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Comment by fungi | Hacker News Reader

> How about we simply ban Google and Facebook from reproducing news on their own site?

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.

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re: bananaface

> 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?

> 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?

Stealing your content? A quick google search for "Australia news law" shows a top stories box with just a headline and a thumbnail. Similar thing with the news tab adds but it adds on about another 20 words from the first paragraph. Which part of that would you prefer them not to show?

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 thought the problem was that people don't click through to the newspaper, that articles are read on Google and Facebook somewhere.

I agree that we should also not be writing laws that just protect large news organizations, we should write them to protect everybody.

Yes, it really sounds dodgy to me that the Treasurer is arbitrarily choosing companies that are subject to this law, and arbitrarily choosing which companies benefit from it.

The ABC and SBS don't qualify as news businesses. That says it all really.

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