Could Google Really Leave Australia? | Hacker News Reader

Could Google Really Leave Australia?

bbc.com

36 pointspseudolus51 comments

This is really a fight over money between Rupert Murdoch's Fox/Newscorp Empire and Google.

A win-win situation for Australia would be for Google to withdraw from Australia and Rupert to not get any money from Google.

The article claims that the ABC would benefit from deals with Google, but wasn't the ABC (and SBS) expressly excluded from the law?

It's clear that it is a lobby vs lobby situation. Murdoch is a king maker. He will likely prevail. I am not as optimistic about a positive outcome for Australians.

I believe they were, due to them being publicly funded. Which is to say nothing of the fact that such public funding has been continuously stripped back under Liberal governments (while continuing to give investment to Foxtel, a private company owned by, guess who, old mate Rupert)

Does it matter if Rupert doesn't get money from Google? His news assets still have print versions, his channels still have media versions, and if Google exits, they'll just concede the entire Aus market to Bing/DDG. Sure the people won't like it, but the more Google actually goes through with its threat, the more evidence it will provide for an antitrust case back home.

I disagree, Google is not making a threat and is not abusing its market position. A search engine simply cannot exist if it is required to pay for links to content.

Rupert Murdoch and his corporations are incredibly damaging to Australia and to the USA. We should oppose his lobbying efforts everywhere we can.

I think Google is now no longer a good company, but it is not nearly as bad as Fox News or Comcast or other companies that truly abuse their market position.

The one area that Google does actually abuse is Google Ads, the auction system there is basically a scam against small business unfortunately.

A search engine can also simply post titles and links, without indexing content.

Google is much worse than Fox News. At least Fox News doesn't harvest my information when I browse CNN and target ads at me. Not to mention the stuff Google does while lobbying without our knowledge.

Google is 92% ads, so if it abuses that portion, it's abusing 92% of its business monopolistically.

I find it obnoxious that they didn't do this in reaction to the A&A Act.

There are perfectly good alternatives to google. Letting them go would not be such a bad thing.

People assume google is unique and irreplaceable. It’s not.

Wouldn't remaining search engines be subject to the new law?

I still can't see why google can't just remove Australian news sites from the index? It should be a very small list for Australia. They already do this for copyright claims.

They probably could, but at least at this point they're probably more concerned with discouraging other governments from trying to pass similar laws.

In my mind, following through on their threat is the worst thing Google could do. If they leave and Australia’s business and government suffer, other countries are going to make laws to ensure this doesn’t happen to them.

There's no law you can make to force a company to do business within your borders. Especially when they start operating at a net loss.

Google is backed into an impossible corner here, and pretty much must leave.

Ars Technica article suggested Australia's new laws also makes that illegal.

As an Australian, I think this is silly. Our current government really sucks with technological issues.

I agree. They declared legislation superior to mathematics. Crazy.

No, not just current government. Both major parties fully supported metadata retention and the encryption ban. This is not a partisan problem.

Not an Australian, but I don't find it entirely silly. Google delisting Australian news would be the inevitable outcome. It's worth almost nothing to them.

They're evening out the playing field. Google can shrug off Australian news, but they're going to have to think carefully about whether they're willing to turn off Search for a first world country.

One loophole I'm very curious about is Google creating their own news organization. Not even a news organization, really just a news licenser and republisher. They have access to everyone's Google searches. I would imagine they're capable of creating a piece of software that calculates how much they're paying to news organizations for what keyword searches, then automatically purchasing an article about that from another publisher that scores better for those keywords (putting them above the other publishers in the searches) and publishing it. Bonus points if they don't even pay for it, they have a human write an article summarizing the other articles, and run it through their scoring pipeline so the writer can tweak it until their SEO score is better than the other articles.

Then Australian news will really be screwed. Little money from Google, and even fewer clicks than they got before.

The one thing I do think was silly is making it adversarial. If you want news agencies to make more money, making Google pay to send them traffic is a bad way to go about that. They should have done something like introducing a tax on Google, and then refunding part of the tax when Google sends people to an Australian news site instead of a foreign one.

You can’t seriously call a country where encryption is illegal a first world country.

First world just means USA aligned capitalist country.

It means different things to different people.

Sure, and I can think up means down, but but when trying to communicate a point or giving directions, people should be aware of what the common understanding is

In this case, the post is just noise, without meaning. Im not sure what point they were trying to make beyond "I don't like this thing", even substituting some of the other definitions.

IF it made sense, perhaps you can clarify.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia are both west-aligned and are not first-world to anyone in the first-world.

Case and point, I don’t even know what you are trying to say. What definition are you using? Rich? Western? White? Developed?

This reply thread telling me I'm wrong is actually telling me I'm right.

Nah the law has provisions that penalise delisting news.

That's not an option for them.

