Australia to introduce Google, Facebook legislation to parliament next week
reuters.com
reuters.com
They spent multiple days inserting unremovable yellow banners on top of every search results page for every Australian that directed everyone to YouTube. Their spokesperson spoke to users like they were kindergarten children; their literal argument was that the legislation would be "like if you had to pay to tell your friends about a new coffee shop"[1].
They also started running "tests" where they would silently blackhole Australian news sites for a subset of users. They simply pretended that ABC.net.au didn't exist, even though 90% of the content on that site is not news.
I don't know what their PR team were thinking, but they've successfully demonstrated that they both have too much power and neither respect nor care about their end users.
This is the fundamental problem with Google, period.
On a tangential note, honest question to people here. If Microsoft was fined for bundling the Internet Explorer browser along with Windows in 1997, why is it that I can't remove Chrome from Android or Safari from iOS or Edge from Windows today? I'm largely stranger to US antitrust laws.
Still doesn't explain why Edge is bundled with Windows and why I can't uninstall it from my PC without going to the system files.
Microsoft didn't lose the antitrust case. It was overturned on appeal, remanded to a lower court to try again, and then the government settled out of court.
From the Wikipedia description of the settlement: "the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future".
What's more "Microsoft’s obligations under the settlement, as originally drafted, expired on November 12, 2007."
Given all of that why wouldn't Edge be bundled?
Theoretically, anticipating an antitrust case might lead you to be equally cautious, in roughly the same way, as having recently gotten an antitrust case.
Though things that "demonstrated that they ... have too much power" sound like some of the worst things you could do if you were anticipating an antitrust case.
Google and other big IT corpos seem to be operating under the assumption that government action is harmless. At most they get a moderate fine, which they can delay in courts for years, and then keep operating with minor alterations.
This won't change until there is actual legislation or they are threatened with being broken.
Having a browser engine in an OS makes sense from a third party developer point of view - if I want my app to run on all windows/Mac/iOS/android/whatever systems without bundling WebKit, having a browser libs guaranteed to be on $target is really helpful.
Android/iOS is a different beast, as they both have decent shares of the market; if you don't like Safari being bundled with iOS you can always buy an Android phone. That seems to be the reasoning behind it anyway.
Mind you, Windows has a smaller market share of the personal computing market today, compared to when the anti-trust cases were settled. I suspect that with Apple's currently higher market share and the fact that browsers are available on phones, pads and other devices, those settlements would have ended up differently.
Create a competitor. Barriers to entry? Figure out how to dismantle or deal with those barriers. Too lazy or don't know/understand how and just want legislation, control, towards tyrannical systems - then yeah, lobby your government to stifle innovation; most governments already stifle innovation - patents arguably being the largest problem here, in bed with the legal-lawyer industrial complex.
This learned helplessness that society feels trapped in really is a problem; thanks to Eric Weinstein for adding that lens as a tool to understand current conversations through as well.
Use DuckDuckGo search or other, gift them money so they can improve their search - or fund another startup who's working on the problem etc. Plenty of options.
Edit to add: I see at least 2 people have continued to choose the lazy option.
I’m not sure that’s a strategy open to many people. Using laws created by democratic processes to reduce power of a Single corp seems more viable.
Winning an election requires the support of exceptional people.
Don't like End of Universe? Create your own big bang.
What do you mean it's impossible? Stop this learned helplessness.
They could then explain how their content uses excerpts of copyrighted material to direct the curious to the source.
It should have then asked for legislation on what constitutes fair use in this context.
If the government insisted on fees, then they should have asked them why news businesses are more worthy of those fees than individuals.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/11/26/coalition-news-corp-fun...
REA still makes up about 80% of news corps value.
When they talk about news being a bad loss-making business, they're talking about the newspapers that are subsidised by their online revenue and used to control politics in three major large democracies (yes, three - I count Australia!)
Five eyes my foot.
As you have noted, three of them appear to be completely blind. If they cannot protect us from this, then what are they there for?
This would probably be effective in America: "Trump speaks at level of 8-year-old, new analysis finds" [0]
[0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-asia/australia/n...
Inference almost feels like too big a word there. Anti-spam is fundamental to what search algos do.
The point of the link is google says this:
>“ While we recognise that the Government has made tweaks to this provision, it’s still not feasible for Google or consistent with our ability to offer quality services. We make thousands of algorithm updates every year, so providing 14 days’ notice of any significant changes to algorithms or “internal practices” in the way the Code prescribes just isn’t workable. This provision also continues to put every other business that relies on Google Search at a disadvantage, all to benefit one group of businesses—news publishers.”
They’d prefer not to say “we’d be overrun with spam if we made this change” but it’s part of why it would be unworkable. The tweaks google makes are part of the cat and mouse game with spammers and gamers.
I suspect that Google are not claiming this law would interfere with their anti-spam efforts, simply because it wouldn't - they can't justify it.
If that was a real concern, why wouldn't they mention it, for example in this lengthy blog post? It's a good public defence for them.
The fact that they don't say it, means that I infer the opposite.
The closer analogy is stock trading. Prices move on news. If you have advance knowledge of news, you’re rich. If you learn, for example, that google will soon start favouring links from aged domains, then you buy as many aged domains as you can.
If you learn that google will devalue links from aged domains, then you have two weeks to rid your network of such links.
And if you are a spammer who gets this information from australian news insiders, then you can beat your competition by moving faster.
When the algo changes are released to everyone at once, it’s like how stock markets function: everyone learns the same thing at the same time.
As for why they don’t mention it, perhaps it is too complex to explain in what is clearly a complex topic. Most people who don’t build websites have no idea of the cat and mouse that goes on with seo.
Are you seriously denying that spammers game search engines and try to keep up with algorithms? Look up the black hat seo industry.
It’s on par with denying programmers use keyboards or something. You’re trying to deny a fundamental fact of reality.
Or watch some of Matt Cutt’s videos. He was the public face of googles rules and algorithm changes. His role? Head of webspam
Considering that Wikipedia dates the concept and its rejection back to 1851, you have understood it wrong.
Once an algo change is put into practice, it’s fairly easy for the seo industry to see what it is. It is no longer obscure!
But if you have advance notice of a change, you can react in advance, much like you can trade in advance of stock price moves if you have insider information.
Stock pricing should, in its core, be about valuing an asset.
Search rankings should, in its core, be about providing most relevant material to a query.
You can’t wave a wand to stop that. I’m describing the world as it is, not advocating how it ought to be.
That is what the law does though. It only does it for google and facebook, and only for news, but it does exactly that.
Not only that, but in the coffee shop example you must give a recommendation. You can’t decline to do so even though the govt really will send you a bill.
