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Comment by Bakary | Hacker News Reader

The laws might be bizarre or poorly thought-out but the concern isn't. A news landscape controlled by American tech companies doesn't sound like a rosy future.

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Nothing is stopping them from building their own aggregation sites and disallowing Google/Facebook to index their sites. They are literally giving their content to Google and then demand they get paid. (Technically Google is taking the content via indexing, but I'm sure they can figure out a way to stop that)

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

I am aware. Why do these news corporations not just write an appropriate robots.txt so Google can't take their content? Is it maybe because they want their cake AND eat it too?

On one hand, it's true that they are making odd demands and are linked to Murdoch. On the other, it's disturbing that you pretty much have to play ball with Google and Facebook to survive as a media institution. Yeah, they could create their own competing service I suppose but in practice that sounds more like a non-sequitur than a workable suggestion.

In Australia, 70% of our commercial media is owned by a foreign multinational (News Corp) and most of the rest is one other company (Nine/Fairfax).

Luckily we have two fairly good public broadcasters (ABC and SBS), but the Murdoch media hate them and the conservative party in power are white-anting them away (budget freezes and things all the time which after inflation effectively mean cuts every year), and the quality has dropped considerably over the last few years with editorial interference (technically they’re independent, but reporters there who break big stories of Government corruption, or showing big problems in Government policy just happen to be hounded out, even though the stories were true).

In the case of Australia, FB and Twitter are actually injecting a lot of competition and diversity of thought into the market, since their news ecosystem is incredibly oligopolistic.

That's a good point but FAANGs are oligopolistic on a global scale. It's come to the point where anything that could possibly weaken them or get the ball rolling towards their fragmentation sounds like a good idea, even if it's half-baked and negative in its own local context.

To be clear, I’d like to see some of the FAANG companies broken up. But worrying about their global oligopoly when the alternative in this situation is News Corp, another global oligopoly, seems misguided to me.

You gotta start somewhere. It's far from an ideal situation, but simply the prospect of it creating a spark elsewhere is worth taking.

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