia has a history of producing consumer friendly laws (although I am sure we have our share of bad laws on this), and I consider google to be working against my personal interests, so I think this law is probably good (for consumers and news media, but not google/facebook).

0. https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/draft-...

AFAIK you're missing a crucial point - they're trying to require G/FB to pay out billions to old (read: dying) media publications, which will crush small publications. On the Open Web, ABC News should get the exact same treatment at JoeBloggsYT2020.

That's my main problem with it. Extend those minimum standards for everyone regardless of revenue and other selective filters.

Can someone explain what this means?

> providing information about how and when Google and Facebook make available user data collected through users’ interactions with news content.

Is it saying google or facebook need to tell news publication about when/which users are accessing thier content?

This reads to me more as if though G/FB have to tell news organizations what data is being collected, rather than disclosing the actual data.

A quote from the Q&A seems to clarify:

> give news media businesses clear information about the nature and availability of user data collected through users’ interactions with news on their services;

It is explained in the ACCC concepts paper [1] under the heading “Sharing of user data.” The idea is that both news organisations and digital platforms make money from targeted advertising, but digital platforms have access to more data, and thus an advantage at the negotiating table.

[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/ACCC%20-%20Mandatory%20...

Murdoch's News Corporation and the currently incumbent Liberal party are very cosy with one another, so it's not surprising the government is legislating to prop them up financially. It's beneficial to consumers to have a well funded fourth estate, however I doubt this is being done out of public interest.

God forbid if Sky News corners a prominent real estate in my Youtube results, they are already atrocious and have insufferable comments.

Sky News is almost more virulently ignorant and hateful than Fox News. I'm shocked Australia - a generally 'nice' country - is capable of producing something like this.

You do realise both Sky News and Fox are owned by Murdoch right?

Its all the same shit.

Our media here is a joke, even our govt funded "for the people" news org is massive biased toward the liberal party.

The ABC (our government funded "for the people" service) only changed their tune, a bit, since the libs threatened, and followed through with, budget cuts. Oh, and the unprecedented event of Prime Minister Turnbull ringing the head of the ABC to complain about an article that was eventually found to be primarily based on sound economics. (yes, Australia's leadership are that petty).

Australia is 'nice' when the powerful are winning all their arguments.

Terrorism, climate change, the challenge to single-narrative media, gay marriage, and a number of other examples of recent societal change are shifting the ground underneath the powerful, and they're not winning 'naturally' as often as they'd like, so they're resolving to win 'unnaturally', which very quickly degenerates from a position of 'nice'.

Sky News is what it is because of chasing popularity. Unfortunately it has a suitably sized audience to maintain it's virulently ignorant and hateful narratives. It's representative of a distilled version of a Australia's hopes and dreams for the future. Oh so sadly.

Australia ain't a nice country. We moved away partially because of rampant racism.

> It's beneficial to consumers to have a well funded fourth estate

Fine. Have the government pay subsidies. It's not Google's duty to fund the newspaper industry.

> On the Open Web, ABC News should get the exact same treatment at JoeBloggsYT2020.

I legitimately don't understand this point of view. Original reporting of the kind that keeps politicians and corporations in line costs money; investigative journalists aren't cheap. What YouTuber gives you this kind of depth? Will the world be a better place without the Fourth Estate?

Sure, this is a legitimate argument.

But then why wouldn't the money go to fund the AP Press Pool in Canberra which shutdown recently because of lack of funding[1], or to the ABC or SBS or other public journalism?

Instead it goes directly to the big publishers who cut journalists while increasing the salary of people like Andrew Bolt (who is so far removed from a journalist it is objectionable).

[1] https://apnews.com/c9d2809aaa0e8fa47c629723444d7b51

Your response is unrelated to what I was disagreeing with.

My underlying argument is that a strong free press must be maintained and that the reductionist argument that legitimate news sources and JoeRandomYouTuber should be treated identically is naive at best.

> Instead it goes directly to the big publishers who cut journalists while increasing the salary of people like Andrew Bolt (who is so far removed from a journalist it is objectionable).

The relationship between the rise of populist/sensationalist media and that of the Internet/social media/Google is inextricably linked. Traditional news sources found their revenue declining and so chased whatever attracted consumers, including sensationalist cretins like Bolt. Google should accept responsibility for this.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that the ACCC's proposal is the perfect solution to the underlying problem, but the status quo does need to change. At least they're doing something.

> Your response is unrelated to what I was disagreeing with.

Well the flow of money is the source of pretty key in enabling a strong, free press.

> My underlying argument is that a strong free press must be maintained and that the reductionist argument that legitimate news sources and JoeRandomYouTuber should be treated identically is naive at best.

Sure.

So there should be some kind of non-discriminatory rules that allow new players to find a voice as well as maintaining credible news sources.

> Traditional news sources found their revenue declining and so chased whatever attracted consumers, including sensationalist cretins like Bolt. Google should accept responsibility for this.

Well I agree that the news ecosystem has changed, and I agree that a strong and free press has value.

> At least they're doing something.

See I don't see this as a good thing at all. I see this as making the problem worse by funding players who are some of the worse examples.

Looking at news.google.com, 100% of the first few pages is from those old, dying media publications. The news displayed by Google is not from JoeBloggsYT2020. It's not even close.

As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience.

You don't have to take my word for it though, you can opt-out of personalization on Google here: https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols

Try it for a month and see if you prefer it.

I have everything turned off on that page. I am doing fine.

DuckDuckGo does exactly that. They call it "no bubbling".

I can confidently assure you that I've had that feature off for ages and could not possibly be happier about it.

It's definitely possible to have a good experience without personalization. Depending on how much you inherently value google not storing data about you, it may be the only way for you to be happy.

But it's very unlikely the actual product experience would be worse with personalization enabled, measured by probability that a search includes something relevant near the top.

Of course the single best way to make the top more relevant is to block ads.

On YouTube, I highly recommend turning off personalization and watch history, especially if you find yourself spending too much time there clicking recommended videos. Without history, it will pretty reliably recommend the same videos again and again, which can help you realize when you have seen a lot and might want to stop.

As someone who remembers the web before personalization, the product experience was better.

It may be true that Google has over-invested in personalization-driven features, and under-invested in user-neutral features.

Personalization belongs in the agent. Specifically, the agent that I own and control.

So Google sends metadata for 5B videos to your browser, then your browser ranks them and shows you the best one? How would your agent do personalization?

Why doesn't my browser compile and store my viewing habits, then construct searches for me? Searches which Google then executes?

Centralized services have built personalization systems in which they operate the personalization algorithms.

I don't have a problem with that, per se, except in that their interests (profit) and user interests (effectiveness) are only partially aligned.

The biggest reason, as near as I can tell, these system architectures were built is that control of personalization algorithms means (1) a means and reason to collect and retain data on users (that can be used for targeted advertisement) & (2) a means to execute targeted advertisement (via insertion into "recommended" content).

It's likely the only way these services are possible at the "free" price point. But it's disingenuous to suggest that they're the only model by which personalization could be realized.

There are lots of examples of where personalization results in a worse experience for users but better metrics for the tech company.

Somehow the Instagram ads algorithm has figured out exactly what I’m self conscious about with my own body; all I see are ads for invisible braces, skin cleansers, and hair treatments.