You also have to give 14 day advance notice to coffee shops that you are going to change your recommendations. This also changes your recommendation cycle: if a coffeeshop starts serving bad coffee you have to wait 14 days to stop recommending them, and you’ll have to pay them every time you recommend them during that period.
The bill is exactly that dumb. It can be hard to explain something is dumb without sounding condescending. Google probably could have done a better job.
But....were you objecting to the coffee analogy because it’s wrong? It isn’t.
You've got Google, who are now pretty much running the world high street as the quintessential evil rentier, providing little value while extracting virtually all the profits.
They are constantly moving the goal posts, which can ruin businesses overnight, with no oversight.
Now they have to tell businesses beforehand before they make them bankrupt, so the business at least has a chance to change.
Does that sound less dumb and more reasonable if written that way?
> providing little value while extracting virtually all the profits
This is a wildly inaccurate statement. Users have every opportunity to visit the news sites directly and yet they choose not to. So clearly search and social media sites are providing value.
> They are constantly moving the goal posts, which can ruin businesses overnight
We're only talking about news businesses for the purposes of this law. If a news outlet is entirely dependent on google search traffic for their revenue then they don't have a stable business to begin with.
This whole law makes the assumption that Google and Facebook are the reason new outlets are losing revenue, but I have yet to see any evidence of that.
"But that's how I get to the website, I type it into the Google!"
This weird, "we hate Google, so we're going to pass this massive indirect law that reinterprets fair use, but only applies to them" is pointless and counterproductive. If you don't believe that Google is providing any value, then ban search engines and see how the people of Australia react. But I don't actually believe that the problem people have here is that they think users are forced to look up websites through Google.
If that was the problem, then people on both sides would be encouraging Google to pull out of Australia. It's nonsensical to say that indexing websites isn't a valuable service.
I think a lot of what’s not being discussed in this thread is that in a competitive market consumers could vote with feet, and the resulting competitive pressure would naturally drive better behaviors, but because that’s lacking governments are now poorly attempting to “fight back”.
In a sense, with enough kludgy regulation, eventually there may be enough daylight for a competitor to pop up, and until then people will argue passionately past each other, one libertarian side worried about libertarian things, and the other populist side worried about populist things, etc.
I think that link taxes are not a good substitute for antitrust law.
My take on this thread is that a lot of people want to break up Google, and they're picking one of the worst possible ways to do it. Australia is codifying into law an idea that will fundamentally change the way it looks at how the Internet works. Other countries have figured out ways to target Google without breaking the Internet.
I'm also (mostly because of the general wild arguments I've seen under the main article about what is and isn't fair about links) mildly skeptical about what people actually mean when they say that they want to "drive better behaviors."
Indexing information is a better behavior. People having the freedom to build and share indexes of information without anybody else's permission, including news organizations, is a better behavior. There are criticisms I have Google, including of Google's algorithms. I would like to see antitrust brought up. But I'm not honestly sure the criticisms I have of Google are the same ones that Australia has. I'm seeing people argue that summarizing an article is stealing. It's not, that's not what copyright is.
> In a sense, with enough kludgy regulation, eventually there may be enough daylight for a competitor to pop up
This is the worst possible way to make a competitor pop up. Why doesn't Australia just pass a law banning Google search if that's what it wants to do? I'm completely serious, a law banning Google would have less harmful effects on the Internet than the rules they're proposing.
My very cynical take on this that I am tempted to slip into is that for a lot people proposing this kind of legislation, it's not about banning Google or increasing competition, it's about "Google has money and what if established media sources had some of it." I'm pulling back from that take and assuming that most of the people on this thread actually believe this will increase competition. But even with that more charitable viewpoint, this is such a pointlessly clumsy, harmful way to accomplish that goal. If you want Google to pull out of Australia, just be honest about it. Don't this song and dance about how repressing fair use is somehow good for small businesses and the general public.
This is a law that says that Google has to pay to do something it's required to do. There's no consistent thread of logic running through the legislation. It's stealing for Google to link to websites, but it's abuse for them not to link to websites. Snippets provide no value to websites, but removing snippets is playing unfair. Facts aren't copyrightable unless you have a bunch of them from a bunch of different sources in one place. It's just a nonsensically bad law. And the alternative isn't "let Google own the entire world"; there are other pieces of legislation that Australia could pass that wouldn't be so toxic.
Google has effectively slowly turned the lever on a mass amount of industries, year by year shifting their money slightly more from their pockets into Googles, by inching forwards evermore with inlining their content. You can see entire industries being starved out basically, and in a way because they are so big it’s just hard to stop them.
I guess in the end I’m not an idealist and if a single company is suffocating many others, and if you have some levers you can pull to increase their competition, I think it’s totally fine to pull those levers. Like, I think the precedent of “we shouldn’t let any one company get too big” is the sort of Ur-Principle and it overrides any sub-principles like “free market” or whatever.
Again, this specific one seems like it’s a bit weirdly structured, I agree, but I also have about 0 sympathy for Google and even if the news media is rent seeking here and the politicians are daft, it’s a much smaller issue than “stop fucking Google now” so I’m not too worried with various countries experimenting with different kludgy rules, any help in curtailing one of the (somewhat unintentionally but still) worst actors in the market is not the worst thing, certainly won’t keep me up at night.
In finding news? yeah, I actually do. You can find the current news by going to any newspaper of your choice, and read them there: you don't need to search at all (archives are another matter, but then I suspect that that is a very small amount of their traffic).
I actually think Facebook is a harsher competitor: people will share interesting articles (or those that make their side look good) there, and that traffic is harder to replace.
But websites are free to compete with that, by offering better ways to access the content, such as emails tailored to your interests. I know CNN had that option back in the day.
Hence google simply steal the most valuable bit, the headline and the summary, and users can get away with merely browsing the free content, which Google has stolen.
It's as if google owns a newspaper store, that they allow any person to just browse for free. In a real world newsagents you'd be told to buy or GTFO because the newsagent makes money from selling the papers. But because google already made their money, they sell the land, they gleefully give it away for free.
Don't forget, Google is worthless without the content, if everyone banned Google from scraping content tomorrow it would go bust overnight.
But almost every site would make more money without search engines.
Reflecting on this, it's actually in every governments interest to make it as hard as possible for Google/Facebook/etc. to do business in their territory. If google just "give up" on Australia, it means all that advertising money will probably go to an Australian search engine, and be taxable.
Google is hardly "stealing" this. The news sites are offering it directly to Google, and asking for them to make use of it. They could ask Google not to index them, or they could stop asking to appear the carousel, at any point.
