News agencies and websites have their content reproduced on Google Search and News. That's massive value for a search portal.
Yet they publish articles with the entire headline and backing images marked for free display on Google/Facebook. Almost like they are trying to help the search engines to attract traffic.
Google is exploiting copyrighted content to make profit and create audience.
If the search index of Google was empty, the people wouldn't use Google, it's that simple.
So the newspapers are asking for royalties for feeding that search index.
Granted, I have `disallow: /` in mine because I don't want my stuff scraped, but I still see Googlebot sometimes, and others, try to crawl my site.
It's not a very effective opt-out, because it requires the 'attacker' to honor the file's settings.
Feel free to enable it on your own server and watch the logs for a few days after sharing some links.
I hope daddy government treats you well.
Count on Big Brother to save you, and they will beat you down when it's time as well.
Noting that something exists and including it in reference material should by no means incur royalties.
To be clear, the bill is fundamentally broken. It would require Google or Facebook to pay simply when links to news sites are served, rather than for reproducing or condensing the material in the news article as a "preview" sort of be thing (as in other countries). The bill isn't banning links explicitly, but the government should have seen this coming.
Perhaps they could have listened when the two companies they are trying to impose this on provide suggestions - or maybe modeled it more closely after legislation in other countries where such media taxes have been successful.