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Comment by nness | Hacker News Reader

If we ever needed any proof that Australia's Liberal (conservative) party was a puppet for News Corp, its this law.

Pretty much this. Although Rupert Murdoch is a worldwide media mafioso, his home territory is Australia and he owns the vast majority of print media here - this proposed action is in his favour and his only. It even by design excludes public broadcasters like ABC and SBS.

Can you explain?

News corp, headed Rupert Murdoch, owns a lot of media in Australia. Most of this media is abjectly shithouse but heavily consumed by people aged 60+. Murdoch wields undue political power because of this, which induces elected politicians to fawn over him. They gave him the order of Australia the other week for example, which seems nonsensical to many actual Australian citizens, to whom he appears to be a rich prick sabotaging the national conversation.

The frankly embarrassing attempt to siphon money from Google into Murdoch’s pockets is simply the current conservative government ensuring they get excellent media coverage at the next election.

If I have to use a VPN to get decent search results because of this nonsense I will NOT be pleased.

'If I have to use a VPN to get decent search results because of this nonsense I will NOT be pleased.'

Good news then because you can use Duck Duck Go and get reasonable results without being stalked around the internet or run the risk of your parents clicking a scam ad because 'it has 5 gold stars beneath it'.

Duck Duck Go uses Bing (and Yahoo, lol) to complete all searches so he's really right back where he started (albeit Microsoft isn't tracking him).

Have tried DDG before but wasn't that impressed. Will give it another look.

Murdoch is 90yo this year. I find it hard to believe that he wants to line his pockets. He has more money than he can ever spend.

Google is a worldwide monopoly. No one has any chance of negotiating with them. Even a country as it turns out without them threatening complete pull out.

I see this as strong leadership standing up to monopolies.

I would prefer the free market to sort it out honestly but what chance does anyone have against them.

As somebody who dislikes both the established old media firms of Murdoch & Co, but despises the parasitic Tech surveillance capitalism even more, I welcome this (regressive) attitude. Europeans are fighting for similar reasons which is loss of control of their own media and a takeover by US propaganda and norms by companies who have failed to pay their taxes again and again.

imo it doesn't matter that many of these local outlets are backward, racist and populist rags (never criticizing the Australian concentration camps, or failure of capturing the idiocy of the AAbill, or whatever justifies being outraged about etc), the big guys (FB/Google) are expert in doing the same thing but at scale and with better PR (+ they can do so without paying their taxes).

As long as it hurts BigTech it's the right move no matter what "appears" right or wrong. These firms and their management are parasites and they need to be treated as such until they a) pay their taxes and b) respect local laws.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detenti...

Re: takeover by US firms, note that while Murdoch was born Australian he gave up Australian in favor of US citizenship... precisely because it would have been illegal to own such a stake in US media firms as a non- or dual-citizen.

We would also like the Murdoch media and/or tech giants to pay tax in Australia, yes, but neither do at the moment.

Why does Australia allows such a large percentage of it's medias to be owned by a foreigner?

because 'the foreigner' controls the media. it's a race condition.

'Australian concentration camps'?

I assume they're referring to offshore detention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru_Regional_Processing_Cent...

> Europeans are fighting for similar reasons [...] by companies who have failed to pay their taxes again and again.

I get that it's trendy right now for elected non-technical bureaucrats to whine against tech giants. But if they are really avoiding taxes why not simply... charge them for that? Hint: They can't because all the taxation schemes used by these companies are legal. EU bureaucrats could simply write a tax code that makes them illegal but they won't!

All the whining also distracts peoples from asking themselves why European policies failed to grow a healthy growing tech ecosystem like in the US.

The fact they threaten to pull out because they are going to make a small decrease in profits speaks volumes of their bullying tactics. It’s clearly a case of: we don’t want to set a precedent in other countries.

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