I don’t actually want to buy any of these things, and they make me feel bad to look at. A de-personalized Instagram experience would be far superior to me.

You can click the ... menu, then "hide ad". It will show you fewer similar ads in the future.

An unpersonalized IG ad experience would be teenage women's clothing and Netflix branding (assuming you're in the US). You probably don't want that either.

Irrelevant ads in this situation, sounds like they are less annoying than invasive ads

Why wouldn't I want that? It's not like I want to be successfully manipulated by ads, so getting shown irrelevant ads is just a big win in my book.

Well, that explains my IG account. They do seem to know something about me; and one point, they literally recommended some old friends (even tho I wasn't using enough of my name, or my history, or the same email address as in those days, and we had no independent friends in common).

You mean like how every TV ad works? Yeah that sounds preferable.

as another person who worked on personalization I can assure you that way over 90% of users prefer personalization. Decades of A/B tests have proven that.

And yes, some people, myself included turn it OFF because of privacy concerns. But we are in a really small minority.

Is A/B testing focused on increasing the time people spend on YouTube or the actual benefits people get out of YouTube?

A/B testing tends not to produce the result you want when the metrics you are going for are harmful.

I don't work at Youtube, but different teams probably optimize for different things. Time spent is really, really hard to change directly, so they probably focus on things like p(like), p(watch > X% of vid), p(watches another video).

Generally speaking there's no answer in principle to the question "is the time spent actually valuable". For the vast majority of people, time spent on Youtube cuts into time spent doing basically the same thing somewhere else. We're not all researching cures for AIDS or new sources of green energy. Most people just want to sit around being entertained.

"When we A/B tested users against different kinds of personalisation, we consistently found that they liked personalisation"

If your non-personalised experience is stunted in functionality because the core UX of the product is biased towards personalisation, it will be unsurprising if people "prefer" personalisation.

I've actually preferred it on Google services. I seem to get the same recommended videos on YT otherwise and I like how unlikely I am to click on an ad if I ever see one.

What personalization products do you work on? Just curious if there are other services/situations where it's a better experience.

I work on a lot of different products, usually trying to answer the related question "how much better on average is the personalized experience". Often I look at the more relevant but less profitable question, "what percent of users would have had a better experience without personalization". It's always been <1%.

I guess "less than one per cent" is a lot more than you implied in your original post, and many of the people most likely to be in that less than one percent are likely to be part of this audience here.

It's true that it's probably not significantly profitable to worry to much about that group, but saying "I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer" is not a valid use of a statistic of "less than one percent have a better experience".

I get more relevant results from DuckDuckGo. Who doesn't do the personalisation to begin with.

I have found personalisation doesn't work for any search product. YouTube's ranking engine won't get me what I'm looking for. Google's personalised search doesn't get me what I'm looking for, and the de-personalised whilst better, only gets me halfway there because it still tries to geo-bubble me.

I am aware that what I search for makes me slightly outside the norm. All attempts to bubble me fail because of that, and turn your product into nothing more than an exercise in frustration as I try to escape the narrow roads you expect me to walk.

Being able to control the geo is one of the great features of DDG for me, especially back when I traveled a lot. The search engine doesn’t know the context I’m in (and I’m happy about that, I don’t think it should be guessing something this personal and then limiting the options for me).

It also helps me search for content vs for listings, sometimes I want information on a product and not the local merchant, with Google the closest I would get was switching to news search (also not optimal).

> As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience.

As somebody who uses search products many times a day and who has opted in to the less personalized experience in several different ways over the past several years, I can confidently assure you that I very strongly prefer the "less personalized" experience. Additionally, I don't feel like I need a shower just because I used it.

Why on earth would I want you to track me more? I don't see any reason.

> As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience.

I absolutely prefer non-personalized web search results, the YouTube home page you get when you are not signed-in (and have cookies deleted) and suggestions based on the current view only (not on the previous history). I confidently assure you ;-)

Obviously there are people who feel different.

Personally, I don't like personalization.

I had a friend in middle school who was into rabbits for about a year. For the next several years, she got tons and tons of random rabbit stuff from people she knew who didn't know what else to buy her.

That's what personalization feels like to me. I can never find what I'm looking for because the algorithm is trying to pin me down into a category it thinks it understands, and those categories are always the wrong model of how I search.

The experience is much better when I use services that don't personalize.

Also you can't turn off personalization on Google unless you sign in. If you don't sign in, it still personalizes and there's nothing you can do about it.

There's a bunch of anecdotal stories about personalization goes wrong, but I don't see how any of that is a strong enough point. Should you be equally given news about every local news from every city in the world? Should be equally given news about every sport and sport team? What if you don't even like any sports?

Does personalization sometimes go overboard temporarily? Sure. But there's more and more levers to try and fix it. Generally you can mention you're not interested in a specific topic, and while it's not foolproof nor instant, it's still overall much better than getting complete random news.

I currently get plenty of cool articles about fairly niche things that I'm into and don't expect any other "average" person to ever get, such as Python news, animal crossing tips, indie game releases or updates on my favorite TV shows.

Again once in a while I'll get updates for a show I was just looking for but have no interest in, but that's honestly a much smaller price to pay than having zero personalization.

Yes what you describe is what I want. When I search I don't want my search influenced by search terms that are invisible to me and that I can't influence.

If I want to know about a particular sports team or niche, I will either include that search term, or I will subscribe to a pubsub feed for information about that topic. That way I can unsubscribe or filter as needed based on the feed.

What I never want is for an algorithm to try to figure out what I like and subscribe me to topics based on that.

As someone who makes widgets, and can confidently assure you that you need widgets.

I'm wondering if this assertion comes from some kind of "search bubble" among developers of these tools.

If adding widgets to products caused the product revenue to double, then you probably wouldn't call it a bubble.

My previous response was probably a bit snarky. My point was that if this is something that you worked on and you realise that your revenue doubled, then it's probably very easy to justify that to oneself that this is indeed what the users want. After all, you don't hear any negative points, which is what a filter bubble is.

It's not possible to truly know what they want, but it is possible to ask them. Almost all people say they want more personalized content, especially for entertainment. Those who don't want it are free to opt out. The real bubble is around the belief that products with billions of active users somehow thrive without giving users what they want.

We (and Google) run RCTs constantly, including experiments with no personalization. Users self-report higher satisfaction and NPS with personalization.

I miss the old Google search, the one that didn't try to guess what I mean, but instead did exactly what I said.

I can see how for your average user "guess what I mean" might produce better and quicker results, but for power users (who are entirely comfortable with search syntax, and who sometimes may be searching incredibly obscure things), it produces a worse experience

The only type of search personalisation I want is the ability to exclude certain sites from my search results (bye bye Pinterest, bye bye Quora). Google used to offer that feature, but in more recent years it appears to have disappeared.

I particularly wish Google News Search had a way to exclude media sources I dislike. I am interested in Brexit, so I regularly search on that term, but then I get bombarded with a boatload of sensationalised crap from the Daily Express, a media outlet I'd prefer to pretend didn't exist

> I miss the old Google search, the one that didn't try to guess what I mean, but instead did exactly what I said.

