Google threatens to withdraw search engine from Australia
bbc.com
bbc.com
> Australia is introducing a landmark law to make Google, Facebook and potentially other tech companies pay media outlets for their news content.
No, Australia is trying to get Google to pay any time they link to a news website.
The bill text is here: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.....
> (1) For the purposes of this Part, a service makes content available if: 19 (a) the content is reproduced on the service, or is otherwise 20 placed on the service; or 21 (b) a link to the content is provided on the service; or 22 (c) an extract of the content is provided on the service.
I wonder what will happen to the Google Australia offices.
You cannot force a business into a contract nor into a business relationship.
We basically need a large group of countries to agree, at the same time, to make the same demands, to give Google no choice but to comply, or exit the business. (To some degree, the EU is capable of doing this, but enforcement and interpretation of EU directives can be a bit piecemeal.)
It's time for countries to start treating Google more like an enemy foreign power than a mere company, especially if it wants to act on that stage.
Reality is ... always more complicated.
The problem they are trying to solve is Google is a monopoly in Australia (government claims 95% market share). The news businesses are a disorganised rabble. And rabble is putting it politely - more like a pack of thieves, stealing content off each other.
Being a thief was accepted because it didn't matter business wise. Their business was selling a daily dose of ads printed on dead trees. The "news" they are now fighting over was just the bait printed on those dead trees to entice people to read the ads. (Corollary: you're the product, not the customer goes back way longer than the internet.) Geography limits how far you can distribute dead trees (aka, newspapers), so each newspaper (or "masthead") operated over a limited area: about as far as you can transport a truck load of newspapers between midnight and dawn, so people could read your product over breakfast. Ergo, travel about 200km and any direction, and you were likely to find a new masthead, so there are lots of them, all fiercely independent.
The thing they stole of each other, and still steal off each other, is the bait, the "news", the thing they are so pissed off at Google for stealing. They didn't outright steal it of course, it was massaged by what they call a journalist into something that almost identical but side stepped copyright issues. The end result being if you look at two mastheads not too distant from each other, you will see very similar news featured on each. It didn't matter because the thing they were selling was the ads and they had a geographic monopoly. It wasn't stealing, it was cooperative behaviour driven by cost minimisation and it benefited everybody. I exaggerating of course as there is also paid for syndicated news and reprints of press releases, but much of what you read is tarted up tweets, internet posts, and scraped from other papers. It's only bait remember. It could be kitchen floor sweepings for all they care. All that matters is people lap it up, so they read those precious ads.
Then Google came along, following the industry practice of stealing content, to the point modifying by reducing it to a sentence or two so copyright didn't apply, but then sold ads to all their customers. Stealing customers and their revenue is a whole other thing.
The solution for the news businesses has always been obvious, just negotiate with Google for a price on the news. It's highly unlikely Google would forgo all news in their search engine, and there is only one place they could readily get it: the Australian newspapers. Google is already paying some Australian outlets for their content so they aren't complete Machiavellian pricks. But they are businessmen, so they've tested the market and found there were literally hundreds of outlets all selling the same merchandise and of course they had a highly valuable thing to offer in return: if we link to you, you get to display your ads. The response on the undisciplined rabble was to undercut each other trying to get that lucrative link, driving the price to zero.
The ironic thing is Google already gives them the tools they need to withhold their content: robots.txt and other more selective things. Google respects it https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/in... , so all they had to do is use it. But like a pack of two years olds tasked with fairly sharing a bag lollies they couldn't, so they asked the government to do it for them. And that's what worked in France: the government rounded them up and forced them to negotiate as a single entity, so it was one monopoly negotiating with another, and after much haggling they came at a price.
I'm not a lawyer, but this Australian legislation appears to insisting on one on one negotiations between Google and each newspaper, with the government setting the price if they don't agree. This changes nothing, it’s still a 95% monopoly presented with a turkey shoot, so it’s inevitable they won’t agree. The idea of the Government setting forcing a price when two monopolies could just sort it out between them is I'm guessing what Google objects to, and I'm pretty sympathetic.
But now I'm floored. Google has retorted like some spoiled child: well we will just turn off Google search in Australia. It's, well, insane. It's making for great political theatre in Australia. We were regaled with nightly TV news footage of the pollies in parliament milking it for all it's worth (the Prime Ministers response "we make the rules" being just one of them). It's like Google walked into their home ground, and handed over their head on a platter.
