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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

So how does this bode for the lobbying by Ruper Murdoch and co to force search engines to pay for linking to news articles ?

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I think it would be irrelevant, since a specific law was passed in Australia forcing them to pay. I think it applies even to bare hyperlinks?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56410335

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.

Lol wtf does he think would happen if successful? That Google would pay the fee or just drop fox from all search results?

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.

This is unrelated to defamation laws in any way.

> This is unrelated to defamation laws in any way.

Did you even read the case-summary?

"The respondent commenced proceedings, claiming damages for defamation from the appellant"

Sure, the article is about defamation, but the current sub-thread is about Rupert Murdoch wanting Google to pay for linking to his news stories - which has nothing at all to do with defamation.

Yes "this" was supposed to mean the whole "pay for news" thing has nothing to do with defamation laws.

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).

exactly. murdoch controls australia, nothing like a bit of outrage to get the tabloid pumping. he will no doubt now smear said high court judges

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).

> it's seemingly nowhere as big a proportion of the population as in the US.

I think its because Australia has a Preferential Voting system.

Yeah, I am actually very thankful for preferential voting. The way it makes it possible for minor parties to exist and for independents to get in seems to me to be a very good thing.

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