Australia’s Proposed “Fox News Tax”

France is doing the same thing and Google is fine with it.

It's about the detail that Google is required to share all algorithm changes with news co's four weeks in advance of them. This massively ties their hands and would require the AU news to effectively use an entirely different stack of logic and rules to display news articles...which are worth basically nothing to google because they have to pay handsomely for it. Also very little of the money goes to smaller orgs and there are incredibly nonsensical rules around what content qualifies you for payment.

Oh and be aware of a dark detail here: The reporting on this is biased in nature because it directly aligns with the ability for increased money for the reporter reporting. This is why they are ignoring the reason why Google is actually leaving. Kinda like the McDonalds hot coffee thing, it's a whitewash over the truth. (Not that google is the good guy either, part of their game here is based on scaring other governments to not do this.)

Is it? Or have they just realised they may have just stopped the business model that has kept search engines free?

Even if you think the business model survives, how is this even close to chilling? So you get competitors in its place. How does that hurt democracy?

What hurts democracy is Media companies lobbying for laws that suit only them. Giving them money for their content won't make them produce actual news.

If they want to be paid extra for listing, then that should make them rank lower. That's how business works - their news is more costly, and therefore of lower value. This law smacks of protectionism.

What do you call a competition where you want both sides to somehow lose?

I’m pretty sure that Google tweaks their algorithm more than 13 times a year.

This is what makes the deal inacceptable to Google.

On the money front, they just accepted to finance news sites in France. As long as they make more money than they lose, they won’t leave.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/21/google-inks-agreement-in-f...

> There’s one big problem with that hypothesis. If that was the case, then surely the Government would have ensured that funding for media companies would have included the most trusted news brand in Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Company?

> And yet, they excluded it.

This is the first of many articles on this subject I've seen on HN that has mentioned this detail.

The short version is that the whole “google and facebook stole news and profit off it” narrative is false. But because the media has an immense conflict of interest in reporting on itself, they spread this narrative.

Have a look at the chart in the medium article. Did circulation fall when google or facebook were founded or became popular? Nope, the decline started in the late 1980s.

What about relative mindshare per capita? Turns out newspaper circulation per capita has been in a steady decline since 1950! See this chart: https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1316847491808219138...

You can’t even spot google and Facebook or the internet in the circulation per capita chart. It’s just a steady downwards decline.

What role do facebook and google play for media today? They send them traffic. So much so that newspapers complained mightily when google news pulled out of spain and france. They need the traffic! Meanwhile news is not how google makes its money.

Michael Geist did an analysis of how newspapers are shared on social media. It turns out the bulk of the shares were from the newspapers’ own page: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2020/10/how-can-linking-to-an-ar...

It is perfectly valid to dislike Google or dislike Facebook. But on this issue too many otherwise reasonable people fall for the media’s line that it is the media that supports social media giants. This just isn’t so and none of the data support it. Indeed for social media networks arguably Instagram, Snapchat and Tiktok are successful precisely because they are set up not to have news and instead they’re just fun to use.

A functioning press is vital for society. But as Thompson says if we want to support it why not subsidize it directly? It is lunacy to pretend that the value exchange us from news to social media rather than the reverse.

That Newscorp is the beneficiary in Australia is additional spice to the story but this issue is even broader than that.

There are plenty of reasons to tax and regulate Google and Facebook and disrupt their respective monopolies, but the proposed legislation would have far reaching consequences for the Internet and set a poor precedent.

What happens to the likes of DuckDuckGo and any future new entrants?

It also highlights the fact that we need a better model of paying for content. Advertising is just unbearable, maintaining several subscriptions is a pain. A Spotify model would work better for news sites.

The article is spot on for highlighting the transfer of revenue from Google/Facebook to News Corp without anyone else benefiting.

Fantastic, a win win situation for everyone's least favourite company. And the protagonists are shit as well.

Quick update, it's also very clear why ABC was left out from Wikipedia "The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is Australia's national broadcaster, founded in 1929. It is principally funded by the direct grants from the Australian government and is administered by a board appointed by the government of the day"

We have been building a community-to-publisher micropayment model. You can read about the economics of it here: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#ECONOMICS

And furthermore, all these projects should start adopting the Web Monetization stardard, based on Interledger Protocol. Coil is a company started by Stefan Thomas (former CTO of Ripple) to effect micropayments on the Web. They teamed up with Mozilla to make this a standard. We are participating to implement it in all our open source community servers:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/03/web-monetization-coil-and-...