I don't understand any of this. It's like we are dealing with a couple two year olds whose negotiating skills amount to making demands and throwing tantrums. What are they thinking?
(That said, the law is insane, and neatly demonstrates how badly our politicians are beholden to Murdoch).
Neither does the EU.
Neither does China.
If you violate China's laws with your website, they block you. They don't need you to change your website. It's very simple.
If you violate GDPR, the EU is welcome to block you.
If you violate weird Australian laws, Australia is welcome to block you.
No different. Just that (hee hee) we know the EU and Australia won't dare set up national firewalls. But from the perspective of the website owner, they're welcome to set up a firewall if they don't like the website. But the website isn't going anywhere.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Australian govt is pretty open to implementing draconian laws. We've already got mandatory ISP metadata retention; we don't have a bill of rights like USA, we're basically a cryptotheocracy with the head of the Anglican Church as our head of state.
I sense a teensy bit of exaggeration in this remark. Democratically elected politicians drafted this legislation, not the Queen.
No... They will just setup a block list and make the ISPs block it. Hell they might even add a levy to the NBN to pay for it.
As probably the most obvious example, looking at the relative development of the tech sector in the US compared to the EU, particularly now the UK has left, I don't think it takes a genius to work out who loses if the EU really tries to cut off US tech for not playing nicely with EU rules (GDPR or otherwise) and the US government retaliates.
For example, Tencent has a lot of WeChat users in the EU but the EU haven't done a thing about their gross privacy violations that don't align with GDPR. Or Xiaomi Roborock vacuum cleaners, which are sold in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, but send Wi-Fi SSIDs, passwords, GPS, and floor maps back to their server with no option to disable that behavior and no option to request deletion of user data.
They mostly target Silicon Valley companies and don't seem to particularly care if other countries' companies violate GDPR.
Well that’s a very interesting take. Enforcement is overwhelmingly targeted at foreign companies, and primarily from the US and EU. I guess you can be the judge of whether it’s a just coincidence that those are the countries that the EU has the most contentious trade relationships with. Aside from China of course, which I’d say you have correctly observed would simply not tolerate the EU trying to enforce its laws extraterritorially.
This is pay for linking. It means anyone linking to a content provider is putting themselves at financial risk. Even if Google withdraws from Oz, whoever becomes the "Baidu" of Australia will essentially be faced with the same issue: They would have built their user base because user search engine demand is driven by content on the internet, one of the main purposes of a search engine is to provide links to that content, and this law exposes any search that links to content to claims on their revenue.
Of course, small sites need not worry, we hope, unless people can use the law to launch frivolous lawsuits and nuisance claims, but whoever would replace Google (even DDG) would face the same claims from news providers.
The reality is, the news business has been disrupted by the internet. They used to face competition only from a few local or regional competitors, but now the internet puts them into competition with all news providers around the world at the touch of a button. There's no going back to the way things were.
In much the same way that music and tv got disrupted by Spotify and Netflix's models, the publishing world needs new business model, and trying to siphon off search engines I don't think is sustainable. They need a Spotify for News. And by that, I mean, content publicly discoverable, but paywalled behind a subscription service, that needs to be super low overhead.
A number of distributed mechanisms have been tried, by both Google, and others, at micropayments, but it seems to me that micropayment systems have largely failed for some reason.
Independent journalism has to be the future, and whoever provides a platform for that will win.
And it's also very fair, because search engines are, functionally and fundamentally, content scrapers. Everything they have and everything they offer is done by consuming the work of others.
I guarantee that if you make Google pay everyone they link to, they will charge everyone they link to that much + overhead, and everyone except weird hobby sites that don't care how many visitors they get will pay it. Google provides value to websites as well as consuming value from them.
IMHO, if you publish something on the web, and you don't have a paywall, and you don't block in robots.txt, and you don't have a LICENSE that covers use, people are free to link to your content. Otherwise, why even participate in the web when you don't want to be part of it (the linking).
If people start charging for links, you may as well pack up the open web.
If there was an federated free search engine, like bitcoin-like for search, these news publishers would still be in trouble, and they'd have no one go after, which suggests the problem is fundamentally, something with their business model.
Google has regularly defended deranking or banning competitors for allegedly scraping content without providing value as well.
This is pretty easy to understand and I don't think controversial. Scrape your site and transform some of the information to make a useful service? Yes. Scrape your whole site and just host its pages? No.