Google actually prepared to stop listing news sites to Australians at all, in preparation for this law, and so the law was changed to force them to continue listing the sites.
If Google is stealing the content, they are also being required to steal the content. They're not allowed to opt out of showing the data that the news sites are offering. They're not allowed to decline showing news at all.
There is no choice, you either list on Google, or die. Google has an almost absolute monopoly on search in the West. They are the only game in town. There is no 'choice'.
You're making the same point I am, but drawing the opposite conclusion. If what these news sites are producing is so valuable and google is stealing it, why do they not just ban google from scraping their site?
The answer is that they were making money when they were the only way news got out into the world. Now that anyone can break news the news itself is not valuable. Google and Facebook aren't hurting these publications, the existence of the internet is.
I've never tried this at a newsagent, but on multiple visits to bookstores I've just read different books without a transaction.
Newsagents do have the power to tell google to GTFO by editing their robots.txt though
People are rightfully pointing out that nobody forces you to put any of that on Google.
But I also want to point out that if the headline and snippet summary are the most valuable part of an article you write, then you're not providing much value. Copyright law was never intended to protect summaries of what your work is about.
At a basic level, facts are not copyrightable. To argue that saying the title of a news article is "stealing" is like arguing that multiple papers shouldn't be able to cover the same topics. It's like arguing that I shouldn't be able to tell my friend about current events because a newspaper broke the story first. If people can look at multiple sources/titles and get a summary without clicking then tough luck, the thing they are intuiting is not the thing that was copyrighted. News orgs never owned copyright over the individual factual parts of their stories.
If people genuinely believe that IP laws should cover facts about the world, that a reporter should have the exclusive right to talk about an event just because they arrived on the scene first -- I just can't take that argument seriously. If that's what people think, then our social education efforts about copyright have just gone off the rails.
The news is not copyrightable. Your writeup of the news, the specific language that you use, is. Trying to change that would be a disaster for everyone, it would be declaring a war on information itself just so that some entrenched news orgs can make a quick buck.
They can't be providing little value, because the law here demands that Google link to news articles. If there was no value in the search traffic then news media companies would be fine with "okay, we will simply drop google news and stop linking to news media" but they aren't okay with that.
Why would Google be opening a coffee shop? Could you please translate this analogy into the factual situation, so that I can understand your point of view?
Your friend (the searcher) asks you for a cafe recommendation (searches a current event on google) and you tell them the main street cafe is great and you should buy something there (google says the nyt is trustworthy and you should read their page)
The australian law says you should pay the cafe to send them customers (says google should pay the nyt to send them readers)
It’s really dumb. The cafe wants referrals: why should you pay them? Dunno australian news so I used the NYT as an example.
The australian law seeks to flip this on its head and make you pay to recommend, and forbids you from declining to recommend.
Right now it only applies to google but the principle is insane. People actively pay google to recommend their sites: it’s the entire basis of google ads!
By threatening to withdraw from a national market, Google seem to be saying that its business model depends on getting its own users by this mechanism.
As such, it's reasonable to believe that the true market price won't remain negative.
That’s why they’re leaving.
This is not complete, I think. This law would FORCE Google to continue linking to these sites and paying them for as long as Google did business in Australia.
Google threatening to withdraw isn't a sign that these links are valuable to them, because they have to choose between paying to link or not doing business at all.
That this is going to be kind of a difficult choice shows that the value of THESE links is basically zero to Google. If they could keep operating in Australia while not providing links to Australian news, they would.
When a firm can affect radically affect markets across different sectors, the simplicity of argumentation really breaks down.
No. People would find their news as they do now, on twitter, on reddit, via emailed links, via text messages from friends.
In what way has google distorted the news market, separate from the internet itself?
Saying "Google distorts the marketplace" hides the fact that none of the internet companies, big or small, would be okay with this.
When we invent a refrigerator, the refrigerator companies aren't legally obligated to write checks to ice-diggers for putting them out of work. I don't see why this should be any different.
> Their spokesperson spoke to users like they were kindergarten children
It's very difficult when you're in this position to come up with a way to show why something is so wrong without being at least little cynical or infantilizing. What do you do when someone is arguing something that's wrong on an extremely basic level, but also gets annoyed and feels condescended to whenever you try to explain basic principles to them?
If someone sticks their hand on a lit stove, and argues with you about why actually it's good to stick their hand on a lit stove, at some point there isn't a response you can have that isn't going to be infantilizing, at some point you're just going to have to say "hot things make you go ow." If people are angry that Google is insulting them by explaining these basic analogies, then it's harsh, but I kind of feel like I want to say -- don't make mistakes that warrant those analogies.
I think it would be a mistake for companies like Google to act like this is a reasonable debate being held between people with honest disagreements about infrastructure. It's not. It's a debate with an industry/government that fundamentally either doesn't understand how the Internet works or doesn't care. People are mad that Google isn't treating a really bad argument like it's a good one. But it's not a good argument, and it doesn't help anyone to pretend that it is or prop it up and treat it like some kind of serious, reasonable discussion.
Infantalising us regular people who think what the government is doing is dumb isn't winning them favours
Its a horrible law, aimed at what many people think are horrible companies. But its a horrible law regardless.
If Google is going to pretend it's a neutral, benign, entity they should at least try to pretend they care about us.
The hypocrisy...
This [2] may provide some helpful commentary.
From Google/Facebook's viewpoint, one of the more distasteful aspects which is rarely mentioned in most coverage is that they must give two weeks notice of algorithm changes to registered news businesses.
There's a perception in some circles that this is a fairly unnuanced money grab by the government on behalf of Murdoch media[3]. A perception that was not helped by earlier drafts excluding the public Australian Broadcasting Corporation and SBS from the trough. Two organisations the current federal government is seen as being hostile towards.
As I understand it:
- The bill would not allow Google to simply drop Australian news sites from search results (hello Spain News!), hence really only leaving the option to block Oz altogether.
- There is no acknowledgement at all of the value search engines provide to media organisations by the links provided.
- The forced arbitration conditions are quite... forceful. (I'm not really across this aspect.)
A common nickname for our our Prime Minister among his detractors is "Scotty from Marketing" [4]
[1] https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...
[2] https://www.gtlaw.com.au/insights/its-here-news-media-digita...
[3] https://youtu.be/2BPLBIgKjN8
[4] https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2020/01/where-the-legend-of-sc...
What are the limits of control that the Australian Government has over the operations of private companies?
It also seems to be an illogical request: You must include Australian News sites in search, and you must pay for the privilege to do so.
And Australian technologists and entrepreneurs are leaving the country in droves due to lack of opportunity you say? (pre COVID of course)
I mean a company can surely not doing business in a country, then what power does the country's government hold against them? I guess very little.
