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Comment by gundmc | Hacker News Reader

> Google will not be required to charge Australians for the use of its free services such as Google Search and YouTube, unless it chooses to do so.

> Google will not be required to share any additional user data with Australian news businesses unless it chooses to do so.

I don't think Google actually made either of these claims in their letter.

They didn't mention charging for services at all. They said "the free services you use may be at risk". Given the context, I took that to mean the quality of the service would tank if they had to share their algorithm changes.

The data portion is a little less clear. Google was very weasel wordy - they definitely wanted it to sound like they would have to turn over user data, but if you read carefully they only say they would have to share data about how they collect the user data.

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Somehow everyone misses this little gem in the draft bill [0]:

> 52S.(1).(a) ensure that the registered news business corporation is provided with flexible content moderation tools that allow the registered news business corporation to remove or filter comments on the registered news business covered news content that:

> . . (i) are made using the digital platform service;and

> . . (ii) are made on a part of the digital platform service that is set up and able to be edited by the registered news business;

> (b) ensure that the registered news business corporation can disable the making of such comments;

If I'm reading that correctly, if someone posts a news corporation to Facebook, the news corporation gets to delete / edit / moderate any Facebook replies.

I think they (the legislators) have lost the plot.

In another section the draft legislation requires Facebook / Google to notify the news organisation of changes to their page rank / feed algorithm, and also provide advice on how to mitigate the effects of those changes.

Google's claim the bill grants news media business special privileges no other organisation on the planet has is not too far from the truth.

[0] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill...

To me that sounds like it's intended to cover comments made on posts on the news business's own Facebook page, rather than comments made on other pages or personal profiles, etc.

Agreed, that’s what the clause (ii) restriction is for.

When you consider the wider legal context, this also makes sense* .

This is because Facebook requires page owners to assume all liability for comments.

This has resulted in publishers losing defamation cases based on third-party comments made on their posts [1].

* (regardless of whether you feel, as I do, that the proposed legislation is a politically-motivated protection racket for a favoured media mogul)

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/01/australian-med...

1. That case isn't finished with appeals and there are already multiple laws in the pipeline to override it.

2. Facebook didn't require publishers to be liable. The court did.

1. Yes we haven't heard yet whether they will appeal, but the law as it currently stands creates a legal context where you can understand publishers wanting more information about Facebook users who comment on their posts. There are some perverse shakedown incentives created by the current situation.

2. Thanks - poor wording on my part. I meant to communicate that Facebook avoids liability in their terms, and of course the court determined the actual liability falls on publishers posting content.

> In another section the draft legislation requires Facebook / Google to notify the news organisation of changes to their page rank / feed algorithm, and also provide advice on how to mitigate the effects of those changes.

Interesting.

On the one hand working in software the idea of having communicate changes to an algorithm like this to 3rd parties gives me nightmares, and opens the door to regulation of the algorithms design.

On the other hand, given Facebook and Google's monopoly positions, why not? They're able to make of break businesses overnight by changing the stream of traffic, and there's basically no real competitors. Perhaps a weak analogy but if your local government was building a motorway that would bypass your town high street, effectively wiping out 90%+ of customers to your local shop, they would inform you months or years ahead so you have at least a chance to change your business strategy or close shop.

> On the other hand... why not?

You must be unfamiliar with NewsCorp. This is the cesspool that spawned Fox News, Sky News, and The Sun. That hacked the phones of journalists, celebrities, and royalty just to get a scoop. That routinely and as a core function of business interferes in democratic process. That effectively pioneered fake news, and has singlehandedly destroyed the credibility of the entire media industry.

Why not? Hopefully because you give a single fuck about the rule of law.

I'm well aware of NewsCorp, having grown up in the UK and seen them basically decide every election since perhaps Thatcher.

