Comment by infinkaramazov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by infinkaramazov | Hacker News Reader

I'm Australian, and I created an account just to comment on this issue.

Imagine Google News or the Facebook news feed were normal news websites. If you count their traffic as the amount of times people went to those websites just to read news, their raw traffic would dwarf any other news website in Australia by an order of magnitude.

Journalistic websites have editorial standards, and at least some relationship and commitment to the truth (even the Murdoch ones). A news feed, while algorithmically generated, is for all intents and purposes the front page of a newspaper for many, many people.

There is no editor of a news feed. No one checks that what bubbles up to the top passes basic fact checking standards. Most importantly, there's no consequences for misinformation and conspiracy theories being on the same front page as a story about some construction disrupting your commute tomorrow.

The main gist of the new code of conduct, to me, seems like the ability for news websites to collectively bargain with a multinational corporation that essentially controls the news landscape in this country. We aren't the USA. Our news websites aren't the New York Times and the Washington Post. Unfortunately, the two biggest are owned by fairly evil companies (Channel nine and News Corp). Rupert Murdoch himself controls 70% of the Australian media landscape. When he dies, however, this law will still exist.

We've seen the consequences of a journalistic landscape that exists solely through social media without any significant independent news sources in Myanmar in 2015. Australia won't end up like that, but allowing independent journalism to wither on the vine distorts our ability to participate in democracy.

As a collective, if every single news organisation decided to go on strike from Facebook or Google tomorrow, the amount of money advertisers would pay them would drop off a cliff. Google is scared by this because they know that the value they give to the consumer is the sum of Australian journalism, a tasting menu of all the best stuff that newspapers have to offer. Why, then, shouldn't that sum itself have the ability to bargain against Google and get itself a better deal?

For Google at least they have the option to opt-out. They can add a robots.txt file to prevent indexing. It isn't clear to me why special legislation is required to give the media companies bargaining power. They already have the power to say no if they don't think the arrangement is fair.

(For facebook it is less clear, because you can't really force people to stop sharing your links)

It is perfectly possible to create a website without direct deep links. Every other SPA does exactly that.

Sorta kinda. You can completely opt-out of Google Search entirely but there's no way to opt-out of having your content excepted while also appearing in organic search results.

I mean I would be pissed if I was a major news org that saw traffic drop off because Google is copy-pasting content from my site in their omnibox. This stuff is extremely good for the user and I rely on it a lot but they should have to license the content they republish.

Is the "omnibox" a big problem for news? I mostly see it for "facts" as opposed to recent events. But yes, it would be good to prevent that. However it seems like this isn't the primary focus of the legislation?

I think it would be very interesting to have a copyright infringement case on the information pulled into the answer boxes, but I think that is a separate problem.

> there's no way to opt-out of having your content excepted

You mean the news carousel, or whatever it's called in the search results? Doesn't appearing in thst require you to add a lot of metadata to your page?

Pretty sure there are thousands of sites that will "quote" what you reported / investigated so there's no winner here. You can exactly copyright news entirely and people are faulty liberal when it comes to quoting someone else's work.

Let us not kid ourselves, opting out of Google is suicide for any kind of content. Google is (sadly) critical internet infrastructure by now and lawmakers can not ignore it.

Let me get this straight. It’s suicide because of how much traffic Google sends your way and... you’re entitled to get be paid to receive that traffic... why?

How does this protect independent journalism? The law explicitly cuts out media outlets with an annual revenue <$150k, meaning smaller and newer publications will see no benefits; and become easier targets of the Murdoch strategy of absorb and extinguish.

It even excludes the ABC and SBS. This is not about journalism in any way.

>Journalistic websites have editorial standards

I disagree. The ABC has on three separate occasions delayed the issue of a retraction on false reporting I brought to their attention by months. SBS refused to issue a retraction at all for another piece of false information they reported, even though their own source had retracted it.

Additionally, ACMA and the Communications Ombudsman have zero jurisdiction over the online news content of ABC and SBS.

These organisations have a very laissez-faire relationship with integrity and facts.

On the other hand, I once emailed a News Corp journalist about a false claim in an article and it was amended in under 10 minutes.

Please list the articles and their retractions.

Facebook and Google are not dependent on the news companies. They can make plenty of money without them. We've already seen Google shut down Google News in Spain when they tried to force payments there.

Even with this form of government intervention, I expect both companies to remove or block links to news wherever the law allows it, rather than pay the publishers.

Is the goal here to just have Google shutdown Google News in Australia? Seems like that's the only logical result.

This affects Google search as well.

Not indexing the sites and shutting down google news is effectively the same thing.

The legislation explicitly prevents Google from not indexing the sites

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