The bill deals with this in section 52ZZ(1)(b), which says that in determining the remuneration to be paid to a news business, the arbitral panel must consider "the benefit (whether monetary or otherwise) to the registered news business of the designated digital platform service making available the registered news business' covered news content."
I suspect your right. I'm not a lawyer and I would not trust my reading of a legal document as far as I could kick it but the public discussion of the bill is so poor I don't have any choice. I would have thought forcing Google has to pay regardless of whether they link to news sites or not was a fairly fundamental question every voter would be interested in. Apparently not. So we are left with me quoting this, from the act:
> 52Q.(1) The provisions of Subdivisions Band create obligations in respect of every designated digital platform service
> 52E.(1) The Minister may, by legislative instrument, make a determination that: (a) specifies one or more services covered by subsection (2) in relation to a corporation as designated digital platform services of the corporation;
So you are a digital platform if the minister says you are (he puts it in a schedule). And we have this from the explanatory notes [0]:
> 1.34 The Treasurer’s instrument is expected to specify the following as designated digital platform services: • Facebook News Feed (including Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages); • Facebook NewsTab (if and when released in Australia); • Instagram; • Google Discover; • Google News; and • Google Search.
So yeah, Google shall share their ad revenue with the newspapers whether they link to them or not seems to be a reasonable interpretation or what is actually happening here.
> hence really only leaving the option to block Oz altogether.
I suspect there is another option: remove the legal presence of Google Search et al from Australia. They are then out of reach of Australian law. Australians will still be able search, pay for ad words, access their google docs, look at their google pictures as before. My guess is it would have stuff all effect on Google's revenue. Most (all?) other search engines operate that way now, Australia's used amazon.com instead of amazon.com.au for over a decade - I doubt it would effect Google's revenue at all.
https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20EM%2...
That’s not why. They’re threatening to withdraw because the law requires two week advance notice of algo changes. If you have any idea how google works you know this is impossible.
Brexiteers scorned critics and are now learning that indeed some things are impossible, such as control over borders and regulations and unfettered free trade with the eu.
People seem to have such distaste for google that they’re not wrestling with how impossible Australia’s demands really are. Google has faced similar news demands in europe before and didn’t threaten to leave. But those demands didn’t come with impossible to comply with algorithm requests.
Indeed. Both are the result of flooding the media with specious arguments designed to make people fight over irrelevant details.
'Google is a grifter' 'The EU are robbing us of our NHS'
Google is not rich because of news articles. The NHS was not underfunded due to the EU.
You do have some idea, don't you? Enlighten us how it works and why algo change notices are impossible.
> some things are impossible, such as control over borders
Right, no country outside of EU has control over their borders.
Not OP but I think this is meant to be read as one full condition, not 3 impossible things
Literally a multi billion dollar industry. If google gives advance notice of all of this to australian news orgs, they have an asset worth billions and which would break the web worldwide if leaked.
This is just part of it. Even legit sites do some gaming: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing
I work at Google, but not on search. How do you even interpret "algorithm changes" there? It can be as broad as any code or configuration push. Across a complex service, that's probably happening hundreds of times per day. (And even if you narrow the scope to just some search-specific code, changes are probably still happening many times per day.)
Are you supposed to have a mandatory 14-day waiting period for every change to hit production? With a lawyer to approve and transcribe an external description for each one?
:(
Indeed. And we shouldn’t let Google get away with it. :-)
(Although this particular legislation doesn’t seem like a very good way to achieve this.)
robots.txt exists, Google respects it
I'm not saying google is a saint, or even evil but this legislation is just plain wrong. Google have provided an optional free service to the media, and its now pretty much an essential service to them. Another poster said they get 70% of their traffic redirected from google.
The Australian government is playing clear favorites here. They are penalizing a successful company, and rewarding a bunch of other companies that are struggling - Even though their problems are not related to google's success.
And its even more blatant what the game is when you see that the legislation specifically prevents google from paying SBS or ABC - The two highly respected and popular government-funded media networks. The current conservatives government has been cutting their funding and generally trying to kill them for many years.
> A robots.txt file [...] is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google.
> You should not use robots.txt as a means to hide your web pages from Google Search results.
> If your web page is blocked with a robots.txt file, it can still appear in search results
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/in...
The law as written is extremely draconic because it will force Google to link to these orgs(providing value) and then also pay them(providing value). It explicitly forbids Google from delisting them
The general point make by the post you responding is perfectly correct: Google provides many ways for a web site to stop their content from being indexed. That includes all the newspaper sites. And they very explicitly don't use it. This is www.news.com.au's robots.txt:
https://www.news.com.au/robots.txt
Notice how they ban some spider called "NewsNow". But the don't ban Google.
The fact the Australian Government is going after this issue makes it depressingly obvious how deeply the Liberal Government is in Rupert Murdoch's pocket. And it's not like Rupert or News Corp are even Australian (Rupert revoked Australian citizenship to become an American citizen).
Fight the correct fight for god's sake.
Strategically, Google has played the wrong card. It has a better card up its sleeve called GNI [0], which might ultimately be how this standoff gets resolved.
The conservative Australian government, which is in Murdoch's pocket, used audacious logic to justify the extortion play, claiming Google's near monopoly has strangled journalism and so New Limited deserves to be compensated.
However, Google doesn't steal News Limited content - it just links to their stories, thereby sending News Limited 70% of its web traffic in Australia. Moreover, the output from Murdoch's empire isn't even predominantly news anymore - it is entertainment and ideology.
A better strategy for Google would be to take the high road and offer to support real journalism. It already has a program for that in America called Google News Initiative (GNI) [1] which has contributed to local news organs such as Berkeleyside [2] and Oaklandside [3].
If Google has to reach into its pocket and pay millions to keep doing business in Australia, where it earns billions, the best beneficiary would be local news content producers with whom it could forge symbiotic partnerships. That would be good for journalism, good for Google, and an ironic twist of fate for Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
[0] https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com
[1] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/12/10/195853...
Doesn't that exactly demonstrate that the legistlation is necessary? Would Google had struck such deals without the threat of the legistlation?
And I absolutely do not want the future in which tech platforms also ineptly destroy, recreate then gain an unstoppable monopoly on journalism.
It seems to be a response to the government's threat to legislate, albeit a ham-fisted one. Responding to a threat doesn't mean the threat is valid, or that the response is of any use to anybody.
The difficulty with any analysis of the impact of Google and Facebook on news in Australia is that news has never been funded directly. It was traditionally paid for by advertising revenue which was obtained from advertising products that were co-delivered, interspersed among news products.
