Google News Showcase Launches in Australia

we're already here. Google ranking/deranking makes or breaks your business. That's already reality especially for these news sites who live and die off of clicks for today's news.

In this case at least it requires google to pay them something.

Great launch.

That's because the threat to pull search from Australia was just bluff and bullshit.

Amazingly it worked - I've had a number of people come up to me in panic they would lose access to ad words (that was a business owner), their pictures, their contacts, and gmail. Turns out bluff and bullshit is all you need to make ScoMo from marketing (Australian's moniker for their current prime minister) do a 180. That's politics, I guess. To be fair, if though losing access to those Goole services was a real possibility I'd be in a panic too.

But it was never going to happen. As far as I know, the servers that handle all of those things aren't based in Australia now. All Google have to do is remove their legal presence out of reach of the Australian government. Unless the government resorted to some great firewall of china style thing, all of those things would continue to work, and the revenue streams they generated would be unaffected. The only change is no local people on the ground, no GST, and no paying the piddling amount of corporate tax they deign to give us.

> I wish they would pick a stance and clearly say what they mean.

Oh, they picked a stance long ago, and they haven't moved since. 6 months ago Google said they would pay for some news [0], before the draft code was first published. I don't think sharing revenue from a news.google.com.au or whatever it is going to be called now was ever a major issue for them.

Their stance is about a different line in the sand. The newspapers have asked their politician mates, the LNP, to pass a law to force Google to give them money from their search engine business.

Just how badly on the nose this is is not obvious because another piece of bullshit, this time finely finessed by ScoMo himself, is they've come up with some definition of a "digital platform" that somehow captures Google. They didn't. They can't make some general rule like "if you link to someone you have to pay them" - because it's farcical, capturing every web site out there. They can't claim Google primarily makes their ad revenue from newspaper links, because they are a tiny fraction of the results returned by most searches. They can't claim Google is stealing stuff because Google respects robots.txt so the newspapers can turn off Google search indexing at any time if they so wish, and they can't use copyright because the 1 or 2 sentences Google quotes are fair use. So in the draft legislation they don't devote a lot of words defining what a "digital platform" is and then leave the decision of which companies fit that definition to a Judge. In a fine act of obfuscation they do have lots of words defining a "digital platform" - but the companies who have to pay the newspapers are listed by name in a schedule that is at the sole discretion of the minister, and the legislation specifically bans legal challenges to his decision making all those words irrelevant. It is the most blatant exhibition of crony capitalism I've seen in a while.

Google has drawn a line in the sand at "you can force us to pay for links that you say in robots.txt we can index, and are publicly available for free to everyone else". That has not changed, and I'm guessing they would either stop indexing newspapers or remove their legal presence from Australia before they’d let the newspapers put their snouts into the search ad revenue stream. All they've done here is say "we will build a better site than news.google.com.au, dedicated to news, and share ad revenue that it attracts".

If you think this site will do any better than G+, then I've got a bridge to sell you. Rupert Murdock is not known for buying bridges, so if they government accepts this it will acceptance of total defeat from him. Sadly, for Rupert ScoMo from marketing is making conciliatory noises. I think it's finally dawned just how strong Google’s "we will just remove our legal presence" option made their position. Google does have a reasonable presence in Australia (maps.google.com is was an Australian company they purchased, and development is still done here), so moving would be a pain, but it would have stuff all effect on the one thing that really matters - their revenue from Australia. ScoMo is just waking up to the fact he's been played for a moron by Rupert, again, just as Trump did before him, and this offer is at most is a face saving fig from Google. I hope he's grateful they gave him one.

[0] https://www.news.com.au/technology/e5abf473f1091188f78d77589...

Sounds like it's only in Google News on mobile for now.

(No clue why that's buried in the middle of the article.)

But the biggest news is just that Australia called Google's bluff, and is going to pay up for the content they scrape.

But news has always been curated and algorithm-driven, it was just a human editor deciding whether or not certain stories ended up in this sunday's newspaper based on factors like 'do our readers want to see this', 'will this headline catch the eye of passersby at the news stand', etc. The only difference in the digital age is the access to all news from all sources at a moment's notice - so instead of having to pay to read the news from a single publication a day, you can curate your own viewership to be the most interesting articles from any newspapers for free. In practice, this means that every article, not just the front page headline, needs to now be optimized to sound shocking or interesting.

That could lead to a dominoes scenario where other countries realised they could get by too without the mighty Google.

Those of us that need Google for searching for weird code snippets and the like (though Google seems increasingly failing in the battle against SEO spam) could just use a US VPN. Most people would get by fine on DDG.

"AUSTRALIA’S MEDIA is more concentrated than in some countries that are under dictatorships, such as Turkey and Russia. The ownership and management of practically all of Australia’s print and television media, with exception to Network 10, have links to the Liberal Party. News Corp, chaired by Rupert Murdoch and majority-owned by the Murdoch family, owns around two-thirds of the print media and is a majority stakeholder in Foxtel and Sky News.

Nine Entertainment, which was established by the Liberal-linked Packer family and is chaired by former Liberal member Peter Costello, owns the Nine Network, about a third of Australia’s newspaper publications and subscription television service Stan. Seven West Media, which is majority-owned and chaired by Kerry Stokes, another Liberal supporter, owns Channel 7 and any major newspaper publications that are not owned by News Corp or the Nine Entertainment.

Ita Buttrose, another person with links to the Liberal Party, is chairperson of the ABC. Although most of Australia’s media is owned and run by Liberal supporters, there have been times when Australia’s media wasn't biased."

https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/t...

You can fault Google in a hundred other places, but this is 100% on Murdoch and the Australian gov for forcing Google into a corner where they could not display neutral results.

Instead I see unproductive and backward conversations saying that google should pay publishers when in fact google brings more value to publishers via clicks than publishers bring to google. This line of thinking is missing the primary implications in my opinion.