And if we are truly believe "A healthy news media sector is essential to a well-functioning democracy." we need to punish both Google and content creators for publishing things that are demonstrably false. Fake News in otherwords.
News Corp is and always has been free to not have its content on Google (https://www.robotstxt.org/). But that's not what they want, they want a Money just for appearing in search results. Seems more like a rent seeking for News Corp.
> We're bending over backwards to try and accommodate Google
The funny/bizzare bit is we are bending over backwards to accommodate 2 multinational American corporate monopolies that don't even pay tax in this country.
> I don't like the news media but they can't just "not appear" on Google's results. Google has way more leverage than them. Their choices are: accept Google stealing your content and giving you some traffic in return, or die. It's like saying, "you're free not to farm on your feudal overlord's land." Where else are you going to go?
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> The problem isn't a matter of rights, it's that Google has too much power. Individuals can't exert any leverage, they have to accept Google's terms. I don't think that's healthy, it's quite dangerous actually. The only way to address that is a collective intervention.
The leverage is that you stop using Google to get news, no?
Also, I did not see a single ad on either of those pages nor can I recall ever seeing ads when I was looking for news on google. The only money they are probably even making from news is when they send you to a news website that happens to use googles ad services and that's a symbiotic relationship. Even with collective bargaining, I cannot see this going any other way than how it did in germany or spain with either no fee or just delisting all news.
I agree that we should also not be writing laws that just protect large news organizations, we should write them to protect everybody.
The ABC and SBS don't qualify as news businesses. That says it all really.
You can. Just add the robots.txt to the website.
But the news sites need Facebook/Google more than the other way around.
This is oft-quoted, but the media organisations seemed to be doing better before Google/Facebook became the middle-man siphoning off advertising revenue.