Google's advertising model superseded Murdoch's traditional advertising model, but Murdoch's core advertising businesses were not killed by Google alone. They lost out to direct internet competitors:
Seek took the classified advertising revenue for jobs
Domain took the classified advertising revenue for property
eBay, Gumtree, Facebook and Google took the display advertising revenue
If the government's concern is that journalism has suffered, the evidence it can point to is that 50% less people are employed in journalism compared to 20 years ago. The most sensible remedy for that problem is not to transfer wealth from Google and Facebook to Murdoch's entertainment corporations, but rather to fund grassroots journalism through programs that directly result in the production of news by journalists, in ways that preserve editorial independence.
Quite fundamentally disagree there. Responding to a threat definitely validates it. If it's not a valid threat, there's no need to respond.
Responding to a threat is not a validation that there is a threat.
I don't think cats are threatened by laser pointers.
I'm Australian, so yes, I am very aware there are spiders that can kill you. However, that doesn't suddenly make every spiderweb a threat. The reaction may have a reason behind it - but it does not mean that there is any threat present.
Lets try putting it another way.
Children are often frightened of the dark. This makes sense, as they cannot know what is in the dark, and the dark _may_ hold a threat.
This response on behalf of the child in no way says that there _is_ a threat. In all likelihood, there is none.
Responding to something as if there is a threat doesn't suddenly turn something benign into a threat.
I'm not sure what you mean by "valid threat". If you mean the capability of the threat to cause damage if carried through, that's something we don't find out until the party that made the threat tries to carry it out.
If you mean the grounds on which the threat was made, such as here, the Australian governments claim that Google owes Murdoch money, then that's not something that is "validated" by a response. A response to a spurious threat, or an illegitimate threat can be prudent whether the threat is real, imagined, justified, or totally bogus.
In this case, will the Australian government actually impose a tax on Google's practice of linking to content which is allowed by the sites own robots.txt? That seemed pretty audacious to me when I first heard about it, particularly since I don't buy the case that Google owes Murdoch money. But maybe they will try, if they think they can get away with it at the ballot box. I don't know how to predict that outcome. At first I thought it would backfire on the government, but Google's ham-fisted bluff to exit Australia might end up backfiring on Google, if Google even carries out that counter threat, which is by no means certain.
We'll see.
They did in France. And they did it for a fairly obvious reason: indexing French news is worth something to them. If the option on the table was "index Australian news and pay, or don't index", they would pay because indexing Australian news is worth something.
The problem is there are lots of newspapers out there, all selling the same news. They all fight tooth and nail to get the top rank in every search, which presents Google with a turkey shoot. The price consequently drops to zero. That would happen regardless of whether Google is a monopoly or only had 5% of the market. It should tell you something. All this hand wringing about Google abusing it's market power is rubbish. The problem isn't Google's market power. It's the fact there are 20 different newspapers all selling the same story.
The French solved not by bashing Google. They solved it by forcing all the newspapers into a room, effectively creating a monopoly for French news. Google could no longer play one off against the other, and a price greater than 0 was agreed upon.
Google says: "There seems to be no clear or obvious distinction between news and non-news content, and the way that Google works, there is no algorithm that could navigate such a vague and broad definition." [0]
But Facebook says: "Assuming this draft code becomes law, we will reluctantly stop allowing publishers and people in Australia from sharing local and international news" [1]
So who is right?
[0] https://about.google/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/
[1] https://about.fb.com/news/2020/08/changes-to-facebooks-servi...
This is opportunistic at best and a bad idea for the internet long term. Shame Microsoft is encouraging this only to gain market share.
Edit: Okay, they are exempt because they are not called Google or Facebook. I didn't realise the law was only going to be applied to two companies by name. Which, I don't know, doesn't sound like how laws should work?
Do they extend this particular law to any business that isn't owned by Murdoch and makes any ad revenue from news content?
So, yes, if the Minister suddenly decides to add others to the list, that is exactly what will happen. But there's no need to pass it by Parliament first.
And that is as bad as you think it is.
Thanks for the info :)
I'm no Google or Facebook fan but targeting them in legislation for who they are rather than what they do is crazy.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2021/02/11/endorse...
So... If you quintuple our Aus market share, making it larger than anywhere else at present, then we'll happily give Murdoch a kickback. But if you just quadruple it, no, that's not enough. Until then, taking money from Google is good.
I wonder if the oft repeated "independent news organizations" was simply misdirection, or code for "not ABC or SBS". Public funding of news organizations is highly contentious in the US. Encouraging the forcing of a US company to fund a foreign public broadcaster... is not pretty optics.
"Assuming this draft code becomes law, we will reluctantly stop allowing publishers and people in Australia from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram.” [1]
Google has also threatened/promised that it would pull Google Search from Australia if the code passes (though, like FB, it suggested this was a worst-case scenario. [2]
As an Aussie ex-pat, I'm fascinated to see what happens if both FB and Google go through with these worst case scenarios. It would make for a different Facebook experience, I imagine, and it would radically change the search market in Oz where Google has around 90% of the market. [3]
Personally, I think that it will hurt the media in Oz a lot more than it will hurt FB or Google. People looking for news will find ways to get around the 'Google/FB blackout' just like people in Oz have been finding ways to watch US TV shows and VPN/proxy into foreign Netflix sites for years. Maybe everyone will be back to the bargaining table after the 12 month review with a little more honesty about how much of their traffic comes because of Google and FB, and not how much they believe is lost to them.
[1]: https://about.fb.com/news/2020/08/changes-to-facebooks-servi... [2]: https://mumbrella.com.au/withdrawal-isnt-a-threat-its-a-wors... [3]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/220534/googles-share-of-...
One doesn't seem to follow logically from the other. Surely people going around FB/Google and still getting the news would be good for media and bad for FB/Google?
I guess my thinking is that it is easier for someone to replace Google News Australia with Google News or Google News UK to get a range of stories than it is to go to a (mostly paywalled) local news site.
With regards to Facebook, I think that the media companies will miss the traffic from FB/Instagram alot more than FB and Instagram will miss Australian news sources on their Platform.
Personally, I blame smartphones for this, however I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. Provided that sites such as Google, Facebook and even HackerNews don't have dynamic content, that is.
Why remember a URL when you can just click on a link? On websites that aren't content aggregators (like this one), one can assume that the position of links won't change too much over time.
With an aggregation website, however, that simply isn't true. Content on the front page changes over time, which is why noting down URLs or at least bookmarking stuff is important so that one can cite one's sources and re-read articles/information. If one just relies on clicking things on an aggregation website, one can't always be sure that the link you click will be there tomorrow.
It's baffling.
I don't think they will go as far as withdrawing search (note: it's just search not their 3 million other products) from Australia.
