Google looks at pulling all or part of its search engine from Australia
crikey.com.au
crikey.com.au
This solely refers to published news which, not surprisingly, many journalists consider the important part of the web.
A common economic aphorism is "if you want less of something, tax it." Google is responding to regulatory+market signals as intended. Other countries have tried the same thing (e.g. Spain) and found that they haven't liked the results.
Separately, the news sites trying to restrict people from forwarding articles in their own feeds is nuts.
Australia is tiny in the grand scheme of things but the average revenue per user is huge, there's still a lot of money on the table here, along with the domino effect.
The government will face huge amount of pressure and be forced to backflip within days if they actually go through with it, but perhaps that is what they want, to set up this narrative that these entities have far more power than any democratically elected government, which for the most part I think is entirely correct, these companies can make or break many governments on Earth.
And while I support them in what they are doing, in the back of my mind all I can think is that Rupert Murdoch probably pulled some strings to make this happen for his own benefit and it's corrupt all the way down.
Also, liberalism has been sufficiently successful in Australia that the argument "new business should not be compelled to serve interests of old business" will have some currency.
Whether these two sectors will be enough to win an election fought on this argument (widely expected in the second half of this year) remains to be seen.
It doesn't become much more transparent than, say, senior members of the Liberal Party government travelling to the USA to visit Rupert but not any US politicians or diplomats.
News Corp may not own the title deeds for any property, but they have all the receipts for money paid and souls bought.
For example, the current PM’s chief of staff came straight from Rio Tinto, previous PM Tony Abbot’s chief of staff (Peta Credlin) now has a show on Sky News, as does ex-PM Turnbull’s (Chris Kenny, from when Turnbull was opposition leader), who also writes for The Australian newspaper. On the other side of the duopoly, the chairman of Nine/Fairfax is an ex-Liberal Party treasurer (basically the most powerful cabinet minister apart from the PM), and they held fundraising events for the party at their studios during the last election.
So the media run positive stories about the Government, and downplay or fail to run stories about, for example, serious allegations of corruption against multiple cabinet ministers of the Government, while policy proposals from the opposition are scrutinised far more closely and savagely than actual policy from the actual Government, and often rubbished. The media runs character assassinations against opposition party leaders and MPs and puff pieces about the Government ministers, the PM’s wife and her fashion choices, etc. - it’s pretty shameless.
Then there are links between Government, the media and big business (again, mostly mining here) through a bunch of think tanks like the IPA (extreme far-right), the Sydney Institute, etc.
As long as environmental protections are kept weak enough for the miners, and tax cuts keep being promised for the wealthy, none of them rock the boat.
Sounds like they'd be complying with the law, not trying to strong-arm anyone.
It's not a strong arm tactic, just a simple cost-benefit move. And it's not a demonstration of market power either. The proposed regulation only applies to companies already deemed to have market power, so only such companies are considering reacting to the regulation this way. But if the law applied universally, you would obviously see the exact same calculation happen at companies that don't have market power. Most would come to the same conclusion as Google seems to have done: it's not worth it to link to news under these terms.
I'm sure I read somewhere, possibly also on Crikey, that News Corp practically wrote the legislation for the Australian Government, and that some amendments were necessary so that the state-funded ABC would not be excluded from the deal. I'll try to find reference to that. Edit, stinging Crikey article here[1]
Edit two, here's an article mentioning including state broadcasters in the code[2]
Stratechery did an in-depth breakdown of elements of the legislation[0]
[0]https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargainin...
[1]https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/08/28/google-facebook-accc-ch...
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/nov/25/google-and-fac...
I find that a good sign that Crikey doesn't get too editorially involved in the journalism.
That makes sense. It fits in with News Corps long war on news aggregating tech firms (Google, largely) and their several failed attempts to lead alternative services controlled by the traditional publishing industry (with themselves in the steering seat.)
So, having failed to compete, they’ve just decided to lobby government to put its finger on the scale to impose a plan as nonviable as their own prior commercial ventures: if they can’t succeed in the news aggregating portal business, they’ll make news aggregation and search a business in which success is brutally punished with terms that make the business completely nonviable.
Where in the hell did you pull this nonsense from?
Also would like to see Google do it. Good riddance imo. It will rock the nation but will spur interior innovation which we sorely need seeing as housing and the mining booms are over.
So while he probably wasn’t directly involved, I’m sure he had very strong input on what direction the people leading the lobbying effort should take.
But even if he wasn’t, I’ve also heard the son who still works there (the one who didn’t quit in disgust over the organisation’s editorial direction) is just as bad...
Everything is fine, citizens, nothing to see here! Can we direct the usual "censorship" outrage onto censoring all the news?
Unfortunately this is a fight between two or more parties both of which have dirt on their hands. The "news" in question in Australia is mostly Murdoch propaganda. It's not great for FB/Google to profit off embedding other people's intellectual property but "information wants to be free" and we don't want precedents set for how and whether you can link to websites.
Edit: I agree with https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/08/28/google-facebook-accc-ch... "For the avoidance of doubt, it couldn’t happen to two nicer companies. There are sound policy reasons to loathe Google and Facebook — for their relentless accumulation and abuse of personal data, for their anti-competitive acquisitions of smaller rivals, for their tax dodging, for their complicity in the spread of highly damaging, often literally lethal misinformation and propaganda.
But their alleged theft of news content isn’t one."
I quite happily move through life without them. I bump into their paywalls or adblocker checks and go else and still find myself more informed about nonsense i've no influence upon than is good for me.
Consequently, since his company owns the governing Liberal party, it's no surprise that his interests magically become the interests of the government and through them the country.
You are of course right. But there is very little media competition in Australia. In a best case scenario, the opposition wins the election expected later this year and drops this policy. But is that a likely scenario? I wouldn't bet a horse on it.
