Australia Faces Prospect of Becoming Bing Nation as Google Plans Exit | Hacker News Reader

Australia Faces Prospect of Becoming Bing Nation as Google Plans Exit

vice.com

19 pointselsewhen14 comments

I wish the Liberal government wasn't so in bed with Murdoch so they wouldn't constantly fuck anything technical.

To play devil's advocate:

1. This may open the door to funding opportunities for independent media options beyond the News Corp / Fairfax (Channel 9) duopoly.

2. Extractive, US-owned corporations paying money to Australian companies is a net win.

3. Over time Google has changed the nature of its organic search offering to be less fair to site operators. Reducing screen real estate for organic results versus ads, harvesting search snippets for Q&A style data etc. Without outside intervention it could be difficult for operators to strike a better deal.

It was the ACCC who proposed the policy.

Question for any Microsofters here: what is the status of Bing at Microsoft? Clearly it still exists and is maintained, but I have trouble believing that it's a product that Microsoft is terribly invested in going forward.

Not a Microsofter, but note that Bing has like "most non-Google search traffic". It's the default on Windows computers, and a lot of other search engines like Yahoo and DuckDuckGo use their data as well. It runs ads, so it's probably profitable.

And it's probably really good, this story as an example, to be in second place, when the first place runner is doing illegal things, under investigation in a dozen countries or more, and likely to face major repercussions going forwards. Being number two means you're number one when the leader gets knocked out of the race.

Yea, I heard about this news and started trying out Bing and was overall satisfied with the results. Was only a bit of light testing for the type of stuff I normally google, but seemed to do the job.

Not saying I support this new law, I don't really have an opinion of it. But it does seem like losing Google won't utterly cripple the ability to use the internet which is comforting.

I believe it's heavily integrated with M365 e.g. if your org uses azure sharepoint thing and you're signed in to bing you'll get customised search results with links to internal resources

It is my understanding that Bing is everywhere inside Microsoft and that it a service that a lot of other service depends on heavily. Bing is absolutely a core service to Microsoft

What actually is the government proposing. Is it that linking to a news service should be paid for (which to me seems a little odd as the link is sending the news source business) or is it the embedding of actual news text on the google search page?

Didn't we have content aggregation arguments out some time back?

Here is the government's fact sheet on the policy: https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/draft-...

At first pass it seems a little odd that they are specifically naming Google and Facebook but not the "Media" that they are supposed to negotiate with. Sounds like the government is trying to avoid having every blog and website be caught up in needing to pay to provide the link.

As a disclaimer I work for Google but have no special insight so feel free to not take my word for it

My understanding is that the regulation covers 2 types of content:

One is web pages or apps that use "story panels" containing excerpts of articles, like you see in the Discover feed on Android, or when looking at articles from certain publishers in Google News. In some places (notably France), Google already pays publishers for this.

Google would also be required to pay when regular search results include links to Australian news websites (not sure if the payments would be based on views or click-throughs). Having to pay for linking to websites is a lot more unusual and probably not a precedent that Google wants to see (especially since the law wouldn't apply equally to all search engines)

The more people buy vpn subscriptions, the better we all are.

Especially if the VPN server is in Australia.

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