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Comment by clouddrover | Hacker News Reader

It's about funding journalism. What's Mike Cannon-Brooke's solution for funding journalism?

Are you Australian? Because I'd be a little surprised if you'd be saying that if you had a lot of exposure to our media.. Especially given the quality (or lack thereof) of our mainstream "news" sources, and the fact that this specifically cuts out ABC, SBS or most independent sources...

70% of the commercial media here is controlled by one American company, and perhaps not coincidentally they have a very close relationship with the Government. The Government has literally just given their cable network $40 million dollars over the last few budgets, completely un-tendered and without any reporting requirements or anything, to "help advance women's sport" - even though 75% of Australians aren't subscribers and SBS would be a better venue for such content...

> Because I'd be a little surprised if you'd be saying that given the quality of our mainstream "news" sources

So your solution is to make them even worse by letting Google bleed them dry?

What percentage of Australian's news reading goes through Google? What percentage of Australia's advertising spend does Google command?

Sure. Let them die - that ship has sailed. News Ltd and Nine have destroyed most of the quality journalism on their platforms already, and I honestly don't think anything this bill proposes will make it better.

I don't have all the answers, but the best way I think I can support quality journalism is to subscribe to some independent news sites now (Michael West, MacroBusiness, Anthony Klan's new site The Klaxon. Might think about Crikey too because it seems pretty good).

You mean those journalists who spent decades working for News Corp papers? Michael West did. Anthony Klan did. Anthony Klan is proud of his News Corporation Australia journalist of the year awards.

Seems like News Corp helped them both get started. Why shouldn't News Corp continue to fund others as well?

Not if they don't innovate. Music TV and movies have had to do so in the last 20 years, I don't see why news should be different.

What is the innovation you expect to see when Google siphons off their revenue?

I'm sorry, but funding media giants is obviously not a good reason to extort search giants. What is the nuance that I am missing?

Google gets content and advertising revenue, journalists are not getting enough return for their work. It's not sustainable.

Maybe news isn't sustainable in the long run anyway. Independent journalists (who CAN survive on 50k-150k in ad revenue) are the future.

How? They'll be crushed like bugs by the first lawsuit that comes along.

The only way they'd survive is by producing fawning, uncritical reports, like almost every interview done with movie stars.

As long as the courts are fair, there's no problem here.

Lawsuits cost money. There's nothing but problems here. You're asking them to go bankrupt.

If they believe that Google should compensate them then they can already demand that Google stop linking their pages, and then bargain with Google the ordinary way. Why is it fair or necessary to add extra laws here?

It's not "belief", it's financial reality.

There's no "demand" necessary. Just configuration.

Lots of interesting things on Robots meta tag:

https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_t...

The journalists doing good work would be almost entirely excluded by this law.

This money would go to an organisation which largely peddles outrage and division.

> This money would go to an organisation which largely peddles outrage and division.

Frankly that's Google, Facebook, and Twitter. They are aimed at maximising engagement and outrage does that for them. They keep feeding people what they think they want to see and the further down the rabbit hole they go the weirder and more extreme it gets.

> Frankly that's Google, Facebook, and Twitter. They are aimed at maximising engagement and outrage does that for them.

Please, do a google image search for "daily telegraph cover", and then give me your description of the Murdoch news media.

I don't think Google News displays ads on result pages, just the title + thumbnail. Why should they pay for displaying these links when they don't earn anything on them, it doesn't make business sense.

As for news discovered by regular search, I think that is different because the user has to input specific search keywords and restrict to recent results. The difference is about intention and recurring visits.

The situation seems similar to the Google Books fiasco, where we didn't end up with a searchable online library of out of print books. Lots of arguments were raised back then as now, but the bottom line was that everyone tried to do good for himself and we all got less - the prisoner's dilemma in action.

> it doesn't make business sense

If it didn't make business sense then Google wouldn't be showing them in the first place. It plainly does make business sense. Google shouldn't be afraid to pay for what it uses.

If the news sites do not want the traffic, they are perfectly free to use their robots.txt to stop google from scraping.

The want to have their cake and eat it too, plus get paid for the privilege.

Having said this, I have no sympathy for Google either.

They aren't perfectly free to do it and that's the point. Read what the ACCC is doing and why it is doing it:

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/australian-news-media-...

Nothing in that link that I can see prevents the news businesses from excluding themselves from being scraped by google using robots.txt.

Well, nothing except for the fact that their own sites are not compelling enough for customers in order to be profitable, so they don't want to do it.

So you're saying the only problem is practical reality. Good insight.

What do you think this is all about? The ACCC is acting to address the practical realities of the situation. That's what the ACCC is there for.

I think this is about crony capitalism. The old mates want to have their cake and eat it too and get paid as well, and their mates are making that happen.

Just the fact that the ABC and SBS are excluded says it all really. This is clearly not about journalism.

To quote the ACCC chair: “We note that 88 smaller media businesses teamed up to submit a joint submission as part of the process of developing the code. Under our plan, these businesses could again work together to negotiate with the platforms over fair payment for their content.”'

