Not tightly enough to win the last election though :)

Murdoch's grip is slipping. He failed to turn the last Federal election, and has failed with about five State elections despite publishing huge amounts of rabid nonsense about the party he was trying to get out and massive support for the party he was trying to get in. He used to have a very high success rate getting the party he wanted in, but in the last few years he seems less and less effective.

Part of his issue is all his stuff has gone so far right with Sky News (especially 'After Dark' shows) and the tabloids (which also basically includes The Australian now), similar to how Fox News in the US went. But it seems that while he is pulling in a number of crazies, it's seemingly nowhere as big a proportion of the population as in the US. So more people seem to be switching off than getting pulled in (thankfully).

Part of the law was that you couldn't drop one publisher, you had to pay for all news links or drop all news from the platform. Facebook claimed they would and actually did drop news for a few weeks but eventually backtracked and agreed to pay.

Australia has pretty terrible defamation laws, this was probably an attempt to make money. Sadly it usually works.

Both Google and Facebook are paying in Australia.

(In Australia his main publications are news.com.au and associated other mastheads, and Sky News. Fox isn't a player).

Happening in UK too.

https://inews.co.uk/news/technology/tech-giants-google-faceb...

Public broadcasters like the BBC love to gloat every few pixels about how trustworthy they are. Yet, they will have more secret commercial deals with tech giants to get automatic prominent positions in feeds, regardless of quality. They're already spending up on ads on those platforms, and now the money will move in both directions. What could go wrong?!

In addition, the scheme involves harvesting data of users on the social platforms. It's a messy conflict of interest that encourages high volumes of low quality. Because that's all that's needed to get paid.

This is actually discussed in the decision:

“The respondent did not sue The Age for defamation; instead, in 2010, the respondent sued two authors of a book that, amongst other things, contained a chapter based on the Underworld article. One of the two authors was also the author of the Underworld article. The claim settled at mediation, and it was a term of the settlement that the authors would make certain revisions to the book. In exchange, the respondent released the authors from all liability in relation to a number of matters, including any article published in The Age or its affiliated publications concerning the respondent.” [¶182]

And when considering the librarian analogy:

“As the trial judge found, navigating the Web can be a challenge. Search engines assist in that process. But the analogy drawn by her Honour between a search result and a librarian handing over to a library user a book marked at a particular page is problematic, not the least because a search result is only one of a number of responses to an enquiry, as was the case here. Properly understood, a search result conveys to the person searching that they may be interested in one or more of the results. The person is not directed to a particular result, as the Court of Appeal implied. According to the trial judge's findings, results are ranked by the use of an algorithm having regard to relevance using "signals" or clues as to what the person searching is looking for according to the words used in their enquiry. The search result merely refers, in the sense of drawing attention, to a webpage. As Abella J pointed out in Crookes v Newton 68 , there is a difference between drawing a person's attention to the existence of an article and communicating its content. And whilst it may be said that the use of a hyperlink may mean The Age gains a reader, that does not make the appellant something other than a reference provider.

The respondent submitted that the Search Result had the added feature, to which the Court of Appeal referred, that by its terms it "enticed" the person searching to open the webpage. It is difficult to see how this level of excitement could be said to be generated by the words of the Search Result. Moreover, it needs to be borne in mind that the person has already activated a search for particular information before the result is received. As is the case with any search result, a person will employ the hyperlink if they think the webpage to which they are directed may provide the information they seek. It is notable that the respondent also submitted that the decisions of the New York courts should also be seen as involving "enticement". In doing so the respondent appears to equate "entice" with "call attention to".” [¶50-51]