Despite that, this particular point in the draft legislation in an interesting idea, at least to discuss. "Why Not?" was short for "Why not require Google and Facebook to inform affected businesses when they're making changes to their ranking algorithms?" ... that's a discussion that can be had independently from NewsCorp

Because the ranking algorithms are likely changed regularly, in opaque ways. Because many of the changes will be things like "reran the training algorithm on a new data set". Because it's a foot in the door to making them justify such changes. Because the purpose of a good search algorithm is to serve the people searching and not the people writing sites. Because it's an inherently adversarial process between search engines and bad "SEO". Because no good can possibly come from sites having more insight into how to affect their ranking, other than "make content people want". And those are just the reasons off the top of my head.

I agree with all the points you raise. But...

These have are all fundamental assumptions anyone working on the web makes and we’re established as fundamental at the point Google beat out its competitors, in the early 2000’s

At that time Google was a different company and didn’t have a monopoly, and the web was a different place. Now Google does have a monopoly and users browsing habits have narrowed to a few sites like Facebook and Reddit where they get “everything” content wise

So perhaps it’s time to question those assumptions and ask if they’re really still true in today’s context, or whether other things matter more now?

This whole comment is a red herring that turns into a straw man. No one was talking about News Corp, and most of what you said about them is false besides.

And then you try to divert attention away from the real discussion by making it seem like the argument is about “the rule of law” which really comes out of left field, but is a great boogeyman to pull up if you wanna quiet dissent.

This whole thing is about NewsCorp, if you don’t see that, read more. If you think what I had to say is false, please refute it, if I’m wrong I want to know it.

And evidently my ploy to quiet dissent didn’t work, as here you are.

NewsCorp does genuinely violate the rule of law, a different set of standards apply to them and their conduct.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> They're able to make of break businesses overnight by changing the stream of traffic

Maybe small businesses wake up to the fact that building the core of their livelihood on the foundation of a whimsical megacorp is a Bad Idea.

Google attracts businesses to work with them because they make visibility easy. But if they screw over those same businesses, then maybe the bait isn't worth taking in the first place? Maybe networking and building your customer base without Google, in some venue that you have better control over (or is at least more reliable/transparent) is preferable?

This suggestion is interesting in that you seem earnest but you appear to be fundamentally misunderstanding how the internet works:

Ppl use google to search for things, they use chrome to find things, they don’t like typing in addresses, they would much rather google give them the top result whatever that may be.

You are suggesting that the news orgs change human behavior. Good luck with that.

Start from the idea that small business owners aren't actually idiots and don't spend their time promoting their business on social media because it's fun.

Cost of customer acquisition isn't comparable without those platforms. Working harder and still not being price-competitive isn't preferable, even if it mitigates some future risk.

If you don’t use Google to drive traffic and your competitor does, you lose. It doesn’t matter that your competitor gets screwed over by Google a few years down the road. You will already be gone.

This is part of why capitalism is said to have boom/bust cycles. Stable equilibriums are less favourable than unstable ones. Taking advantage of every available opportunity is the only way to compete.

What digital platform is open and neutral? Everything is either controlled by Google, Facebook or Apple, and optimised for engagement and their ability to earn revenue.

Imagine if a company controlled not just the main street in your town, but also in every town in the world. The analogue would be to tell shopkeepers to build their own city and convince people to live their so they can run their shop.

Lowering rank of a sleazy news organization that was previously gaming the ranking... is exactly what they should do if they are keeping the end user in mind.

I buy that AMP is bad and they should share revenue.

It is not entirely Google’s fault that their survival requires click-bait articles instead of having original content

Does Google really steal revenue with AMP? Honest question, since I've read otherwise blog.amp.dev/2018/08/28/are-you-leaving-revenue-on-the-table-with-amp/

No, it’s to address “oh well we CAN’T moderate our platform we didn’t build those tools and we couldn’t find any engineers so I guess we’re just stuck then eh??”

Someone brought that up the last time this came up on HN. In the explanatory materials, they clarified that (ii) is indeed meant to restrict this to posts on their own Facebook page:

> 1.89 In the case of a social media service such as Facebook, this rule deals with the situation where the news business has posted its covered news content on the news business’ own social media page. Comments on the news business’ articles posted by somebody else on another Facebook page are not covered by this law.

https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20EM%2...