But it does set a scary precedent for them.
To repurpose their analogy in the scare campaigns they are running in Australia:
Currently when you ask about the best coffee shop in the area. Google runs down the road, taking a sample of the coffee from the local shops and fills you up with coffee then tries to sell you a bunch of related stuff.
With this legislation Google will have to pay the coffee shops for the samples.
It's a small step but Google have been profiting from "borrowed" content for the best part of a decade.
They need to pay.
Or do we recognise that freely linking to the rest of the web is how the internet become useful to the world?
How much revenue did Reuters miss out on because people in this thread just commented without clicking through? Do dang and pg owe money to Reuters now for foregone revenue?
The contents of the <url> tag of a page are metadata, and I think we can agree that authors don't have copyright derived monopoly over them. Anyone can share a list of titles without violating any copyright laws, and no revenue is lost because that intellectual property does not really belong to the author.
But if I start sending everyone small but different snippets of the article, as per their search term so they don't have to visit the website, I am no longer within the ambit of fair use of copyright. The intent behind the fair use clause is the same snippet is shown to everyone, so in a vast majority of cases there is no loss of revenue and we can ignore the edge cases. Here google has used the edge cases ignored by the law and turned them into a multi-billion dollar business (with at least some part of it lost by the owners of the copyright).
That's not what this law is about. Google isn't summarizing titles, and they offered to remove snippets. The Australian government turned them down.
If the only objection here was "Google is showing different snippet summaries to lots of different people", then we wouldn't be having this debate. How has Google abused copyright here?
It feels like part of the argument here is that newspapers should be able to own facts -- that if people can look at a Google search page, see a title, and roughly know whether or not they want to click on the article, that's some kind of violation. But what does that have to do with copyright?
This is an analogy that would make Cory Doctorow sad.
If they lost the click because the article was summarised and you didn’t need to click through to read it then that’s on HN.
This is less obvious for Google news, but substantially more obvious for other search snippets (like say looking up synonyms).
Of course a reasonable person would argue that more people clicked through to Reuters thanks to HN, and they'd be right. I was simply playing devil's advocate, using the "logic" of the Australian draft law.
Honestly don't understand why google doesn't just say "fine, we'll stop providing excerpts and only provide the link, enjoy the reduced traffic, you really scored an own goal on this one, dumbasses."
They could even have a nice big passive aggressive message "Excerpt redacted due to the XYZ act of 2021. Click here to learn more about how Australian legislation is fucking stupid"
From the code
> Why is this code necessary?
> The code seeks to address the fundamental bargaining power imbalance between Australian news media businesses and major digital platforms. This imbalance has resulted in news media businesses accepting less favourable terms for the inclusion of news on digital platform services than they would otherwise agree to.
"inclusion of news on digital platform services" - the mere inclusion, nothing about the presentation.
It’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder if we would have got here if Google News wasn’t a giant pile of summaries.
Because it is literally against this law. Google has done this in other cases and it is a fine compromise. But this law requires Google/Facebook to continue to link to news outlets. And simply no longer showing snippets does not address the "problem" claimed here and would not prevent the charges.
Australian government doesn't care about snippets - only linking to titles is still a paid action. Not to mention their idea is equivalent to "force HN to publish articles".
Newspapers are news scavenging machines. They regularly copy entire stories from each other, with journalist changing just a few words to get around copyright issues. Surely you've noticed? Every newspaper covers the mostly same stories, with the same facts.
The reason it didn't matter is this isn't about copyright, linking, fairness or any other the other smoke stories you hear. The newspapers had a wonderful business model: they sold ads on dead trees. To entice people to buy their ads laden dead trees, they added news as bait. It's common knowledge in the newspaper the amount of "copy" you have to carry is determined purely by the number of ads you sold - you had to dilute the ad / news ration down to a palatable level.
The people they could sell these ads on dead trees to was limited to roughly how far you could transport those dead trees after they came off the press (at midnight or so) so people could read them over breakfast. Maybe 100km at best? If someone started moving on that territory it was open warfare, but if they just copied your stories so they could sell ads to people outside of you territory - who cared? Rampant copying is how they collectively kept costs down.
Now the internet has moved in, and nobody looks at ads printed on dead trees any more. The newspapers business model has gone. That would be true whether Google was the 1000 pound gorilla on the internet or there was no Google like company. Moving the 100's (1000's?) of mastheads that thrived because of the 100km dead tree transport limit was always going to result in a blood bath that would leave just a couple standing. We are nowhere near that yet.
In the end this is about the internet taking their ad revenue. And that's not because of Google - it's because where before it was read the newspaper on the train or nothing, now you've got a while internet to browse, and most people don't choose to look at news sites, so they lost their audience. In particular it's got nothing whatsoever to do with copyright, linking or fairness, which is why apparently the legislation says Google has to hand over their ad revenue to the newspapers whether they link to them or not.
Nobody thought they would remove Google News in Spain back in 2014, but they certainly did. Sure it's not the same scale and all, but if my memory serves me right it was kinda unthinkable back then.
"It's a small step but Google have been profiting from "borrowed" content for the best part of a decade."
It's not. Website, cafe owners, etc. literally put their content out there to be discoverable. Otherwise they'd just put a /robots.txt or not make a website at all! What is stopping the new sites to add a blocking `/robots.txt` if they don't want to be listed? The problem is that Google is massively profitable and everyone wants a piece of the cake.
(I'm talking about normal Google or Maps search, the snippet/previews where they cannibalize the website's content is a different topic and I'd agree with you there)
Why would they go that far? At worst, shut down google.com.au or redirect to google.com (ie, a Non-Australian site).
It's hardly their fault if people persist in using Google even when they don't operate in the country any more, surely? If the Australia government wants to create a great firewall of Australia to ban Google, surely they should do it at their expense, not Googles?
No google are not profiting from borrowed content. You can always deindex yourself by robots.txt or otherwise.
It's just google is providing a huge value to the market and content creators have gotten lazy and now waking up to that all other options of publishing are going away or are way more expensive.
Google is in damage control mode. And will rather deindex all news sites, not pull search entirely.
And no, the content creators are not lazy, this is an example of the content creators doing something. It is a part of the commercial practice: The marketplace does not accommodate its participants. Adjusting the marketplace is a valid reaction. Just like leaving or any other action.
P.S. I do not have enough context on the matter to know whether this is fair or not.
That's the hilarious part. They modified the law to explicitly disallow Google from doing that.
This is just the next iteration of the Australian government trying to prop up the failing business models of their mates businesses
The last decade they've been picking winners like nobody's business and yet the opposition party is, for reasons that I can't determine, impotent in pointing this out for political advantage.
