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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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?
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!)
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.
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.
If Google is going to pretend it's a neutral, benign, entity they should at least try to pretend they care about us.
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...
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.
The hypocrisy...
https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-asia/australia/n...
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.
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.
Or do we recognise that freely linking to the rest of the web is how the internet become useful to the world?
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?
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?
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.
That's the hilarious part. They modified the law to explicitly disallow Google from doing that.
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.
If ABC News decides to write an article about what you said, should they have to pay you?
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?
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.
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?
Not OP but I think this is meant to be read as one full condition, not 3 impossible things
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?
I'm no Google or Facebook fan but targeting them in legislation for who they are rather than what they do is crazy.
Do they extend this particular law to any business that isn't owned by Murdoch and makes any ad revenue from news content?
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.
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.
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.
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.
:(
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
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.
"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-...
It's baffling.
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.
That said, it would be much, much worse, if they withdrew Gmail.
I wonder how hard they're willing to play here.
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...
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?
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.
And I absolutely do not want the future in which tech platforms also ineptly destroy, recreate then gain an unstoppable monopoly on journalism.
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.
Bring on bing I suppose
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.
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.
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.
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...
(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.)
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.
Featured on Android, Google Assistent or in the news tab on the other hand...That might become quite pricey for publishers.
"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
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.
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?
So nothing really changes, the sky is not falling.
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.
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?