That still carves them out a protected niche in what otherwise was an independent service, that in no other case provides that level of autonomy.

If I were in FAANG's place, I'd tell the AU government to get stuffed by turning every response page into a "Tell your government that this bill is ridiculous and we'll be back when it's repealed. So long and thanks for all the fish."

> that in no other case provides that level of autonomy.

I, like all FB users, can delete comments to my own FB posts.

So can media organizations. They just can't pre-moderate the comments.

Where are you seeing a requirement to pre-moderate?

There is no such requirement. But that is the capability they want that they do not currently have. They already have the capability to delete comments, just like you can delete comments on your own posts.

If they want that, why wouldn't they put it in the law? And if they want it but it's not in the law, then why do we care?

Perhaps that's what the draft legislation means by "remove or filter comments"?

Excellent, but why enshrine the ability to do this in law only for sufficiently wealthy media companies? Seems a bit ridiculous, doesn't it?

As opposed to only sufficiently wealthy American technology companies...

Well yes, Facebook has an obvious right to moderate their own platform. News Corp, on the other hand, does not own the Fox News Facebook page.

I'm glad you're not FAANG then. When there's a dispute, you work through it rather than take your bat and ball home.

I hate to use the argument but how well did appeasement work out historically... that’s right it didn’t. When something is stupid and only happening because they have the power to force it. Sometimes the only way to fight it is to fuck off and say “sorry but no, I don’t wish to participate in this farce”

Given how badly Facebook and Twitter screwed up dealing with misinformation and hate speech, I would not in any way be unhappy if they did so.

What makes you think that the news companies will do a better job?

The content that they publish?

Not sure why you are being voted down. The news media, for all their faults, can be sued for defamation and in fact have been sued. They also have editorial policies and a clear method of publishing articles which have inbuilt checks and balances.

Sure, it’s not perfect but unlike Facebook, Google and Twitter, they do have processes in place to handle misinformation and prevent the worst excesses, and if these break down it is very clear who you can sue. Ergo, they can be held accountable.

Wow legislating “your” Facebook page as though it’s property sounds like a slippery slope.

As opposed the the slippery slope that democracies are sliding down all over the world?

I agree that it is challenging, but frankly, given how much evidence there is of bad actors and misinformation on social media sites it has become clear that these corporations will only make choices that drive revenue or revenue related metrics.

I don't know what the right solution is, but it's not twiddling thumbs while foreign owned corporations continue to accumulate control over communications and media.

This is a long read from New York Times, but it's essential to understand how (a) "news media" and (b) Australian government are strongly influenced by (c) Rupert Murdoch: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/03/magazine/rupe...

If the proxy vote here is between Larry & Sergey v. Murdochs, guess who I'm voting for.

A recent case established that Australian news organisations are legally liable and may sued for defamatory comments posted against their stories on social media platforms

> I don't think Google actually made either of these claims in their letter.

Agreed. And because this ACCC response doesn't link to the letter, I think these rebuttals to non-existent claims are deceptively misleading

Isn't that a basic tactic in political communications: when asked a question provide the answer you want to give not the answer to the question you were asked?

Similar to "strawman" in online forums, right

More "message discipline" I suspect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_discipline

Interesting. I wonder who coined that phrase? It's a curiously positive sounding phrase for something that's actually quite nefarious.

The discipline, applied to its own name. :-)

arethusa, thanks, interesting.

I guess this is something taught in paid classes to business leaders and politicians, so they want a positively sounding name.

Also, except for when the person has evil / corrupted intentions, then, is this technique neutral or sometimes even good

Can at least save time via fever of topic discussions

The google letter makes non-existent claims that aren't part of the proposed law. Like that youtube and google will somehow magically offer worse results. They can offer the exact same results they do now - they might just have to pay for it. "If we had to pay more for news content, we would probably just cut it out because we don't want to pay - thus leading to worse results" doesn't quite have the same ring, does it :-)

As such the ACCC response is also full of bullshit. This is how politics go, and the sad part is that most people seem to simply read one side of the argument and go ranting off angrily based on the bullshit claims, rather than investigating the truth behind both sides

> they might just have to pay for it. "If we had to pay more for news content, we would probably just cut it out because we don't want to pay - thus leading to worse results" doesn't quite have the same ring, does it :-)

The amount they'd have to pay for it seems to be dramatically more than what they make for it, so "if this law passes, we will stop serving these results" seems to be a reasonable reaction.

