The party in power federally is the Coalition, and they are deeply entwined, in a symbiotic relationship, with Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd: illustrated by endless editorial lines supportive of the Coalition in media across the country, revolving doors of Coalition advisors and News Ltd staff, through to regular questionable and controversial decisions in favour of News Ltd.
A great example was Foxtel being given a $30 million grant with no process, documentation or explanation around it [1]. It was simply explained as 'media reform'.
Like those 'media reforms', these proposed ones are also highly politically-driven and largely to the benefit of News Ltd.
This is not about supporting our news media here: the public broadcasters (ABC and SBS) dominate online and yet the proposed legislation deliberately excludes them from any claimed profiteering from Google.
This is just the abandoning of any free market principles the Coalition claims to have to provide support for their domestic media wing, in the form a local protection racket.
The claim of profiteering from search result listings, as you also imply above, is just not true.
As one ex-News Ltd and Google-associated Twitter account has emphasised, Google delivers billions of free clicks to publishers and makes very little ad revenue around search results. [2]
A good brief summary of the situation can be found from a local tech commentator, Justin Warren [3]. Two valuable points he makes:
* big publishers are salty over failing to see classified ads would get destroyed by online
* there are legitimate concerns with Google and Facebook, but they're largely orthogonal to any of this
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/19/gover...
[2] https://twitter.com/neilwrites/status/1295200085152694272
[3] https://www.eigenmagic.com/2020/08/17/draft-news-media-and-d...