The current Australian Government will do whatever it takes to secure competitive advantage for it's donors.
The Greens are the closest thing to an effective opposition. Both the main parties have effectively the same policies, the same supporters (now the unions are rooted) and the same voter base.
Here is the part Google objects to from their propaganda piece https://about.google/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/ under "Why does the revised Code not work for Google?":
> 14 days algorithm notification: It requires us to give news publishers special treatment—14 days’ notice of certain algorithms changes and ‘internal practices’. Even if we could comply, that would delay important updates for our users and give special treatment to news publishers in a way that would disadvantage everyone else.
I would argue it is even worse, as a SUBSET of publishers that the Australian government deems worthy qualify. Basically Rupert Murdoch, for my English speaking cousins in other countries, and their only real local competitor.
If this was ONLY about paying, it would be a negotiation. This is a bizarre law that aims to profit the people who are supposed to hold the government of my country accountable, and give a leg up to specific publishers. None of that bodes well for democracy in my country, and this is government getting in bed with specific businesses, the cynic in me believes to win the government more favourable reporting.
If they came back with: “Frankly we’re not entirely sure, we just jigglede the handles in the factory until they came out like we wanted them to.” Then they’d not be allowed on to sell any cars anymore.
This isn't true. Neural networks doesn't have state of the art performance in many areas, there is no way they would use them for everything.
The Age doesn’t pay the State Parliament to talk about politics. It doesn’t pay restaurants to talk about their restaurants (besides paying for their meal when it’s a review, of course.) It doesn’t pay the AFL to talk about footy. Nor do they pay the families of murder victims whose deaths they monetise.
These news organisations are asking Google to pay for something; forgetting that their entire business is based on monetising news events which they do not pay for.
To expect Google to pay them for the privilege of sending traffic which they can’t figure out how to monetise is ridiculous.
Especially so when all traffic to the Herald Sun, for example, runs directly into a pay wall.
It’s on THEM to figure out their business model. Google is literally teeing up thousands of possible customers for them on a daily basis. What more do they have any right to ask for?
A coffee-shop owner could argue that Google is providing enough coffee that it's disincentivizing someone like you from making a purchase, but the issue here is that Google provides tools to the coffee-shop owners to opt-out of giving those samples to potential customers. Instead of using them, the owners want to force by law that Google pays them for the samples because they still want Google to do all that leg-work of finding new customers for them. This could make it cost-prohibitive to run the service, especially as the legislation can be interpreted broadly (e.g. Google says that as written it'd be difficult for an algorithm to distinguish between news and non-news content).
I think a better analogy would be around restaurant delivery drivers. Pretend for this analogy that restaurants have a captive supply of delivery drivers that can't go off and get another job, because all the drivers know is how to drive restaurant deliveries for a living. Restaurant owners are incentivized to use the delivery drivers because it allows them to get more customers. What if the owners started asking for a law to be passed that made delivery drivers have to pay them for providing delivery service. The drivers can still make money in the end after the tips they get anyway, right?
If ABC News decides to write an article about what you said, should they have to pay you?
(The Minister has spoken with Microsoft, and it appears that they were "happy" with the result, and there hasn't been a suggestion that they will be asked to comply.)
Drumming up changes in Prime Ministers just to increase their ratings. These companies are NOT champions of the people. They’re just as greedy as Google and far less ethical.
This is a prime example of why the government should not get involved in b2b. The incompetence of the government never ceases to amaze me.
Or on a more serious note, he just likes power, regardless of how much his businesses would lose.
Either google gets slapped and stops being a parasite that lives in the cracks of copyright law, or newscorp dies.
This is the definition of a win win situation.
Seriously? Snippets are clearly fair use. The open web has operated on those principles for decades.
You're doing the same as those who cheered on software patents.
I don't care if Facebook and Google are the targets, ultimately this takes rights away from all of us and will undoubtedly spread out of Australia if it goes well.
Best thing that can happen is News Corp collapses and other countries stay away from legislating the internet.
We have the GPL instead of trade secrets, we can actually see the code without signing away our firstborn.
I don't see a down side here.
The GPL is not a software patent.
> I don't see a down side here.
Ignoring the fact that the GPL doesn't have anything to do with software patents, ignoring the fact that this analogy is wrong, let's pretend for a second that it does make sense.
If you went to someone like Stallman and asked him "you can have the GPL, or we can get rid of software copyright", he would not choose to keep the GPL. The GPL is a stopgap that we use to keep some software free in a world where software is not free by default.
But we currently like in a world where snippets are fair use. Taking your analogy at face value, you're talking about getting rid of our freedom so we could have a limited scenario where we can claw a little bit of it back? Some kind of snippet GPL?
So it still doesn't make any sense. Even those most charitable interpretation is still a bad trade for us to make.
Nonetheless, it is a terrible law.
However there is an argument that the price to pay might be acceptable if it pushes Google away from the Australian market. Strategically, these companies are a huge risk of foreign political interference.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/sep/19/turnb...
There's still some power in the dinosaurs. This also indicates to me that this kind of thing has been going on for decades, and it's just the advent of the Internet (somewhat ironically) that's allowed for this kind of information to leak out to a larger percentage of the population (but not a large enough percentage to affect the election result, as it turns out).
* Search engine
* Operating systems (through Android)
* Web hosting (Google cloud)
They also made a serious play into social organisation with Google+.
Murduch controls a broadcast business which tells people what to think using mass media. I don't like that.
But Google is more threatening, and its strategy is more threatening, no matter what you want to argue News Media has done. Murdoch isn't reading my work emails, doesn't control infrastructure my company relies on, doesn't track the physical location of my friends and associates. Google does. Google's potential for political activism is more scary.
News Corp's actions have paved the way for the paranoia about Google / Big Tech because they've actually used their potential. News Corp are verifiably evil.
This legislation, however, does nothing to slow Google's potential in any of the examples you mentioned.
(I think, fundamentally, we agree that both are bad)
The outcome is uncertain, but it should be fascinating to watch.
Seriously though RSS has never died and tonnes of us still use it despite the efforts of close-walled companies like Facebook and Twitter disabling it on their services. It is the only way I like to consume my news, particularly tech news, as there are just too many sources to do it any other way.
There are some services/clients that try to do what you describe and filter your feeds to emphasise keywords, authors etc.. that you are interested in. They are generally pretty immature though and I would welcome some better systems for this, as long as it is transparent what they are including and excluding.
(Is there an open source app that fetches and scrapes sites instead of the subscription model?)
App for android Handy news reader does that.