Maybe your site is a medical blog and over the years has written about pretty much every condition. If someone else were to scrape this, and make an interactive map of the human body, where if you click on a part, it lists links to the original blog, plus a pop-up summative snippet, very few people are going to scream "You did nothing! This guy spent years writing medical articles, and you come along and make a fancy interactive body as a way to linking to his articles, and now you're getting ad revenue and traffic!" Obviously, if lots of people are using this new interactive service, it's a value add.
But what if instead, I setup a site like WebMD, supposedly with expertly written medical content from the Web's best medical bloggers, but I just scrape all their articles, and host those pages on my own site, as if they had written the articles as contributors to my site.
And you don't think the latter should be downranked?
Do you think GPT-3 should somehow pay someone everytime it generates an answer? What if future search engines crawl the web and build giant transformer models which just answer questions by whole-sale authoring a new article from scratch, how do we compare that to a human being doing the same thing?
Scraping is how human beings learn and there's a big difference between wholesale piracy, and transformation.
From what I could gather from the article it's a really stupid ill-thought out law and damages the whole internet in Australia for the benefit of few news companies.
There's a major issue here because as a search company you could wake up one day to find that a single person has decided your revenue and expenditure has changed drastically. Even if you believe the spirit of this law is good, the way this is written is downright dangerous.
[0] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill...
In the meantime, Google is “experimenting” with leaving out Australian media entirely which on one hand is good (starving Murdoch of oxygen) but on the other hand is terrible (starving everyone of oxygen).
Google can just withdraw their business presence from Australia but continue to provide search.
If after that Australia wants to block Google like China that's on them.
If they served it out of Singapore or some other place in the region speeds would still be decent.
As for resources on such treaties, visit the OECD website and you'll be inundated with the model treaties that form the basis of the actual treaties between countries. (Some treaties involve many parties, most are between two nations.) Since you're not paying me, I will simply point out that under America's tax treaty with Australia, the Technical Explanation would note that providing services to another country's citizens is an activity covered by the treaty, and Australia's tax office has plenty of documentation saying the same.
Australia would be more than welcome to do the same.
(But hee hee, we secretly know their citizens would protest if they set up a national firewall.)
And a plethora of marketing businesses will go batshit on the government if they force Adwords out of Australia. Adwords is a huge part of the industry. We're going to see this sector struggle for a while if they need to re-adjust.
All financial transactions would take place outside Australia, Google wouldn't need a legal entity there.
On the other hand without looking at the actual law I remember when the Aussie prime minister said "the laws of mathematics are all well and good but in Australia the laws of Australia take precedence." When taking about backdoors for encryption that only the police could use.
A tough spot to be sure.
Apple meet Orange.
As a company owner you can wake up one day to find that your company is now listed as an official designated digital platform corporation in the Federal Register of Legislation[1] and your finances have completely changed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasurer_of_Australia
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.au/Browse/Results/ByRegDate/Legi...
"Although the Treasurer, in making the determination, must consider whether there is ‘a significant bargaining imbalance between Australian news providers and the group comprised of the corporation and all of its related bodies corporate’ the determination is not invalid for failure to consider this (s 52C(3))."
So there is only one factor they're required to consider for that portion, but they can choose to ignore it without apparent consequences. You can tell this was written specifically as a blatant money grab, something more legitimate would have factors beyond "because we say so" even if only to provide cover.
Let's be real Web search isn't that new or special anymore.
Before you cry that Google has the best results, the results are actually fed by data mining users. If we all jumped onto Bing tomorrow, after enough usage, it will have the same results as Google.
Amp and Chrome dominating the market is reason enough to ditch Google before it continues to abuse its monopoly like this.
As a supporter of a free and open Internet, I can't see how the logical conclusion of requiring websites to reimburse the other end of a hyperlink for the privilege of linking to them could possibly be a good thing.
As a user of the Internet in Australia, I am concerned about what the obvious sovereign risk of the Treasurer having this power to arbitrarily punish web companies does to the availibility of services to Australian users.
As a software developer in Australia (albeit one who hasn't worked directly in web tech to date), I am concerned about the damage this does to the tech industry, and subsequently my employability and income, in this country.
And most of all as a political citizen of Australia, I am deeply troubled by the idea of giving politicians the power of deciding which media organisations do/don't have the power to arbitrarily extort money out of FAANG as a significant revenue stream.
Yea, Google needs to be reigned in, but not like this, not with corrupt legislation handing free money to old established news organisations in an attempt to keep them afloat.
You do realise other search engines will likely have to comply (or leave the country) too, right?
