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Seems like a lose lose situation for Google to me.

If the Aussies call their bluff, then 90% of the population will switch to Bing/ddg and will be fine.

More discerning Aussie searchers - like people googling for why their spring boot app won't work behind an nginx proxy - will just use a vpn to get to Google US - and they'll be fine too.

Google's dam will be broken open and the emperor's clothes will be left a little raggedy.

There's more at stake here for Google than Australia, and Aussies play hard and ruthless at the best of times (can confirm, am kiwi).

What if they take it further and also pull other google products like gmail, chrome, maps? That would cause some serious trouble.

That would likely be an antitrust suit waiting to happen

It's just a hypothetical I don't think it will come to it, but wondering why that would that lead to antitrust case? My knowledge of law is non-existent. I thought antitrust suits are because of getting into a monopoly position. Are you arguing that such an action would leave them open to claims of monopoly? Forfeiting services might be seen as a form of abuse, but isn't it sort of opposite of an antitrust by forfeiting your monopoly / strong market position?

You're leveraging your dominance in some sectors in order to gain advantage in another sector. That's what they got Microsoft for. Also can't imagine countries bowing down to these kinds of tactics anyway.

Deciding that it's no longer worthwhile to provide services to everyone in a country is not leveraging your dominance. It's giving up. They can't force Google to operate in Australia.

There are more countries in the world that believe the people should be in charge not venture capital.

Europe would close ranks pretty much immediately. As would New Zealand. Not so sure about UK though, but that's not a surprise to anyone, is it?

That's a terrible option for Google, because it's a clear statement that they see themselves as above national governments.

The large tech companies have been doing everything in their PR power for the last 30 years to pretend we aren't in the opening decades of a cyberpunk future.

Why break the kayfabe now, when they have the most to lose, and before their dominance is generationally cemented?

Won't the same regulations then apply to whatever search engine fills the gap though?

Not as yet. The law will apply to Facebook and Google, at least initially. A rational implementation would set a bar for market share or market capitalization before the laws kicked in.

> As I see it, part of the problem is that Google no longer simply provides links to the content, it also provides substantial excerpts.

If the publishers were happy to be shown without a snippet, they could simply add a `nosnippet` meta tag or http header.

It's amazing how much robots.txt, nosnippet, and noindex are ignored in the reporting and comments about this topic. The controls are already there for Google to do whatever the news outlets want.

The anti-Google argument in this case should be along the lines that they force the news organizations into a prisoner's dilemma. They might be better off if none showed snippets but as long as some are they are better off showing them.

> whatever the news outlets want

They want to be shown in a prominent position on the search and be paid for the privilege. No possible change in result presentation will be satisfactory.

In this case though, Google is doing something that’s very useful for consumers. I hate having to click through to websites that might be 90% advertisements.

Indeed. Why should I have to load a ten megabyte web page to access 500 bytes of text information?

I think a more fitting question is why should google showcase the ten megabyte page so far up the results. Perhaps because those ads that cause the bloat are likely served by them.

Because that 500 bytes of text have cost the publisher quite a lot to be written, and the other ten megabytes of ads and tracking code account for that. I hate advertisments as much as the next guy, but it's a little astonishing to me how people expect journalism to be free. Papers have to monetize their content somehow, otherwise they'd be unable to provide it.

So nationalize it! Isn’t that the HN solution to everything? ;)

You jest, but doesn't just about every country have a government-owned/government-funded news producing organisation? The ABC, the BBC, the CBC, the ARD, PBS etc. etc.

Many times that text was written by a random commenter though, and commenters are almost never paid.

These publishers pay very little for the content to be written. Vast majority these days is written by a low paid writer just out of college, not even a living wage. Real journalists have been let go. Newsrooms are mostly a depressing place to work these days, compared to 20 years ago.

Well, content production has a price.

I hate having to pay my groceries, should I stole it instead?

The root problem here being, again, that advertising-based business model is allowed to exist in the first place.

Are you seriously advocating banning advertising?

Not all, but most of it. Ideally anything that isn't "pull" and opt-in from the customer POV.

I summarized my justification here: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.

Most of the stuff in there doesn't even apply to Google. I think Google is just about the most "pull only" advertisement company I can name of the top of my head. Certainly compared to local companies here they're saints.

Also: you don't consider the need for new companies to get initial attraction for a new (or better/different version of X) product. How would you have that happen without advertising?

Google ads aren't really pull - they insert themselves into search query. You didn't ask for these ads to be there.

(A simple switch saying "include ads relevant to the query" would change this to "pull" mode in my books, as long as I could enable or disable it permanently for my session/account.)

Still, in context of this discussion, I meant to focus on the websites whose content Google reproduces in search results. These sites are the players that opted for an ad-funded business model, which is the source of this whole kerfuffle. Having an answer to my question being provided directly in response to query is a feature and great UX for me as a user. Websites want to restrict this not because they want to offer me value, but because they want to monetize my eyeballs. Sites with alternative business models wouldn't have a problem with Google reproducing content, and perhaps could reach an agreement in which they feed Google content on purpose, in exchange for some payment. Less websites and more data sources would be a good thing.