It won't just hit Google and Facebook, but anybody who runs a social platform. Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter even Mastodon are all in the firing line. The Australian government has unilateral control over which sites are required to funnel money Murdoch trash instead of real (maybe even independent) journalism.
My prediction is people will move to social platforms that do let you share these links, and one by one they'll find themselves regulated out of existence when they get large enough to catch the attention of the government. Even worse - think about the ways this could be abused e.g. to shut down small outlets who committed the crime of linking to mainstream sources.
I believe this is far more despicable than anything Big Tech is doing, and global adoption would be the end of a free and open web.
You thought software patents constricted the flow of information? This is 10x worse.
Edit: Please, Aussies, call your MP and tell them your thoughts. Put aside any negative feelings about Big Tech for now, and think about the future of the web. This will eventually affect all of us who operate comment sections, blogs, forums and Mastodon instances.
* I LIKE giving the Aussie government unilateral control over this issue vs the status quo of giving Big Tech unilateral control over it.
* I LIKE the fact this is unfair, Big Tech has been treating people unfairly for quite some time so I'd like to see them be treated as unfairly as possible. The more damage the Aussie government does to Big Tech the better, the more unfair, the more sadistic the better.
* You say that global adoption would be the end of a free and open web? It's far too late for that and the likes of Google and Facebook have nobody to blame but themselves.
That being said, we've seen time and again governments will introduce laws with a fair reason and then totally abuse it down the line (Patriot Act anyone).
In my country, the government locks people up for making offensive Tweets based on mostly unrelated legislation from decades ago.
The free and open web is still here, just most people don't choose to use it. Whatever you think of Big Tech, you can go somewhere else and build a website. DuckDuckGo proves it's possible to crack these companies with enough of a value prop.
That said, it would be much, much worse, if they withdrew Gmail.
I wonder how hard they're willing to play here.
Featured on Android, Google Assistent or in the news tab on the other hand...That might become quite pricey for publishers.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150725/14510131761/study...
A quick reading of the Bill indicates this will apply to snippets; and even a hyperlink without snippet. Who is that good for? That ended up damaging publishers in Spain.
Who else can imagine Google bargaining with the publishers for reduced paid renumeration by offsetting "value" from organic referrals?
Public trust in the media is paramount, which is undermined when media organisations can only compete by tailoring their articles to fit into an explicitly commercialised search system.
Google is great for selling products. They’ve built their entire business around selling products. But is news a product, or a service?
User value to companies that serve advertising is based on what companies are willing to pay to serve ads to them. Which is directly tied to the monetary value of that users business to the company buying the advertisement.
Australia is the richest nation (that isn't just a tax dodge) on earth. Sure because the metric used is USD it varies.
I'm going to give you a great grounding example. A typical gardener in this country can take home $80k USD a year. That has to be 4 times or more someone in the USA. I'm not talking a garden contractor in Bellair I'm talking an average Joe.
Google are great at hiding their revenue but I guarantee you that Australia represented a good 20% of the US based revenue. Despite having a population that's only 10% or so.
They would absolutely have their bottom line impacted by withdrawing but they aren't going to. Because of the former sentence.
I don't think the OECD agrees with you there.[0] Ahead of Australia in GDP per capita PPP according to the OECD are: Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, the United States, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Sweden, and Belgium. Not accounting for PPP the World Bank still puts several countries ahead of Australia.[1] Looking at incomes, Australia is not at the top either.[2] I don't think Australia has an outsized impact on Google compared to the US. If these numbers are anything to go by, then Australia's impact relative to population would actually be smaller.
[0] https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=61433
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?most_rec...
Source please - otherwise you're just pulling numbers out of thin air.
So nothing really changes, the sky is not falling.
a) The Minister will name a series of companies they deem the law will apply to, and it applies only to them. (Currently only Google & Facebook. The Minister recently spoke with Microsoft and decided not to add Bing to their hitlist.) The Minister can change this at any time, without Parliamentary oversight.
b) The companies it applies to have to both reveal the inner workings of their algorithms to selected news companies, and give 14 days notice of any changes that will happen.
c) The companies it applies to are not allowed to stop indexing or showing news content. They can't decide not to do business unless they stop being a business altogether.
d) The companies that will be paid under this scheme are selected by the Minister, and can change at any time without Parliamentary oversight. So it will have a net zero effect on independent journalism.
Bring on bing I suppose
Do they go directly to the news sites or to Bing?
And there's plenty of other countries that would be eager to get money out of Google if Australia shows a method that works.
Of course, China didn't fold when Google pulled out so it's questionable whether they consider that a winning strategy or not.
Instead of remunerating the obvious party, will Google instead be paying the registered news business corporations corresponding to the 5 news articles that show up in the top 10 search results for this query? The other 4 search results would miss out on being paid as they consist of 2 social media discussions of the first result, an international news organisation and an international news aggregation website.
What if instead I search for "Ancient Egyptians collected wild ibis birds for sacrifice, says study"[3] which brings up the original press release from an Australian University[4] as the third result. All other results returned are for the most part a copy and paste of the original press release and include a WikiNews article, two Australian media organisations ([6] copied from [5] copied from the original [4]) and a number of international science news websites and international media organisations. Who is Google paying in this scenario and why should anyone be paid anything for copying and pasting a press release that is returned by a Google search result? It looks like this question is unanswered according to section 52X which states it's up to companies like Google to figure it out after this legislation comes into effect:
> The responsible digital platform corporation for the designated digital platform service must ensure that: (a) a proposal is developed for the designated digital platform service to recognise original covered news content when it makes available and distributes that content
[1] https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Victorians%20Expecting... [2] https://www.betootaadvocate.com/headlines/victorians-expecti... [3] https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Ancient%20Egyptians%20... [4] https://news.griffith.edu.au/2019/11/14/genetic-analysis-sug... [5] https://theconversation.com/holy-bin-chickens-ancient-egypti... [6] https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6494482/how-egyptians...
If you allow these big tech companies to leverage their attention oligopoly to profit from rent-seeking, they're going to become hotspots of economic parasitism and this will subvert all the incentives which capitalism relies on to function properly.
"It's good these tech behemoths are being pushed-back. They have stifled competition for much long now just by having so many resources at their disposal and using those all together. You just can't compete with that kind of abundance.
These behemoths, when left even for a few months, would make way for other competitors to spring up, and at least have a marginal chance of winning. Without they leaving, this just seem to not happen"
- nindalf
Yes, this would (could/should?) also apply to smaller sites that make money by aggregating traffic based on the original work of others and monetizing the attention. We can start imagining what that could look like and how to implement it. Instead of "GUVERMENT IS BAD" knee-jerk reactions, this should be exciting: what would an internet look like that would have compensation of content creators among the first principles?