You and me both. I cannot stand the whole 'I know better than you, let's use these synonyms that don't exactly mean the same thing or are literally different from the exact phrase you're searching for'. I loathe that Google removed the ability to search for symbols, basically destroying it as a means to find certain kinds of research papers and expressions.

I would legitimately pay for a research-quality search engine similar to Google Search circa 2010ish, before the Panda or Penguins and the truly awful Hummingbird algorithms were enabled. (And no, Bing's not it - it's basically about as good as Yahoo Search ever was before it was just a frontend to Bing...)

You can still do this per-query by typing `-site:quora.com`.

news.google.com allows you to hide publications, probably at the domain level but I can't tell. I use this extensively, but I don't know if those choices are honored in the Google search news tab.

I know about `-site:`, but it is a pain to have to keep on typing it in, they used to have a feature to permanently block certain domains in results, from your Google settings. (Plus, `-site:` only works for a few sites, since it counts against the search keywords limit.)

When I go to news.google.com, I can't work out how to hide news sources. I do have a "Hidden Sources > Manage" option in the settings, but it doesn't let me add any, just tells me I don't have any. Each individual result has a few options under it – Share, Save for later, and a "More" menu with a "Go to..." option that takes you to the page for that media source. But even on the "Daily Express" media source page, I don't see any "hide" option, just "Follow" and "Share"

Does this feature still exist? Is it disabled for my Google account (maybe because of some privacy setting I set)? Does it only work from certain countries? Google is inscrutable as always

You have to click on the vertical ... button. It's a little hard to find on desktop, but on mobile it's very clear.

Okay, I worked it out – really confusing UI. The "Hide" option only appears on the vertical ... menu on certain screens, not others. The "Headlines" page displays it, so do "Sections" and "topic" pages, but not search results. I was trying to find it on a keyword search result page, which is why I couldn't find it anywhere.

Also, blocking a source hides it from "Headlines"/"Sections"/"Topic" pages, but not from keyword search results pages. You'll still get your blocked sources displayed in those. (Confusingly, when you search for "brexit", you can get back two different "Brexit" topic pages, which have the same title but different pictures, or you can get a keyword search results page, which behaves differently.)

Could you give an example of when it doesn't do what you ask? In my experience it always only makes it more specific when it's vague in the first place and never overrides what specificity you gave.

For example if I write `range`, it's extremely vague but one of the first results I get is Python. If I write range JavaScript obviously that'll be first.

Not the original poster, but I've disabled all personalisation that it's possible to disable since forever, and my biggest problem with it is that it still doesn't seem to disable it entirely.

So yes, I definitely prefer it. And looking at the other replies to your message suggests that I'm not alone here.

I have turned off personalization for several years now. I prefer it off, though admittedly I adblock, and block thumbnails etc...

Yep, I have my main search engine on personal laptop switched to DuckDuckGo. Guess what, more often I just end up typing '!g' for finding something relevant.

For US, DDG still is fine I guess for basic results like local websites. If you are traveling to other countries, notice that DDG will often give very bad results for queries with local relevance.

I ran away from data collection and personalisation at the start of the last decade, but I often these days leave it on, because it just makes my life easier. Another example would be Google Photos, where letting Google run my photos through algos is very convenient because the simple feature of searching by visual context works like magic. The young privacy freak me would have been horrified if he knew this.

> Try it for a month and see if you prefer it.

Far longer than a month. It’s a vastly superior experience.

99% of personalization is utter shit. Having hard filters ("never these domains" on search engines, "don’t try and get me to rewatch things" or "No comedy" on Netflix) would top shitty personalization (aka. hey, I’m dumb, but please watch this) every time.

edit: For me. I realize that the majority of people seem to want tech to guess/tell them what they actually wanted.

What would be good and bad examples where personalization excels and fails?

Given the generic names for a lot of things in tech, it's at least mildly useful that Google knows I'm probably not searching for info on snakes or fruit.

Lol, you can ‘confidently assure’ huh?

Clicking that link, turns out I’ve had all of those personalisation features switched off for nearly a year.

Don’t be so confident that your ranking/personalisation products are universally appreciated

Fortunately I have mountains of data and do not have to trust anecdote and comments. Almost all users self-report higher satisfaction and they behave in ways consistent with strongly preferring personalization.

A few months ago, I disabled all of that stuff, so that YouTube only recommends videos based on my subscriptions and liked videos. I guess it's still personalization, but it's personalization that I have control over, which seems to have drastically improved both the privacy and the quality of recommendations.

I don't use Google for search, though, so I can't comment on that.

And having disabled personalisation on a lot of products for as long as I can remember, I can confidently assure you that yes, I do in-fact prefer the non-personalised experience.

I don't want it to display what some service _thinks_ I want, I want it to display what I'm asking for. No more, no less.

I definitely prefer it.

I don't think they care about the end user. The goal of this law is to let legacy media companies which are becoming obsolete and can't compete anymore to become parasites that are paid just because they want to get paid. It's anti free market law.

How are they working against your personal interests?

> This sounds great to me

Keep in mind, this is not motivated by your interests and has nothing in it that is there to help them. It's based on an a priori assumption that old media is good for consumers interests and all of the benefits it provides are directed to a newly invented category of "registered news businesses" which will have special rules. So no, you're not going to find out changes to algorithmic ranking in advance, nor will you get information about how and when Google collect information on you. It'll be provided to Rupert Murdoch, but not you nor anyone who doesn't qualify as a large media conglomerate.

Look, I'm not going to deny that this is obviously motivated by News Corp and Fairfax lobbyists.

However, the ACCC is legitimately one of the really brilliant government agencies here in Australia -- our consumer protection laws are actually designed around protecting consumers interests and I would argue is firmly on the list of positives when taking stock of the pros and cons of living here.

It’s worth noting that, while the ACCC did recommend “requiring designated digital platforms to each provide the Australian Communications and Media Authority with codes to address the imbalance in the bargaining relationship between these platforms and news media businesses and recognise the need for value sharing and monetisation of content” [1], the “mandatory bargaining code” policy resulted from a more recent and specific direction from the government [2].

[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/holistic-dynamic-refor...

[2] https://ministers.treasury.gov.au/ministers/josh-frydenberg-...

The ACCC is great. (I'm Australian, and think it's a awesome example of a regulator with real teeth)

But this makes no sense! Why should Google be forced to pay News Corp to display its headlines, when other smaller companies have to pay for ads for to get the same exposure?

> News media businesses alone would be given information that would help them artificially inflate their ranking over everyone else, even when someone else provides a better result

I'm not sure how Google wins this one because it seems like an easy comeback is "well why don't you just be transparent and tell everybody that information". Ultimately, as long as they have anything resembling "secret sauce" they will be in the cross hairs of regulators for unfair treatment (even if just alleged, not proven), and the minute they don't they will lose their competitive advantage.

Perhaps the worst thing seems to me that it prospectively constrains what kinds of algorithms they can actually apply to things they can tell people about. So all kinds of approaches with poor explainability (say, deep learning) will get put aside for things that are empirically worse (more biased, unfair, less equitable, etc.) but compliant with the law because Google can "explain them" to people.

> I'm not sure how Google wins this one because it seems like an easy comeback is "well why don't you just be transparent and tell everybody that information". Ultimately, as long as they have anything resembling "secret sauce" they will be in the cross hairs of regulators for unfair treatment (even if just alleged, not proven), and the minute they don't they will lose their competitive advantage.

