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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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...

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!

^ 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

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

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