You really are failing to understand this. You must try harder.

OK, and ABC/SBS?

I understand and it's ridiculous. Just because your business is not profitable shouldn't mean another business should be forced to subsidise it. Unless you have mates that can make laws, that is.

You're not missing anything and there's no nuance.

It's a blatant moneygrab for fossils from a government they have by the balls.

The classified ads have dried up and they're out of ideas.

Could do like the UK does with the BBC and fund it via ordinary taxes. It seems like a relatively simple solution.

Except for the Defund the BBC movement that's going on right now... I'm skeptical any government funded broadcaster is sustainable when it just turns into a propaganda outlet for the establishment.

I'm not super familiar with UK politics but it looks like this movement raised something like 45k british pounds on gofundme? Seems pretty fringe. I guess the BBC will remain funded.

The actual org is small, but it's caused thousands to pull their license fee, which is no small sum of money for the Beeb. It's not like they're rolling in profit.

There are around 65 million UK residents. Even if thousands pull their license fee it's not gonna move the needle that much. And if it did move the needle, I suspect the government would address the issue by enforcing the license fee more aggressively, or by doing the sensible thing and funding the BBC via the general fund.

They can't legally enforce it because the BBC guy has no special power to inspect your telly set and it's not technically a tax (as long as you don't consume BBC content). They also include YouTube/iPlayer consumption of BBC so it's unenforceable on a technical level too.

They've tried to scare people into compliance since the 50s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van

That makes me, as a non-UK resident, rather sad. BBC programming (at least what makes it to North America) is really very good.

The ABC is government funded: https://www.abc.net.au/

And SBS is partially government funded: https://www.sbs.com.au

But it's not enough to have just two news organisations.

If the number of organizations is the concern, the government could fund a larger number of organizations. This doesn't seem fatal to the option I proposed.

Or the government could just make Google pay for what it uses. It's simpler and more direct.

Haha, no it is not. Taxing a specific organization for a specific policy purpose is much more complicated than paying for that policy purpose out of the general fund and paying for it with general taxation.

To see the truth of my claim, consider what's going to happen if Google declines to "use" the Australian news media after this law is passed. I doubt any serious person believes this will be helpful to the news media's bottom line. So you'll have an even more serious problem for news media revenue, and also the search engine most people use will be doing a worse job of helping people get the information they're looking for. All because the government chose a complex policy solution to a simple policy problem. (At least, the problem as stated is simple. I suspect the actual problem the government is trying to solve is a little different than what is publicly claimed.)

Of course it is. Industry specific regulation exists for all industries. This is nothing new.

Why do you believe that everyone else must pay Google's costs? Why do you think Google shouldn't pay its own way? It's a bizarre position to take.

I am not clear on what you're talking about when you discuss "paying Google's costs." It doesn't "cost" Google anything to link to a news article. And it doesn't "cost" a news media company anything to be linked to. "Everyone" is not paying Google's costs in any of the scenarios we're discussing.

Google profits from the content. Google must pay for it. We're not talking about just linking to articles. We are talking about people's news reading being entirely mediated through Google.

It's disappointing that you've failed to understand the issues. Read more:

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/australian-news-media-...

If Google removes all news links from their services (assuming that would allow them to avoid this tax), and remains profitable in Aus, please remember to update your beliefs on this subject. I will do the same if Google's removal of news links causes a material decline in profitability or allows for the creation of a profitable upstart that deals with the Aus news media on these terms.

You're still not getting it. It's not about if Google is profitable or not. That's beside the point.

There's not much I can do for you anymore. It's up to you now.

In the comment I was replying to, your first sentence was "Google profits from the content." How then is it not about whether Google is profitable or not? I am contradicting your assertion that Google profits materially from this content. If Google removes the content and remains profitable, that strikes directly at your claim that Google profits from the content. It's not beside the point. It is exactly responsive to what you wrote. Maybe that is not the point you were trying to make, but IMO that is an issue with what wrote, not my understanding of it. The language you used was about profits, plain as day.

> In the comment I was replying to, your first sentence was "Google profits from the content."

Which is not the same as "Google is profitable."

Good grief. This is about making sure journalism survives. Google bleeding it dry doesn't help it survive.

Thank goodness you've given up because your points were so incoherent that it was borderline spam.

It seems incoherent to you because you haven't understood the issue. You haven't understood the issue because you're only listening to what Google tells you. Google wants you to have that narrow perspective because it makes you exploitable and that's good for Google's business.

Google is making sense here. The evils they are fighting against helps doubleclick. See Google plus (G+) it can drop and abandon things. Big.

What do you think?

I think you haven't understood what the ACCC is doing and why it is doing it. It's not a mystery. They are very clear about it:

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/australian-news-media-...

Btw, the above was an attempt at a GPT3 trap. I could tell by the sentence structure that the person I was replying to didn't seem normal

Attempt failed.

It's about funding media organisations.

There's nothing in the terms that means the money goes to hiring journalists at all.

Who do you think hires journalists?

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