Because then people would game it.

Exactly, the ranking needs constant tweaking to deal with spam/SEO.

Which is what's happening right now.

The only difference would be that you don't need to do industrial espionage on google to see what works first, so the cost of the seo would drop.

Yes, same as the phone book for AAA Plumbers.

Playing devil's advocate, gaming search engines used to be about keywords then it became more about links. SEOs nowadays talk about "EAT", expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. It's still possible for marketers to mimic quality signals but it's less easy.

It would be much easier if the author of webpages were to declare themselves, sort of a Pagerank but applied on a person/topic level. It could/can be done with structured data. This of course has privacy implications but it keeps the publishers as transparent to the search engine as possible. Verification of sorts would be needed so other people don't use your authorship details on their own site. It's the kind of social fabric/data Google could've perhaps used Google+ for.

Slightly more on topic, marketers used to be able to do accurate keyword research with Google, and also see the keywords that people searched for when landing on their site, which is quite useful for figuring out their intent. Google keeps all that data to themselves now.

I find their "concerns" about "use of private data" a bit laughable, considering they used your personal search history to try and target you on sites you visit across the web via ads. They don't mind retaining data about users, they just don't like having to share it with anyone.

> It would be much easier if the author of webpages were to declare themselves, sort of a Pagerank but applied on a person/topic level. It could/can be done with structured data. This of course has privacy implications but it keeps the publishers as transparent to the search engine as possible. Verification of sorts would be needed so other people don't use your authorship details on their own site. It's the kind of social fabric/data Google could've perhaps used Google+ for.

This was actually done back when Google+ first was launched — people could attach their authorship and it would be displayed on the search page, and you would also see a list of “experts” for particular categories on the right hand side when you searched for things like “python” or “poker”.

I believe it disappeared with the rest of Google+, because no one actually cared.

Seems like that's one major ingredient they'd like to add to their algo as intent/authority is otherwise measured much more indirectly.

>Because then people would game it.

...with slightly more effectiveness allowing better competition with google itself.

You can do search. You can provide content. Doing both became rent seeking. And damn does google do rent-seeking very effectively.

> Ultimately, as long as they have anything resembling "secret sauce" they will be in the cross hairs of regulators for unfair treatment

I don't see how this follows: this regulation isn't precipitated by "unfair treatment" of news media, nor are the gov't and media pretending it is. Quite the opposite: this is a plea for giving news media an unfair advantage.

interesting. it seems to me that if Google really wanted to influence Australian public opinion, they have far more sophisticated ways to go about it than this clumsy attempt at PSA outreach slash fear mongering. It's almost as if they need to be seen to be taking some responses to the media payment legislation but they don't really care. That's what's interesting to me. I wonder why they would not care.

perhaps because they have inside knowledge that the legislation is a dead duck and the government doesn't intend to follow through but perhaps the government is simply doing this for whatever reasons maybe political points with the population.

I have no doubt that the Australian government and Google play a delicate dance with each other while they both cooperate and see that they both get the outcomes they both want. so the gloss that this is all about consumers, spouted by both sides, I think is false.

anyway, interesting to watch where this goes.

My guess, is that they will comply by either giving the media a copy of their "Quality Raters Guidelines", or just setup an office where the media can send staff to sit at a slow computer and view a billion lines of source code.

hehehe. yeah the due diligence document room. and lots of minified JavaScript UI code.

I love how companies can say complying with legislation would be overly burdensome. and how governments can make laws that have no technical reality. the interface between tech and law is pretty leaky and inefficient.

In theory a tech-competent judge could enforce laws to be closer to technical reality.

That's true. I suppose that's the idea. If that's the case, technical education should become a part of judgeship, if it's not already.

Yes. Though of course it would also help if the laws were written by tech-competent people.

(That doesn't mean that all people in parliament need to be competent. Most laws are written by specialists, not MPs.)

Google's entire business depends on being squeaky clean. If they ever got caught doing "sophisticated" opinion influencing, they'd lose half their value overnight as customers switched to alternatives. And then every democratic government would join in with a serious kicking, given their elections are so vulnerable to said influencing.

I think Facebook sails very close to the wind here, but my impression is that Google's management is a lot more professional about protecting their business long term. So I'd be suprised if they tried any dirty tricks.

However, their efforts won't be limited to open letters. There will be some very high-powered lobbying going on, and I bet this letter is mostly to frame that debate to counter the lobbying from Murdoch's empire. All in all, a great time to be an Aussie politician - a lot of very expensive trips, lunches and other inducements coming there way.

I doubt this. we are beholden to Google. we can't just go elsewhere even if we disagree with some things some people in Google do. advertiser or consumer. or government. they ain't losing half their business anytime soon, no matter what kind of things they pull.

I know it's not a common opinion, but I believe that other than the rational argument you presented (which I agree with) I do think it's also a matter of values and mentality.

Yes Google is a big org, their business is problematic, and they do crap at times. But I think their mentality is much more less Machiavellian than Facebook.

I believe the "do no evil" as a compass, they might not always adhere to that as you or me may perceive it (after all, it is rather subjective), but it does seem to somewhat guide their actions.

Switched to who? Bing?

> It's almost as if they need to be seen to be taking some responses to the media payment legislation but they don't really care

They care. I'm currently situated in Australia and did a random google search and a giant popup jumped up saying "The way Aussies use Google is at risk". No way they are doing that on their main search page if they do not care.

That's more like it. if it was just that letter and PR release I'd be surprised. but even so... I think it's just for show.

remember news Corp is not just an Australian company. this could be part of a bigger game between Google and newscorp, and between newscorp and the aus gov.

I initially thought this was going to be about the new [1] anti-encryption law's in Australia... another concerning matter of government intervention...

[1] https://fee.org/articles/australia-s-unprecedented-encryptio...

nope, Google doesn't give a shit about that. They just hate having to pay for displaying content from news media.

Rightly so. This is a shakedown by Murdoch

Why would anyone be thrilled about having to funnel cash to News Corp? The news business is dead, and good riddance because it descended into yellow journalism and clickbait garbage.

Check the News.com.au homepage and observe it looks like a worse Daily Mail.

>The news business is dead, and good riddance because it descended into yellow journalism and clickbait garbage.

I think it could be the other way around, where people expecting news online and free has meant declining revenues, click-bait and ad-infested news articles.

News aggregators get the user's onto their site without the overhead.

Keep in mind Google are being forced to display the content AND pay for it.

Well they did say this:

https://www.reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/rgs-statement-o...

Not sure what happened after that...

Google should just de-list News Corp and the other big media companies that dominate the Australian media industry and who often manipulate elections for their own benefit with one sided heavily biased coverage. Give some breathing space to the smaller players.

The quality of news would triple if they removed all newscorp sites. They could just use ABC news purely and the quality would be far better.

Dominate or not they represent half of the Australian population more or less. You can't just bring news from the Guardian and expect it to appeal to all Australian. The question is, if you don't want to show News Corp what else will you show in order to give a voice for the Australians on the right side of the political map?

