Hacker News Reader

Comment by hkt | Hacker News Reader

That's.. awful. A Murdoch bill, then.

Do you know if bloggers etc can be compensated?

First Murdoch stopped most of Australia from receiving the fast fibre to the home that had just begun rollout.

Instead we got lumped with using his rotting Foxtel coax cables for slow expensive unreliable broadband. Plus we spent $10 Billion extra for the current copper mashup, compared with the original fibre to the home rollout he blocked using Abbott the onion muncher.

Now he pushes his parliamentary puppets to grant another tranche of protectionist profits for his media empire.

Australia ranks third in the world for corruption... when measuring percentage of billionaires who made their fortune through political favours and giveaways.

Check out the bar graph in this article:

https://www.theage.com.au/opinion/game-of-mates-how-billiona...

To be eligible for the scheme, the proposed bill requires annual revenues of at least[0] $150,000 (amongst other things), so I imagine it would exclude most independent-journalist-running-a-blog situations

[0] see section 52G of the draft bill - https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/news-m...

Thanks for sharing. An explicit revenue minimum... incredible how blatant this legislation is. Not about supporting journalism at all.

A common solution for such situations is to have some kind of association of or platform for independents which can hold the relevant registration.

Wow, that's vile. So clearly about incumbent media power rather than promoting diversity.

I wonder if eg wordpress, or ghost, would be able to create a situation for their hosted blogs in which authors were paid for their content by virtue of the organisation itself having the minimum level of revenue.

> I wonder if eg wordpress, or ghost, would be able to create a situation for their hosted blogs in which authors were paid for their content by virtue of the organisation itself having the minimum level of revenue.

That would open up a whole other can of worms in terms of liability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com