> Also: you don't consider the need for new companies to get initial attraction for a new (or better/different version of X) product. How would you have that happen without advertising?

Perhaps I need to update my article with some thoughts on that. The TL;DR: of my position on this topic is: if everyone shouts through megaphones at everyone else, you need your own megaphone to be heard. Take away everyone's megaphones, and maybe we can all have an actual conversation.

> (A simple switch saying "include ads relevant to the query" would change this to "pull" mode in my books, as long as I could enable or disable it permanently for my session/account.)

I must say, occasionally I do actually use an ad in Google search. They can be useful. Not that often, sure, but still. Not zero. They have something to do with what I'm trying to use Google for.

They're not random attention whore ads like, say, newspaper sites have. No big, moving, brightly colored "CONTEST! PARTICIPATE!" ad, none for getting a fitness subscription and no attempt to sell me wine.

But you're right that they aren't "pull" in an absolute sense. I guess I still think they were closer to "pull" ads than pretty much any other website I use. And if the whole web would do ads Google style, I'd be very happy and consider that a big improvement.

I agree with that entirely, but they are still using someone else's material to provide the service they are providing. As such they are using, without paying, someone else's work.

The service they provide may be very good, indeed, it is very good, but should they not pay for the materials on which it's based?

Publishing excerpts is a perfectly legal use of other people's copyright and does not require any sort of compensation (attribution is the only thing required and Google correctly provides that)

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-rule-copyri...

Basing one's entire business on quoting snippets from other people's work, wholesale, seems one of these cases that might be legal, but leaves a really bad taste in the mouth.

Is it legal? Maybe. Should it be legal? Is it ethical? Is it good for society? These are questions that people should ask.

Are you saying that Google shouldn't pay for the works they are quoting?

This action by the Australian Government seems to be based on the idea that what Google is doing is unfair, and so the law should be changed. Google is fighting against it because they say it's legal, and it shouldn't matter that they make a lot of money from it.

Copyright as a concept seems to be fair game on HN for many reasons. Maybe this is another place where it should be reformed. Maybe the amount taken from a single work is not the issue. Maybe what should be an infringement of copyright is having a "work" that is primarily taken from other works, even if only in small pieces.

I have no skin in this game, I have no axe to grind, but I do feel that the situation is unbalanced, unfair, possibly unethical, and needs to be reviewed and possibly changed.

I'm no Oracle ... I don't know what the right answer might be.

> This action by the Australian Government seems to be based on the idea that what Google is doing is unfair, and so the law should be changed. Google is fighting against it because they say it's legal, and it shouldn't matter that they make a lot of money from it.

It is not really the "Australian government" it is Rupert Murdoch, a billionaire, who controls the evening news and with that, elections. It is so blatant that the party that will need to vote this into law is actually divided on this issue. Think of it: the majority party that backs the government, their representatives, are considering this too blatant corruption to follow ranks. They are famous for forming a single front on everything by the way, which I guess is the point of forming a party, but this party is certainly more united than the others.

Rupert Murdoch even had the gall to exclude any news organisation he didn't own from these payments, most famously ABC, and of course he does also own several social media companies, who unlike Facebook, are not getting hit.

> Maybe the amount taken from a single work is not the issue. Maybe what should be an infringement of copyright is having a "work" that is primarily taken from other works, even if only in small pieces.

You're saying creating an index of material from multiple sources should be prohibited or subject to paying money to everyone included in the index?

The real reason news media are doing so bad is that people just don't care about news, never mind local news, like they did at this point almost 100 years ago. Combined with global news sources like the BBC far outstripping most "popular" (except not so much anymore) news in quality. Additionally, the BBC covers Australia pretty well. This is not just visible in website visits, otherwise measured views to the evening news, for example, have plummeted even deeper.

I would also worry, if I was Mr. Murdoch that if this legislation goes through, Google, Facebook, Youtube, ... all become direct enemies of news organisations. It won't be about competing for views anymore, Facebook and Youtube, Amazon and Twitter will be banding together to deny views to news organisations even where it damages their own views, their own bottom line. I have very little doubt who will win that contest.

Furthermore, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter have an incredibly privileged position when it comes to reporting local events, they could easily outperform any news media with machine learning because of the data being uploaded through them. They could stop having any links to the outside world at all.

Then Google should hire journalists to write it.

Those Silicon Valley boys, always trying to make money on the labour of others. Will they ever come up with a business plan that is not at heart slavery, theft or extortion?

Ten years ago Google News was excellent because it was easy to read multiple perspectives on a story by clicking multiple articles. I ended up visiting more news sites than I would have otherwise simply to get a better picture.

Nowadays it's much harder to get that comparison, and I avoid certain sites because I know they're paywalled, or because they present information in video form, which IMO is somewhat reader-hostile (you can't skim a video). So to the extent that your guess is correct, it is something that the news sites have brought upon themselves.

Did they bring it on themselves? Or where they forced to adapt to the loss of revenue? As you say it's harder to skim content behind a paywall or in a video, it's also harder to scrape it.

For every user like you that visited more sites because of Google News, there are likely plenty more who stopped visiting any sites because what Google News surfaced was all they felt they needed.