> "if this law passes, we will stop serving these results" seems to be a reasonable reaction.

If that's Google's reaction then they should say so outright, not this weasel wordy letter.

Being required to inform news media about changes to result ranking algorithms in advance and advise them on how to avoid being impacted also gives news media a unique ability to game search results and takes away Google’s ability to prevent them from gaming results. I would certainly expect this to also seriously degrade the quality of search results. Not only will results become a pile of worthless SEO spam by news companies, Google will also have to use a much more simple ranking algorithm free of both ML techniques that can’t be explained to news companies and advanced algorithm techniques that are valuable trade secrets that news companies would obviously leak with their many employees, poor security, and adversarial motives.

I would just expect Google to use obsolete or different algorithms for search results for Australia.

The "worse results" probably stem from the part of the law about changes in pagerank algorithms: If search engines are required to notify about changes in algorithm and provide mitigations for those changes, the easiest way to provide this would be: Keep the algorithm as it is, never change it again (for Australia) and accept the degradation that will result from that.

Not only that, it would allow SEO companies to sign up as "news organizations" and then use the knowledge gained about the ranking algorithm to fill everyone's search results with SEO spam even more than it already is.

Also, what does this section even mean in the context of ML models? How do you communicate that you trained an interest-estimation model on more data and will now be using the upgraded version? I’m sure Google uses many such models for producing personalized results, and probably several are updated in production every day. Does Google have to share the inner workings of their search stack with these news companies? Do they have to share the models? Does Google have to explain to these news companies how the newly trained model might treat their content differently than the previous iteration? Any of these things I expect would cause Google to throw up their hands and abandon the country. Exposing a live feed of all their trade secrets to the employees of random news companies is obviously not going to happen, and explaining why ML models do what they do is an active research area.

These are excellent points about the ML aspect that I haven't seen mentioned so far.

The legislation would prevent Google from removing the news content from search results.

From google’s open letter

> 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.

That seems to pretty clearly suggest Google will be forced to hand over personal data.

It's deceptive. They aren't saying they would hand over any data.

That seems to be pretty clearly what the law says they will have to do. Do you have a different interpretation?

It’s deceptive to directly quote them?

Google Open Letter is too high-level. After reading it you can't claim/prove much based on it. There are no details. Just high-level: "search is at risk", "data may be at risk", etc. For me, this is just a bone thrown to spark a political debate...

It shows the strength of the their best argument.

Ehh, disagree. It just shows what kind of PR they think most people respond to.

Weaselly words or otherwise, there is a big power imbalance here. The ACCC can ultimately make Google do what it wants and is backed by a government on this matter. Google has no control over the ACCC.

The ACCC is being irresponsible not dealing with - in precise terms - what Google actually said. Anything less verges on bullying. This isn't a public shouting match between equals.

> The ACCC can ultimately make Google do what it wants and is backed by a government on this matter

Not really. Google could just exit Australia. And who you think that would hurt more, Australia or Google?

As long as the proposed regulations don't make Google's Australian operations completely unprofitable, they won't.

Based on the last time this was up on HN I recall the news company lobby estimated that Google would be required to pay something like $1B/year, which is certainly far more money than they make off of news-related searches originating in Australia. The law has some prohibitions on Google substituting Australian news with news from sources in other countries, but I think it doesn’t go so far as to say that Google has to continue to serve news searches. Abandoning the country entirely might be a stretch, given how many other products would be impacted, but disabling news results entirely or declining searches that seem to be looking for news would not be surprising. The law is clearly deliberately vague to give both the government and the news companies the upper hand against Google in any sort of legal dispute, but I think Google would be within its rights to take this to court and demand an enumerated list of all of the news companies in Australia (since the law says the government is planning to make a list) and a list of all of the international sources of news that Google is prohibited from substituting, then stop serving results from either in Australia.