Someone else will step in to take their place. The only reason News Corp is even in this position is because they completely overstepped their bounds with Murdoch's political fuckery. There's no reason you can't have a professional conservative news company that plays by the rules, and if there's a market for it, someone will fill it, just like anything else.

Wouldn't that just be Google manipulating coverage for Google’s benefit?

I don’t think Google should be blessing any publishers with special “news section” status. Let websites compete organically. Any media with finance capital backing is going to be biased in favor of wars and against labor.

There's a difference between giving special treatment and fully de-listing, kinda like what happened in Germany and Spain with Google News. This is a direct and targeted attack by NewsCorp, abusing their influence in australian politics to force a bill that benefits them. Why should Google help someone that is trying their best to attack them?

Being a neutral platform for speech is not ‘helping’ anyone. It helps the ideas the public agrees with the most, which is why Google and Newscorp are fighting to control internet media with backroom ‘partnerships’ rather than giving viewpoints that are actually popular a fair playing field.

I believe the legislation prohibits this. If they delist one news site they must delist all sites or face large fines.

From the letter:

    > We’ve always treated all website owners fairly when it comes to information we share about ranking.

Really? https://twitter.com/methode/status/1166643751659429888

    > The law would force us to give an unfair advantage to one group of businesses - news media businesses - over everyone else who has a website, YouTube channel or small business

Google is concerned it can no longer pick winners and losers. I don't prefer News Corp, obviously, but it's just lies lies lies on both sides trying to control money funnels.

I assume google has other knobs like just making advertising in .au super expensive (they have a monopoly on that side too) but the battle will end up being bloody.

> Really? https://twitter.com/methode/status/1166643751659429888

What is this about? I can’t tell from the tweet.

it is a google employee picking a winner of an algo update

To all the people (hopefully Australians) who paint this as the government propping up legacy media: Isn't it better to have control of your media in local, Australian-owned and regulated megacorps, rather than some faceless megacorp in another country?

Jokes on us, our media is run by a faceless megacorp in another country anyway (News Ltd).

According to Wikipedia, it's not in another country. Unless "Surry Hills, Sydney" is another country.

If Wikipedia is wrong, you should update it for the benefit of the rest of us.

If you look a few lines down in the same infobox, you'll see its parent is "News Corp" which is in the US.

Google's Australian subsidiary is registered as and headquartered in Pyrmont, Sydney.

Guess there's no problem with it controlling Australian media!

In theory yes, but in reality the Australian-owned megacorps are all owned by a single person, and every single one of the media outlets they control endlessly pushes the political message of just one side.

So although they're "Australian owned", they're very far from good "neutral" sources of information.

(Source: am Australian)

EDIT: For those wondering, it's like virtually all of Australia's media being run by Rush Limbaugh. And he has a cozy relationship with the government, so all of this is just a way to force Google and FB to pay him more money.

Fairfax has always provided a counter to newscorp and there's no reason this funding wouldn't be available to any new players that wanted to start up.

There is no Fairfax since 2018, and even then Gina Reinhart owned 20% then. Now, it's channel 9, and having Peter Costello at the helm. So... Yeah, we don't really have a balanced or neutral media landscape. The ABC, The Guardian and a small selection of boutique papers and websites are alone in putting journalism before explicit political narratives now. And well, even the first two in that list heavily rely on clickbait and lazy opinion pieces to pad of the content.

I feel obliged to mention Crikey here, mainly because it's quite low-key but deserving of wider readership.

Fairfax still produces daily newspapers with a large readership in Australia's 2 largest cities. To say they don't exist just because their ownership changed is a misnomer.

There's been a very noticeable drop in quality in The Age's reporting though. And then there was this back in June:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/14/journalists-at...

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/18/age-editor-ale...

^ This.

I'm hearing heaps of people crying "Murdock" and "Newscorp" but how about local jobs and ownership vs a global conglomerate that doesn't give 2 f#%ks about our tiny 25 million population and takes $4.8 billion offshore while paying only $100 million tax[1].

The Australian Associate Press recently went bankrupt and needed a bailout from philanthropists[2]. As much as you dislike one particular section of old media it's essential that local media exists in a functional democracy. Google taking $4.8 billion of revenue out of the country strips these organisations of their funding without providing a replacement.

[1]https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-18/google-pays-more-tax-... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Associated_Press

Newscorp isn't Australian though, it was just started by one.

(a former Australian, who gave up his citizenship when it suited him better to be a US citizen)

Ironically, for tax reasons.

And yet our pollies are, inexplicably (not really), still in his pocket.

Ironic you should reference the ABC when the legislation specifically excludes the ABC from any benefit other "registered news organisations" may enjoy.

I didn't mention the government funded ABC but rather the Australian Associated Press (AAP) which is a collection of local journalists funded collectively by the large media companies on both the left and right wing.

I was referring to your reference [1].

The AU government wants to give private media a leg up, but won't allow the ABC (or SBS) to receive any moneys from Google/FB, and at the same time regularly cuts funds to both the government funded media entities.

so, i'm not getting this. they take revenue, not profit offshore. profit meaning global profit. you want to tax the money they make in your country, without them first paying expenses in other countries?

so if i have developers and research in america, and software sales in australia, my australian costs are $0, and all revenue is taxable profit. yeah, that seems fair. double fair for australia.

Look up transfer pricing

it's the method i used to move capital in my small american business when i opened an office in russia. a company in another country is a separate legal entity. you charge market rates, as you would any other company. it has zero to do with my post.

the complaint is profit is taxed instead of revenue. the complaint is not valid.

Do you really believe Google makes no profit in Australia?

I understand for accounting purposes they don't. But they make a lot of money with very little expenses...

Right - they have very little in expenses in Australia. Because all the development and maintenance is in other countries. That is my entire point. So they take the market value (transfer price) of the expenses and transfer that money to countries where those expenses are incurred. They then pay for expenses related to their local offices and 2000 employees. What's left over is called profit, is taxed in Australia, and they paid $100mil of taxes on that profit last year.

Lets say you are sitting in Chicago. You create a search engine, get a thousand developers working on it. You then set up an Australian portal for that web page, on which Australian businesses buy ads. In your version, the costs for Australia are zero. In reality, those costs include the development of the search engine in Chicago.

The Australian Associated Press is a news wire service, similar to AP or Reuters.

It did not disappear because it went bankrupt. AAP had three owners, Nine, News Corp (~95% ownership between them) and SWM (Seven West Media).

This year, when Fairfax and Nine merged, there was no longer any requirement for AAP to exist in its current form. Fairfax and Nine both supplied roughly 35% of AAP's operating costs. The newly merged organisation could reroute the money spent with AAP (tens of million dollars a year) to their own in-house reporting staff. The benefit here is that the copyright to the content produced is then owned by Nine - not AAP, and the content produced would not be sold to other media organisations as well.

The whole reason for its existence was to reduce the amount of money spent by Nine and News Corp, so they could pool resources.

If it still existed today, the only benefactors would be other media organisations that acquired content from them (eg, Seven, The Guardian and News Corp)

Why should Australia's largest media company subsidy coverage for other companies?

Edit: some words and clarification

Does it matter? Transnational corporations are sovereign in all but name. If Google really, really doesn't like a particular local law, they'll pull out of the country (e.g. mainland China and, soon, Hong Kong). The "local, Australian-owned and regulated megacorp" is Rupert Murdoch's media empire, which is currently in bed with the reigning Liberal party. There is no regulation here.

