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Comment by renaicirc | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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

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.

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?

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

Lots of interesting things on Robots meta tag:

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

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

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.

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.

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