I think very little of Google; I'd like to see them leave Australia. Australians, of which I am one, are fools to be supporting that sort of centralised data collection. Tear it up, burn it down and throw it out in my humble opinion. I'd rather have incompetents than Google.

"[W]ell they can leave" is true - but the idea that that is something they would 'choose' to do is in my view a philosophical canard. Google is going to make the best economic decision and in that sense they don't really have a choice to make. The ACCC/government is the one with a range of options where they can pick one. And they should be held to a higher standard than bullying companies.

Google obviously. F2f

> They said "the free services you use may be at risk".

This sounds more like a threat. "If you don't give us whatever data we want, for free, then we will cut you off from some of our online services as punishment.

> Given the context, I took that to mean the quality of the service would tank if they had to share their algorithm changes.

I see this argument from them all the time and honestly, I see very little evidence of it. I use DDG exclusively now but I used Google and DDG side by side for a while as I was transitioning over, and during that time I didn't see much variation in the quality of results. If anything, being in a filter bubble made it harder to find new information.

> This sounds more like a threat. "If you don't give us whatever data we want, for free, then we will cut you off from some of our online services as punishment.

Or start charging for things that used to be free, like news results.

The bill says Google needs to make available "a list and explanation of the data the digital platform service collects".

This is quite ambiguous if it is just a collection policy or the data itself. I can see Google being fired up about that but should be something that can be clarified ( there is public consultation going on ) not whined about.

They certainly imply they will either be removing services or putting them behind a paywall. Some choice quotes from the google letter:

> Hurting the free services you use ... demands that would put our free services at risk.

That implies Google will change what Australians see vs other countries. No more. No less.

Some possibile outcomes:

Imagine a page with only foreign results. Plenty of news entities cover Australian news, and a result like this: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=victoria+australia+covid could very easily nix the news box, and any and all Australian news results and content.

Google could take the attitude that all Australian news sites that require payment have a robots.txt with:

Disallow: /

I can't imagine any law that both demands Google crawl sites AND demands payment for it will survive being contested in the courts. You can't both compel and enforce - it is one or tother, and if it costs Google to crawl your site, why should Google crawl your site?

I can see a news site, like The Guardian, agreeing to give Google their news for free, and getting all the SERP links as a consequence. I can imagine Google doing deals with all manner of sites for nothing, where the value of 100% of News traffic from Google is likely millions.

I have no idea what the proposal of the ACCC is (and I'm Australian) but this seems a really weird case, where the unintended consequences could be almost anything, and the likely outcome is more likely to be bad for Australian sites than beneficial.

My first thought was that Google would do as per Spain and just stop linking Australian news outlets. However, I was under the impression that the Australian proposition does not allow Google to treat foreign sites differently. Hence, if they carry foreign news they must carry Australian sites - and pay. Or else carry nothing at all.

> I was under the impression that the Australian proposition does not allow Google to treat foreign sites differently. Hence, if they carry foreign news they must carry Australian sites

Why, if they want to carry news from other countries, should they also have to carry Australian news?

Maybe they should just string match all their news results to Australian news so nothing gets through, even if they appear on third party sites (duplicate detection, they had it for years on regular search).

> Why, if they want to carry news from other countries, should they also have to carry Australian news?

Because the law says so, because the law is very deliberately crafted as a mechanism to force Google to give money to Australian news companies.

>That implies Google will change what Australians see vs other countries. No more. No less.

The letter is a threat, and it makes its threat by implication. The benefit of implying a threat is that it allows you to make any number of veiled threats without committing to any. If they wanted to say no more, no less, they would make a specific threat, but they want people to worry about things, so they make a vague threat.

So any possible threat that a reasonable person might suppose is meant by the letter achieves what Google wants with its letter. Australia has decided to take one of these potential threats and answer it, to make Google look bad, but it might also force Google to say that is not what we mean, the implied threat made more precise looses its power to frighten.

Of course none of this jockeying for position changes the fact that Australia is trying to pass a very bad law.

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