There is a kernel of truth in your post; we do need a better funding mechanism for independently produced news. However, it's hard not to see this as less "preserving independent news" and more "Google should pay for the house organ".

Murdoch gave up his citizenship in 1985, he has not been Australian for a long time.

Murdoch shouldn't be allowed to own media in Australia, IMHO.

This is an entirely separate issue to dealing with Google and Facebook who absolutely must be dealt with the world over.

Yep, I agree with you on both points.

I wish that was an option, however it is not. The options are Newscorp (a large American corporation), or Google (a large American corporation).

You say that as if this code of conduct would achieve it. But it isn't really about that. This is not about who controls the media, it will not change that either way. If they ACCC cared about that they would not have tolerated the near monopoly of Australia's media that already exists.

Neither our media nor our tech giants are local, Australian-owned and regulated. There are some local media (Channel 9 and Channel 7) but most of it is Murdoch.

I think, the best solution here will be for Google to sell all its assets and business in Australia to a company to be named by the Australian prime minister.

If they wish to continue to offer search there that is.

and give google 45 or 90 days to comply

That would be NewsCorp. I really hope your comment is a joke.

I'm pretty sure it's a joking reference to Trump's executive order forcing a sale of TikTok.

I'd vote they just delist news.com.au. It's a PIA when some search returns tags.news.com.au that is blocked by pihole. It's a cesspit of news biased news anyway. Sure, other newspapers are biased as hell and many just a voice for some ignorant opinion or blind agenda, but they are quaint in the naivety. News.com.au is an organised propaganda machine.

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission's response: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/response-to-google-ope...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24185374

This letter is seriously weird. Shows a clash between two different lobby groups; neither of which actually cares about citizens. I think the quality of news has degenerated severely since it's been put in the hands of Google and Facebook and so I don't even know how to think about this issue.

This does make a case for increased competition in both the search and news space though.

I imagine there's going to be a very strong knee-jerk anti-Google reaction here, but let's stop and think about the law itself. If it actually does what this open letter says it does, then it's a bad law, plain and simple, and we should support and applaud efforts -- even Google's -- to inform the public with the hope of changing things.

I don't like the "free services" wording in the letter. Free services shouldn't be a justification for anything.

Indeed. Free here = subsidised by the not-so-privacy-sensitive ad system, and their argument is worrying about user privacy.

Time for Yandex and Baidu to come into the Australian market. Baidu has shit tech so Yandex it is.

I guess you're not an Australian. It's a national sport to get access to American products which the companies don't make available in Australia. If Google dropped out of the local market, everyone would just get access to it via a VPN. (Probably one that Google makes available in exchange for private data.)

Feels related to this article from June 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53176945

"Google to pay for 'high quality' news in three countries"

I'd definitely encourage more regulation in this area.

It's going to be a balancing act but at the moment, its is way too skewed towards the big corp in the corp vs consumer arguement.

tbh im sick of seeing posts about stupid "kmart shopper finds.... bla bla bla" show up in my news feed

> You trust us with your data and our job is to keep it safe. Under this law, Google has to tell news media businesses “how they can gain access” to data about your use of our products.

This corpspeak wording seems very broad. I wonder what Australia is gunning at here, if they are really asking Google/FB to share user insights about users visiting these news sites, that doesn't sit well with me as an user.

Good news! You can replace corpspeak with legalspeak.

https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/news-m...

What we see here is a final rebellion of the big media companies worldwide. In Germany we have seen something similar. In the end, it's highway robbery: Google is made to pay to the mediacorp, but it is not allowed to de-index them either.

Perfect scenario – you've succesfully made a cashcow! Google is by far not the good guy here, but rest assured, I hope all those big media outlets burn.

> A proposed law, the News Media Bargaining Code, would force us to provide you with a dramatically worse Google Search and YouTube, could lead to your data being handed over to big news businesses, and would put the free services you use at risk in Australia.

The last point particularly reads as extortion.

I get why those under Murdoch umbrella hate it so much but is picking another evil the only option?

If anyone is smart enough and patient enough to understand the new law could they comment on these points?

1. How will Johnny little guy’s “news blog” benefit from this? Could they require google pay them to display their headlines on search? 2. Will the revenue passed on to the Murdochs be taxed by the Aus gov? Ie: another way to capture tax from Google operating in Aus? 3. What are the foreseeable outcomes of say, no news results are displayed on Google search and people have to visit the news websites directly? Ie: what I often do when I see an interesting article I can not read, I google for it and find a news site that _will_ let me read it.

Surprised no one is saying this. Every generation has to relearn what many have realized over the centuries: power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. The only way to avoid people "abusing" other people is to make that situation impossible (both parties having power that other cannot take). If you create a situation with the tools of power just sitting in the open, and only one party can use it, then you will have abuses.

This logic applies to governments, corporations, and ordinary people (think of the tyrannical managers we've all had at some point). Its an unchangeable facet of human nature. As long as the weapon/tool is on the table, and there are enough people, someone who is a bit more sociopathic, greedy, or has more emotional turmoil will pick it up and wield it against other people for their own gain.

For examples see: all of history whenever a person / civilization had any advantage over another person / civilization and sufficient time elapsed.

Its kinda crazy but everyone always thinks that some new power / invention that creates a one-sided situation like this will "only be used for good", imagining that the people using these tools will be benevolent (for all people who could use the tool, and all the time the tool exists).

Discussion on the law itself here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24006150

I just remember for non-Australians and Australians too: if you still use Bitbucket, Jira, or another Atlassian products - think about the privacy right now.

If the problem is that Google will be forced to share data with news media... maybe just stop collecting data then, so there's nothing to hand over?

google search is already going down the tubes. for example, i search every variation of “when is grass fungus active” and am served up with results on how to cure grass fungus. just one example of many in how there search engine cannot deal with different angles to a search and has huge delivery buckets that aren’t useful, if you need a more granular search ability

The legislation [0] gives all news businesses (including smaller ones) a pathway to force Google to enter into an agreement with them. It opens up Google and Facebook to world of costly business dealings.

With little effort, I could start “Deco’s Local Newspaper” and publish a few issues online. This will give me a pathway to force Google to “deal with me.” This negotiation, mediation and arbitration could incur Google thousands of dollars in employee time, arbitration fees, and paying for half of the legal costs. Google cannot say “no” from the start. They can’t even ignore me without being in violation of the new legislation.

Relevant snippets:

“... news media businesses can participate in the code if:

- They predominantly produce ‘core news’, and publish this online: [...]

- They adhere to appropriate professional editorial standards: [...]

- They maintain editorial independence from the subjects of their news coverage: [...]

- They operate primarily in Australia for the purpose of serving Australian audiences: [...]”

“If the parties have not reached an agreement for the inclusion of news on digital platform services within three months of negotiation, and the parties have attended at least one day of mediation, news media businesses can elect to commence arbitration.”

“Arbitration under the code would be performed through ‘final offer arbitration’. The digital platform and news media business (or a collective of news media businesses) must each submit a final offer on the remuneration to be paid by the digital platform within 10 days of the commencement of arbitration. Parties would then have a further 5 business days to provide comments on each other’s offer.”