But that could backfire and Google's power to deplatform a company or a whole market without recourse could be bad for their anti-trust lawsuits. They are benefiting from their powerful status of being a central internet infrastructure without wanting to be subjected to the rigors we set for other infrastructure, such as buildings, roads, energy and food. Would you agree to have the hypothetical 90% monopolist in road construction and operation ban your business or town, so you can eat your freedom and drive on unpaved roads?
That's not true: the article's title intentionally misled on that front, and the article body continued to raise fears about a "restricted" search product.
However, I exclusively use DuckDuckGo, personally.
I'm sure that USA and UK news media will work well enough for most searches and they will be happy to serve Australian users and earn money off of them by showing (Google-provided) Australia-targeted ads.
On the other hand, you're right that intuitively people probably won't consider that their local news sites must be accessible through google, if they want news, they do have a go-to source, whatever that is - so that supports an argument that Australian news sites overestimate their importance to Google; Google probably won't suffer much if it can't or won't link to them.
The law proposed is either a) pay existing media establishments to link to their content, or b) do not show any news at all, including from international sources. They won't be able to block local news and show international sources without facing penalties.
As I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong) The AUS government passed a law aimed at a making a specific search engine pay other private entities for including links to them among its results. Seems nuts!
Of course Google has to decide to either comply or pull out of the market, that's always their right.
True and i as Google would just say, hey if you want your link in our Australian search-result you have to pay upfront. Problem solved. If Australia has, for some time just white pages then the peoples will probably do something about it...in the meantime google get a butt-load of money, and Australia looses allot of it.
And maybe just maybe Australia makes his own search-engine (which would be a good thing)
Because that's what the proposed law says the government would do.
I believe what the law actually says is that Google should to pay news providers when it displays content from their websites in search listings - eg when you search for a topic in the news and Google highlights some articles in the "Top Stories" section at the top of the results. The contention is that those links provide very little value to the news site and a heap of value to Google. If that is really the case then there's no reason why Google should get to access and display that data for free.
The point of search engines being able to index a site and display the link alongside adverts has always been that it's a mutually beneficial relationship - the site gets traffic, and Google gets sites to show ads next to. If people are no longer using Google to go to websites then that value proposition changes, and having your website in Google's index is no longer a benefit. If that's true then it's not unreasonable for site owners to suggest they should be paid for the 'raw materials' that Google makes money from. There is an argument that news sites could put up a robots.txt site to block Google, but that's a bit like saying burglary is OK if a house owner hasn't locked their doors...
Can't agree with your analogy though, that just isn't how the web functions.
Seems like a pretty clear business-to-business issue that should in no way involve the gov.
What they were saying was absolutely ludicrous. Somebody from News Ltd. said with a straight face that Google probably owes them $1bn a year - a full quarter of all Google’s Australian revenue across all their products! Either they’re crazy liars, or seriously extremely deluded as to how important their news results are to Google’s revenue...
As far as I remember the more ludicrous part is that the code mandates that Google must include news results. That means that Google must pay for all news links. It couldn't, for example, decide to partner with some news orgs and not others. It also couldn't just remove news altogether. The penalties proposed are also insane. Billions if I recall.
Which then leaves them with either effectively being held hostage to pulling search entirely as described here.
This is probably to the advantage of the existing large players, since a new smaller player would find it much harder to get traction. We all know the domain name to Mr Murdoch's news websites, but we do not necessarily know the domain name to new media news websites. And we probably won't head off to NYT expecting to get decent coverage of Australian news for natural reasons.
The result is probably going to be a disaster, with fake news spreading as images on Facebook, which will be somewhat trusted since everyone knows you can't find the source in Google and you can't link to it on Facebook, so the fact that you can't confirm it doesn't mean you can call it refuted.
Further, it seems that Google won through a technicality, that the European Commission hadn't been notified of the new regulation and on these ground the case was dismissed. That's very different from actually ruling on the underlying issue.
Will there be "pirate" news search engines? Like for torrents.
I don't believe that every single news website in Australia agrees with this law. Some would want to be listed in the search results without getting money. Will there be an opt-in?
There is a opt-out[0].
But "the protocol is purely advisory and relies on the compliance of the web robot" so maybe laws is needed to punish crawlers not following the exclusion standard?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
There can't be. The way the law is written, if Google and Facebook serve any news links in Australia, even from non-Australian sites, Murdoch gets to shake them for unbounded amounts of money.
This article seems to confuse the two, as if the user never used Google. (What's that bit about "yellow pages for internet"? Does he describe catalogues from the 90s? What?)
It does not apply to products like Google Mail and Google Maps since they aren't platforms to get eyeballs onto content written for Rupert Murdoch.
The suggested alternative is that instead of serving up Google Search in Australia (i.e. the thing produced by crawling websites), they might serve up an entirely opt-in service. Think of sites like the old dmoz.org. It will suck about as much as it sounds like it will suck. If they do that, I would expect Australian web search traffic to go mostly to the new Google Services Directory and spread gradually to Bing and Duck Duck Go and Yahoo. Microsoft and Yahoo will probably actively strive to avoid becoming the universal default, because as long as they aren't big enough they won't attract the burdens of this law.
The fact that Murdoch's scheme got this far just shows how much power he has over the Liberal Party in Australia.
The Murdoch empire has far more sway over public discourse, and who gets into power than any of the big tech firms, but of course the Murdoch dominated press ignores that ...
Crikey is an Australian publication of limited circulation and had covered the developments of this legislation quite thoroughly since it cropped up in August last year, so most Crikey readers would know the context upon reading the headline.
Crikey being sensationalist link bait goes against their, generally, subscriber-only access.
'crap' judgement is up to the reader.