They actually have to exit the market to wriggle out of a forced arbitration deal or stare down the government.

As a non-Australian, I somehow have this impression that all your recent governments sucked, and not just with the tech issues.

The article on Ars suggests that the new law would not allow them to delist one provider and allow another. This is not law yet, this is part of the proposal. I am still looking for some evidence that they are not allowed to delist all news sources. This may be my lack of understanding the legalese. There is maybe some 'poison pill' in just delisting news and they are going the nuclear option in Australia.

Google has to push back to stop this happening in other countries. In any case, they can negotiate with price on SERP results ads and on the ads they no doubt place on Murdochs sites. Things will balance out if it does go ahead.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Google leave briefly to fully illustrate their power in the marketplace - I doubt it's an empty threat. If I ran a AU based business that's dependent on Google I'd be emergency planning right now.

I'm curious to see what would happen in this case. Would DuckDuckGo or Bing get a boost that Google? Would Google struggle to recover that market share when it inevitably returned? Would public perception of Google take a dip, or would Australians respect someone standing up to the Rupert Murdoch press?

My guess is Australians would continue to use a non localised version of Google. Bing and by extension DDG is awful for Australian results in my experience.

Unless they block all Australian IPs as well. I don't know about widespread VPN adoption just to have access to Google.

Or they could just drop the News tab and be done with it.

One one hand we see some politicians puffing their chest and simply waving goodbye at Google.

On the other, I wonder what's the net brain flow coming in and out of Australia, and how that attitude regarding tech affects it.

My suspicion would be that more tech workers leave Australia for the US than move there, and if the government were to combine kicking Google out with domestic industry programs it could have a positive effect on retaining talent.

I’m an Australian that would be delighted to work in public service on ambitious projects.

My confidence in the government being able to make it work is essentially zero. It’ll take decades to fix what’s broken in Australia’s public IT sector, and with the Liberal party in power we ain’t starting today. Just having Scott Morrison read The Entrepreneurial State would be a start, but I’m not convinced that the man actually reads books.

Anecdotally most of my developer friends have moved to the US. I prefer Brisbane’s lifestyle so I’m still here.

I’m curious. What is Brisbane’s lifestyle like? Would love to visit.

For a lot of folks reading HN, who are trying to excise Google from their lives, if they were in Australia, this would be a dream come true. How do you make Google go away? Force them to pay.

If not being able to use other people’s content for free breaks their business model then maybe the business model is indeed a problem.

Showing a link to a site is "using their content"? What's really ridiculous is that this law would not allow them to not show a link to Australian news sites that are demanding payment either. The law is literally forcing Google to "use their content" (as you call it) and forcing them to pay for it.

>Showing a link to a site is "using their content"?

Google does way more than just "showing a link".

The top part of search results is basically google ads and content google scraped off other sites.

In many cases you can't even SEE a single bonafide link without scrolling below the fold.

Featured snippets - scraped content

Side bar - scraped content

"People also asked" - scraped content

Please leave, we’d love it

Like you loved GM leaving?

GM as in General Motors? Is there some context here I am not aware of?

GM closed their Australian factory a few years ago (Holden), and recently stopped selling cars here entirely.

Australia used to have tariff barriers to support local car manufacturers. Ford, GM, Chrysler/Mitsubishi set up. From that we got a local industry and poor quality, expensive cars. Tariff barriers were removed, GM shut down local production. Is that a good thing now Toyotas are cheaper? Opinions vary. Were the jobs working for GM that were lost made up elsewhere as s result of the end of the tariffs? You guessed it, opinions vary.

Google don't pay meaningful tax in Australia so it's hard to like them here.

Let me try again: Like you loved Altium leaving? I didnt mention Toyota because it might seem like a win in some peoples eyes (invaders retreating). Yay for cheaper cars you cant afford because your manufacturing job was moved to Thailand due to half assed half-free trade deals. Sooner or later you will either work in a mine, or in service industry feeding/taking care for the miners.

https://theconversation.com/the-curse-of-the-resources-boom-...

GM cost Australia to stay. Australia is is better off overall without GM.

Australia is not a singular entity. Are Australians who lost jobs better off now?

Reductio ad absurdum Australia would flourish with no people in it whatsoever, just automated resource extraction operations by Rio Tinto strip mining whole continent to the benefit of few stock holders.

Back in the 80s or 90s, one of the Labor Industrial politicians concluded that it would be cheaper to give every GM and Ford worker a million dollars payoff than to continue to heavily subsidise both Ford and GM car manufacturing in Australia. And then to remove all tariffs on imported cars from overseas, giving better, cheaper cars for Australians.

This has finally been done. As for those Australian workers who lost jobs to overseas manufacturing, it's pretty much the same as all those workers in other developed countries whose jobs have been outsourced.

Please also leave all other countries I do business with. :)

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