“After receiving submissions and comments from the parties and the ACCC, the arbitrator would have 30 business days to choose one or the other of the parties’ ‘final offers’, which would form a binding agreement between the parties.”

Therefore: I can force Google to enter into an agreement with me (even as a small business) and incur thousands of dollars of overhead costs in the process.

I’m not one to use hyperbole, but this is insane. I would not be surprised if Google turns off Google Search entirely for Australia when this code passes.

Also, this legislation is specifically for Google and Facebook: “Digital platforms must participate in the code if the Treasurer makes a determination specifying that the code would apply to them. The Government has announced that the code would initially apply only to Facebook and Google. Other digital platforms may be added to the code if they hold a significant bargaining power imbalance with Australian news media businesses in the future.”

This also seems strange, though I’m not against legislation specifically for mega-corps. Small businesses / startups are already hard enough to start with all the legislation they need to comply with, so protecting them from irrelevant codes like this is healthy for industry.

[0] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/DPB%20-%20Draft%20news%...

between competing commercial entities and the government, I am unsure who is more likely to invoke "the law of un-intended consequences" as an explanation for their behaviour.

Lets just say all of them are likely to do this: Not just note that there is an un-intended consequence, but actually acting to bring it on.

> The law would force us to give an unfair advantage to one group of businesses - news media businesses - over everyone else

They already give unfair advantage to mainstream news media over other sources of news and commentary. They artificially boost "credible sources" or "reliable sources" or whatever they call them; and also refrain entirely from recommending some sources which they disapprove of (right-wing, left-wing, world states which oppose the US etc.). On YouTube this has been very apparent in the list of recommended videos (at least if you're reading about US and world news). On the search engine itself it may be less pronounced, but they are actively doing that as well to some extent; see:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-interferes-with-its-...

or if you can't get past the Paywall, see:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/18/pers-n18.html

I tried to work out why I'm so unbelievably torn about this, and I've concluded that it's because this is a "whoever wins, we lose" circumstance. Both the press and Google are nightmarish creatures.

Let's google win the next elections

Pay corporate income tax here and then will talk.

You talking to Google or News Corp?

You're flipping a single-sided coin. Heads you lose, and that's the only option.

Is News Corp pretending it doesn't turn any profit by offsetting it to an Irish entity?

I always understood it's deliberately run at about breakeven, it's a political tool, not a money-making enterprise.

> deliberately run at about breakeven, it's a political tool, not a money-making enterprise.

Well, that's worse, or at least no better, and makes it much harder to defend the writing of new laws to protect it (except when you're the one both writing the laws and using the tool). Just writing that makes my skin crawl.

Admittedly, that's a different topic to tax avoidance though.

https://www.afr.com/rear-window/is-news-corp-still-paying-ze...

> ... there’s the withholding tax [News Australia Holdings] pays on interest it pays to a News Corp associate offshore, which News likes to lump in with income tax.

(AFR is Fairfax / Channel 9, take that what you will.)

(googler, opinion is my own)

My understanding is that Google is locally incorporated in australia, as you can see on this page[0], at least for Ads, likely other businesses. If you select Australia on there you will see Ads payments are made to "Google Australia Pty Limited".

[0] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2375370?hl=en

Look up transfer pricing

Google Australia Pty Ltd acts as an agent for Google Asia Pacific registered in Singapore.

The profits are routed as licensing costs around the world to end up in this or that low tax jurisdiction.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. Found this which gave more context.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-01/google-facebook-make-...

Open letter to Australians

We need to let you know about new Government regulation that will hurt how Australians use Google Search and YouTube.

A proposed law, the News Media Bargaining Code, would force us to provide you with a dramatically worse Google Search and YouTube, could lead to your data being handed over to big news businesses, and would put the free services you use at risk in Australia.

# The way Aussies search every day on Google is at risk from new regulation

You’ve always relied on Google Search and YouTube to show you what’s most relevant and helpful to you. We could no longer guarantee that under this law. The law would force us to give an unfair advantage to one group of businesses - news media businesses - over everyone else who has a website, YouTube channel or small business. News media businesses alone would be given information that would help them artificially inflate their ranking over everyone else, even when someone else provides a better result. We’ve always treated all website owners fairly when it comes to information we share about ranking. The proposed changes are not fair and they mean that Google Search results and YouTube will be worse for you.

# Your Search data may be at risk

You trust us with your data and our job is to keep it safe. Under this law, Google has to tell news media businesses “how they can gain access” to data about your use of our products. There’s no way of knowing if any data handed over would be protected, or how it might be used by news media businesses.

# Hurting the free services you use

We deeply believe in the importance of news to society. We partner closely with Australian news media businesses — we already pay them millions of dollars and send them billions of free clicks every year. We’ve offered to pay more to license content. But rather than encouraging these types of partnerships, the law is set up to give big media companies special treatment and to encourage them to make enormous and unreasonable demands that would put our free services at risk.

This law wouldn’t just impact the way Google and YouTube work with news media businesses — it would impact all of our Australian users, so we wanted to let you know. We’re going to do everything we possibly can to get this proposal changed so we can protect how Search and YouTube work for you in Australia and continue to build constructive partnerships with news media businesses — not choose one over the other.

You’ll hear more from us in the coming days — stay tuned.

It's been highlighted below but the reason this is posted here and up voted is that Google choose to 404 any requests coming from non Australian IP addresses.

Hardly seems to be the thing you do when you're acting above board...

It turns out there are two URLs for this, one which only works for Australian IPs, one which works for everybody.

Australia-only URL: https://about.google/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/

Global URL: https://about.google/intl/ALL_au/google-in-australia/an-open...

Alias which redirects to Global URL: http://g.co/australia-letter

However, when I first posted this, Google was showing a message to people using Google Search in Australia, directing them to the Australia-only URL not the global one. It appears since then they've changed the popup to use the global URL.

At first I (and others) worried there may be something intentional and under-handed in this, now I realise it is probably just some sort of Google-internal stupidity. Hanlon's razor strikes again

Changed now. Thanks!

Link that works globally (not just in Australia): http://g.co/australia-letter

@dang, can we change the link on this submission please?

Yes. Changed from https://about.google/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/. Thanks!

404. Got a copy?

It appears they've blocked access to it from non-Australian IPs.

Here is the HTML they serve to me: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/skissane/05bac6c78d99e359...

Text:

Open letter to Australians

We need to let you know about new Government regulation that will hurt how Australians use Google Search and YouTube. A proposed law, the News Media Bargaining Code, would force us to provide you with a dramatically worse Google Search and YouTube, could lead to your data being handed over to big news businesses, and would put the free services you use at risk in Australia.

The way Aussies search every day on Google is at risk from new regulation

Your Search data may be at risk

Hurting the free services you use

You’ll hear more from us in the coming days — stay tuned.

Thank you, Mel Silva, Managing Director, on behalf of Google Australia

Nice one, thanks! Maybe also do an archive.is link?

archive.is only wants to archive the 404 page.

I think to archive this you need either (a) an archiving service with servers in Australia or (b) an archiving service that archives it using your browser (instead of their servers) and then uploads it to their servers.

I can't find any archiving service for which either (a) or (b) is true

ah, ok

https://web.archive.org/web/20200817020923/https://webcache....

