In general I would say whatever corporations want is not in my best interest, so whatever they don't want, might be.
It seems dangerous to have this kind of government-on-the-right-track reaction when the corporation cheering it on is in the business of fossil fuels, factory farming, or opiod manufacturing just because a different corporation yells loudly about it.
Of course I would like to see the government go further and upset News Corp as well, but upsetting these two seems like a good first step
I mean, that's even before you consider that there isn't really any logical consistency to the claims that Google and Facebook are making huge profits directly from Australian news content. It's just a ludicrous false assumption...
Why is it a false assumption? The users are the product, and the user want news
With the assumption - at the moment, these publishers the ability to not be indexed using robots.txt, sitemap.xml etc.. If Google and Facebook were making huge profits directly from Australian news content, they could pretty easily organise to all boycott them. If the assumption behind this law was true, then that would be extremely effective because of the money apparently at stake. Or if the news sources just felt they were being unfairly used, they could just cut them off on principal. But they haven't done either. Why not?
Secondly, Facebook couldn't credibly come out with a threat like this. Why would they cut off what News Corp and Nine tell us is apparently a huge revenue stream? But as we know, they're not really making huge profits directly from news, and not even much indirectly, so Facebook can threaten this.
Countries very much look to each other for policy guidance because nothing is better than having facts on the ground in deciding whether a policy works or not. We've seen it especially recently with COVID-19 responses.
Facebook/Google need to make sure that policies like this aren't enacted because whilst Australia is tiny, the US and the EU aren't and will adopt a similar policy if it works. And then suddenly it snowballs into something you can't stop.
Better to treat one now than none...
I'm Australian and I don't.
Superficially, it is profitable for a corporation to make their customers happy so they will want to buy/use their product. Not everything is a monopoly.
Personally, I feel like our government is only concerned with staying in power - historically that's been whoever Murdoch favours - and that's why we get garbage like this.