Google Threatens to Remove Search in Australia as Spat Escalates | Hacker News Reader

Google Threatens to Remove Search in Australia as Spat Escalates

bloomberg.com

48 pointsmancerayder33 comments

> Google is behaving like a corporate bully, said Johan Lidberg, an associate professor at Melbourne’s Monash University who specializes in media and journalism.

I feel like the lawmakers are instead trying to bully Google into subsidizing an industry in need of a new business model.

Australia doesn't seem to be very friendly to tech companies with the introduction of the law a few years ago that makes any employee there potentially have to implement backdoors.

As opposed to countries where there are already government backdoors?

I suppose, although in those cases it seems to be the company collaborating with intelligence agencies rather than having one of their employees forced to go rogue.

An interesting debate:

- Democratically elected government of a sovereign country decides to regulate its market.

- An foreign entity is trying to blackmail the government to listen to non Australian entity how they should have their market set.

- And point of the writers here is that the Australian government governing its own country and market is wrong and hostile and ... and the Google has right to blackmail it?

Are you serious?

We just had the Chinese government telling us (essentially) to shut down free speech and eliminate the multi-party system.

Now it's the corporate world's turn to tell us what to do.

ahh hacker news and sinophobia

a classic duo

Australia has a right to tax Google.

Google has a right to decide the taxes are too high and withdraw from the market.

Neither is blackmailing the other. At worst, they're negotiating.

To remove some of the nonsense I've seen spread around.

It's not blackmail, Google merely stated that if they are unable to make revenue above the cost of implementing these new laws they will be forced to withdraw from Australia.

You cannot on the left hand say "You must do X (Paying news sites for linking to them)" but also in the right hand say "You cannot do Y (Removing news sites from linking)", that effectively makes this a tax that is passed directly to news company coffers.

They are also not willing to allow third parties to control the content and release timing of updates to their search algorithm, which seems reasonable.

In a free market, a company can choose to provide or not provide services based on whether they make money or not. If you require a search engine to pay for content it links to, it cannot make money. Google is correct in making the statement that it will need to exit Australia.

You may not like Google, and I don't either do to it's abuse of small business on its Ads/ AdWords product, but I don't think any search engine could operate under these rules.

Rupert Murdoch, and his extremely powerful company, have lobbied for special rules that harm democracy and free markets.

How is discussion blackmail?

Google is a private entity, they are able to make their choices.

Australia, and Murdoch are also able to enforce their views.

Let google go. If they do, someone else will come into the Australian market and if they work well with the new laws, it will be a new business model and moat to take on Goog.

If Google is required to pay publishers for the value they provide to Google, then those publishers should also be required to pay Google for the value they get from being ranked highly in search results.

Isn't it the case already? The first 3 results of some search terms (e.g. "mattress") already go to the highest bidders.

While any other business is more than happy to pay Google for the benefit of ranking high, the news industry never buy ads, and instead want to force Google to deliver the news to users and paying for the benefit.

Should they be able to deduct the incurred costs of SEO from this?

I believe Google is a corporate bully with its monopoly on search... However it’s easy to see that this sort of legislation allows arbitrary gate keeping of content from big tech where they (1) get to pick the publishers they want to pay, (2) pick the amount of money they want to pay them, (3) get PR headlines out of it showing how they’ve adopted these new “rules” Doesn’t simply won’t do what the legislators want it to do.

If government wants to limit Googles power over publishers, The correct way would be to limit their monopoly on search.

The proposed Australian rules specifically disallow this.

Google isn't allowed to simply not pay some news outlets. They must all be paid and treated equally.

Except if you're a small/independent news provider who doesn't make enough revenue.

Or if you're a wholesale (Newswire) provider.

Then you get nothing.

Some arbitrary percentage payout for a ridiculously small percentage of viewership is close to nothing. But hey at least they’re treated “equally”

If you don’t want visitors reading snippets on google, simply block google via robots.txt

Ditto for fb.

Forcing a company to buy services is ridiculous.

But i guess they have to do this because their alternative is a foreign tech tax, and subsidizing their local media

Remember, it may be easy for you, but 99.99% of population does not know how to do that or what robots.txt is.

Websites have been harvested for profit in similar way privacy was for the last 20 years. The content and privacy came as completely free resource for tech companies to exploit and, exploit they did making enormous wealth in the process. A parallel to oil exploitation comes to mind.

At one point we need to realize that this practice is not sustainable and there have to be consequences.

The core idea of the search engine we are working on is that websites that appear in search results should receive a share of the profits for our privilage to have them there in the first place (and make money off that fact). So not only we will pay for links, we will do so without them asking.

You dont need the visitors to know how to do it, only newspapers’ devs or any kind of tech. Someone must be responsible for maintaining their websites, and robots.txt is as simple as can be, even has plugins for cms and such.

Websites can opt out but most of those make their money by driving traffic off of search engines and social media and selling ads themselves.

Only the best of the best media sites would even make it online without traffic from aggregators and social media (i have been involved in local media so yes, that is from experience).

However, either case, media sites lose more than Google or fb gains if they delist, gands down.

Senator Bragg said it was impossible to assess its value to the local market.

“All we’ve got today is your threats and your blackmail,” he told Silva.

Blackmail! What is Senator Bragg hiding?

It's certainly an interesting choice of words. But I'm more partial to commending those standing up to blackmailers than scolding them for what they (may) have done. If blackmail really happened and it was not just a slip of the tongue.

I'm realizing that many people, including HN commenters, have no idea what blackmail means.

I looked it now up just to be sure and it seems the joke is on us. It's most often used about threats to reveal a secret. But it can be used for any threats.

Well, Google will never succumb to this pressure from the Aussie government. If it did, that'd be used as a precedent all around the world.

They've already caved on the same issue with the French government https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/google-agrees-to...

I suspect they think they'll have a better chance threatening the Australian government than French/EU ones

TFA:

> But the Mountain View, California-based company has adapted to similar requests in other countries without cutting off search. Google stopped showing news results from European publishers on search results for French users last year after local regulators urged it to pay for content, and then on Thursday the firm said it reached a deal to pay media publishers in the country.

Don't worry Google: our federal government is spineless and will surely find a way to water down the legislation without appearing to do so.

Ok can someone give me a tldr here? Does the law require google to index these sites, then display them, then pay for what the law is mandating that they do?

Does it apply to links or the summary versions?

TLDR - applies to transcluded content but also pure linking - applies only to businesses designated by the Treasurer - gives no opt-out (i.e. Google cannot just choose to not index those sites)

Don’t quote me on this, I don’t have the bill in front of me but I believe it’s broadly correct

Australia should have just said "there is a tax on search engines. We will use the money this tax raises to subsidize our media industry which is struggling".

Governments tax and subsidize things all the time. They're well within their rights to.

One can only hope

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