What Google is afraid of is the precedent it sets for other countries to do the same and eat into their search revenue because it would dispel the myth that tech companies cannot be regulated, that's the real danger here.
This is not an accurate summary of the law's effects. Yes, that's part of what it says. But if they can't come to an agreement, Australia gets to set the price sharing amount. And declining to link to news content isn't allowed, so if it costs Google more than the news is worth, well then it's effectively just a tax that applies to only a single company.
This is like if I, the mayor, said, you must negotiate with this man to rent some rooms of your house. If he doesn't like the price you give, I'll decide what it is. No, you can't choose not to rent rooms to him.
"But iterated games sometimes require a strategy that deviates from apparent first-level rationality, where you let yourself consider lose-lose options in order to influence an opponent's behavior."
"Or, in layman's terms, sometimes you have to be a crazy bastard so people won't walk all over you."
I don't agree generally with a lot of Googles business practices but I feel like this is just a desperate attempt to increase profits by the Murdoch media in Australia.
As has been said elsewhere, if news sites don't want their content to be indexed/smart-carded by Google they can set that in their page headers and robots.txt
The problem is they want to have their cake and eat it too, they want all the traffic passed through Google but they also want to effectively be paid for the users that never visit their site (Whether or not they ever would have).
Disclaimer: Am Australian
For the purposes of this Part, a service makes content available if: (a)the content is reproduced on the service, or is otherwise placed on the service; or (b)a link to the content is provided on the service; or (c)an extract of the content is provided on the service.
I think most of us would agree that a search engine being charged for providing links (b) is pretty dumb.
But with the rise of content embeds and republishing (a/c), it's a completely different scenario when Facebook is sucking up your content for the benefit of their users.
So while I feel this is a raw deal for search engines, it is about time that social media platforms paid their dues.
Are they going to withdraw from Saudi, from Turkey, any other place that imposes their own laws?
If they do, I’d love to see Bing and the Duck go in and earn their keep.
Honestly, seeing Twitter, Amazon and now Google do things because it makes them “mad” to me shows they have too much power. I hope the EU puts their foot down and reigns them in.
On the other hand, news orgs can’t have it both ways. Google does not owe them money to index them.
Why can’t Google just not index news sites but provide other services?
Perhaps their lawyers have a problem with the principle or some ambiguity around it, maybe concerned that search engines could end up retrospectively being found to owe significant money to sites they didn't anticipate, perhaps very many sites they didn't anticipate?
I'm hardly a fan of the way big tech firms, Google included, sometimes act, and I do think freeloading based on others' content is a real problem that needs addressing. However, from the legal wording I've seen quoted so far this potential law appears to require a site like Google to pay up merely for linking to content hosted elsewhere, the most basic element of the WWW. If a news site doesn't want people linking to it, maybe the WWW isn't the medium it should use to publish its material?
And when the search engine says "Sorry, that's not a good business case for us, we won't be operating in your country", that is considered a "threat"?
Look, companies want to make money. If you don't allow them to make money, they won't operate. Is it that hard to understand?
Now it's just going to be buried.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/google-agrees-to...
People will just go to abc.net.au or smh.com.au or news.com.au directly, if that is not their habit already.
To be fair, Big Media have been doing something not unlike that for generations, as have big businesses in numerous other industries through various forms of lobbying, regulatory capture and revolving door politics. It's not as if Big Tech getting in on the act is a unique or original move. Not that this necessarily makes it any better, of course.
One interesting potential difference this time is that in a very direct way, Google are only strong enough to make this strategy work if they have a lot of popular support for their services continuing to operate, which is another way of saying that their services are providing a significant public benefit and possibly they have a point. If their services aren't all that and competitors can readily step in to provide a similar value to society, as various comments here have already suggested, then this strategy by Google is doomed to fail and will also leave them in a considerably weaker position when it comes to playing poker over other regulation in the future.
Should the US be able to force Chinese companies to do what the US wants?
If google can make money, they will. If they can't, they won't. If they pull out of that market, maybe it's a good indicator of the potential benefit of starting such a company.
Search engines are absolutely a parasitic business, for the mere fact that they could not exist without the content they scrape, index, and serve to users. It would be permissible if Google didn't make a profit by doing these things, but they do. So--something needs to be rebalanced. Either search needs to be a public service, non-profit, or there needs to be a profit sharing or some new licensing scheme or law that the content owners are subject to.
If you don't want Google scraping your content, add a noindex directive or robots.txt to your site and Google won't scrape it or link to it.