> It appears they've blocked access to it from non-Australian IPs.

Wow, just turned on my residential VPN and selected my Australian server, can confirm it does load. Didn't even have to clear cookies.

Very sketchy google. Even if the Australian law has issues and alternatives cannot deliver for free, I would not support Google aims here. They are the big news business they are gaslighting into Australians into being afraid of.

I think I now want an auto-loader to compare websites accessed from different locations.

They're not gaslighting. This is about News Corp (former owner of Fox News) and a few other multi billion dollar albeit unprofitable media companies using their political sway to extort Google. It will almost certainly result in a worse experience for consumers.

Why is this being downvoted, it's precisely correct. Our government is entirely transparent about how heavily influenced it is by its industry "partners". Murdoch (NewsCorp/Fox) has been dictating policy to the Liberal Party for a long time.

It appears they've blocked access to it from non-Australian IPs.

I wonder how that conversation goes...

Middle manager: We have a message that we want an entire continent to see. But only that continent. Nobody else.

Webdev: OK, but why?

Middle manager: Because if people outside of that continent see what's happening on that continent, they might want the same thing.

Webdev: That feels weird and icky.

Middle manager: Here, have some stock options and office toys.

http://g.co/australia-letter

This should be the link for this thread.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200817020923/https://webcache....

Fixed now. Submitted URL was https://about.google/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/.

> Google pays a trivial amount of tax here.

Google provides a lot of value with their free products too. Aren't you discounting that?

That's debatable but ultimately meaningless when it comes to tax obligations.

We need to unite the world under one government. The system should be democracy but no longer country based. Instead, it's region based. A successful party in one region can enter election in any other region and get votes. So it's like war, but with voting not weapons!

We can solve the taxation issue that way, since the world is whole so only one money system and we make it electronic so transactions will be taxed!

Pot. Kettle.

No such thing as a free lunch.

Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism | VPRO Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw&t=29s

Open letter to Google Earth. Fuck off

I am delighted at whatever law is driving that letter and want to lobby to introduce the same law here in NZ.

Be careful what you wish for. This law is Australian government protectionism for the already-corrupt and thankfully dying status quo: the lumbering dinosaur that is News Corp.

IMHO, what makes it obviously corrupt is that News Corp pays little to no tax and is owned offshore, and yet the Australian government protects it as if it's local (whilst at the same time cutting funding from the local news organisation the ABC).

There's most definitely a void opening up for quality news and media, which is being filled by social media opinion pieces (which, to be fair, is no different from what I'm writing here) which are lacking in any of the quality, research or integrity that news reporting should have.

Having said all that, history shows that what news reporting "should have" (quality, research, integrity, fact-checking etc.) has been bent in various directions since the very inception of news media. So what we're getting is just a changing of the guard as opposed to anything necessarily worse than before. However, this law the Australian government is attempting to push is a delaying tactic against the changing of the guard.

It's protecting something that never really existed.

Given how easily NZ politicians have caved to US corporations in the past (Hobbit Law, S92A etc) I'm not holding my breath.

> could lead to your data being handed over to big news businesses

Coming from Google, this is a bit funny. I expect Google to be bigger than the combined Australian newspaper industry.

I'd probably trust the Australian govt to protect my data better than Google or even worse Facebook. The way the article has twisted the words in Google's favour is commendable though. Marketing really is everything.

Looking at how many people opted out of MyHealth over the concerns of Government having their data, I think your reason will not resonate with many.

I really hope they made good on that. Can we confirm that if we opted out, we indeed don't have a my health record, or whether they just set one up regardless?

They may have set one up regardless, as the basic registration data comes from MyGov, and you may have a user.

However, it would require your health professional to upload data to the service - and most have simply refused.

But to actually check if one's MyHealth record exists and has data, one must first opt-in to MyHealth, which is a bit chicken/egg.

I can't agree, but to each his own.

> I'd probably trust the Australian govt to protect my data better than Google or even worse Facebook.

I would not.

The Australian government seems entirely incapable of creating any technical project of a decent size correctly. The list of disasters is quite long, but a few from recent memory are ones such as the census website which collapsed when people tried to use it [0] and the myGov project which has had so many data breaches [1].

Atop of which, the government's usual response to someone exposing flaws, is to attack them.

Whilst I don't want Google or Facebook to have my data, because they will use it in ways I don't appreciate, my government will leak it. And then claim it wasn't serious and excuse themselves from any repercussions.

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-12/census-2016-site-up-a...

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/technology/revealed-serious-flaws-in-...

[2]

I run on the assumption that the government has my data anyway. So it doesn't really matter whether they get it directly or via google. Since google wants to target me with ads, I preference removing google as a middle man. Bonus points for removing the only half-decent excuse for collecting that data anyway, so now the surveillance state is a bit less defensible.

I feel less comfortable handing my data over to an entity that has a monopoly on violence but that’s just me.

Really? They regularly have huge data breaches and are totally incompetent at protecting data and security in general. [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/03/home-affa...

The government that mandates backdoors in every software product? That government?[1]

1. https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-...

While I vocally opposed that piece of legislation (and are included in the public comments collection), that is not an accurate description of the law. The government that can force you to add backdoors in certain circumstances, and you cannot tell people about it. Yes that is utterly abhorrent, but that isn't the same as "government mandated backdoors in every software product" -- though funnily enough, the US Senate actually did try to pass a law like that in June[1].

[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/senates-new-anti-encry...

If you aren't allowed to know the difference, there's no meaningful difference, and certainly not a difference worth defending.

Sorry, you're right. The government that can demand backdoors in any software product. That's a lot better. /s

I didn't say the US Senate is a lot better, but to be completely fair there isn't a backdoor law in the US yet. It's possible Australia was the testing ground for that type of legislation though.

I didn't say it was better, I said that the description wasn't correct. If we're going to criticise something, we should describe it accurately -- otherwise our opponents can simply say "they're being hysterical and don't know what they're talking about".

Heck, that's exactly what the ASD did when the vast majority of people were screaming about employees being individually targeted by the legislation (which wasn't accurate). Now, the ASD also did misrepresent the legislation too -- but now it's less obvious to the general public who is actually being sincere.

Sigh. You're right.

Considering Google and Facebook are willing participants in PRISM [1] it can't be any worse

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#M...

> The actual collection process is done by the Data Intercept Technology Unit (DITU) of the FBI, which on behalf of the NSA sends the selectors to the U.S. internet service providers, which were previously served with a Section 702 Directive. Under this directive, the provider is legally obliged to hand over (to DITU) all communications to or from the selectors provided by the government.

Being legally compelled to provide data isn't the same as being 'willing'.

I don't understand why my comment got down voted. But yes, as one of you have pointed out, it's just my opinion. And I don't think the original draft of this law as much to do with giving your data to the govt, but more about Google/Fb being more transparent with the conditions under which, our data will be used by them. I'm not a legal expert and I may have misunderstood some of it. It's my opinion that big monopolies like Google, Facebook and Amazon should be regulated in some ways and be held accountable. I honestly don't have an answer to the question "What if govt loses your data"!

https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/draft-...

The context you're missing is that in Australia, the "big monopoly" is News Corp and not FAANG.

Thanks mate. Yes that's true.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathema...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24185374

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