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People in this thread seem to believe that this is only relevant to Google News. This is actually for all of Google, including Search. According to https://www.
by ipsum2 6y ago
People in this thread seem to believe that this is only relevant to Google News. This is actually for all of Google, including Search. According to https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/facebook-and-google-face-10m-for-media-code-breaches-20200731-p55h6p https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/facebook-a...
> Mr Sims said if Google took a similar approach to its actions in Spain when it was asked to pay for news on its Google News tab, it would be irrelevant because the code covered news content in Google's primary function, search.
So it seems like the ultimatum is: pay Australia media companies ~$1b or don't list any news media (including international news) on Google Search for Australian users. Interesting dilemma.
- quink 6y agoMr Sims here is ACCC chairman Rod Sims. The same who rammed through so many terrible decisions around the NBN, just as one example, including the POI decision which in one fell swoop eradicated all bits of ISP competition that had arisen in the ADSL2+ space. Funny thing for a "Competition and Consumer Commission" to do, yet here we are. Internode's blood is on his hands.
- doctor_eval 6y agoWell I agree re the PoI, but internode did pretty well, they got a $100M exit; lots of other ISPs and suppliers hit the wall. It was a nightmare decision to go from what, 7 POIs to over 200? Made no sense at all. Mind you the entire NBN from soup to nuts has been and remains a disaster. Sent from my faulty HFC NBN (gone down 4 times in the last 2 days)
- rosege 6y agoSo does that mean having a hyper-link to a news article needs to be paid for? (Genuine question!)
- ipsum2 6y agoThat's what I wondered too. From the article, it seems like they're only targeting Facebook and Google for now. To apply the law equally, it seems like it should affect all websites that link to or copy the meta description tag of a news site.
- AnssiH 6y agoI'd guess this only applies to snippets, not simple hyperlinks, so Google could get away by showing headlines only. However, that is just complete speculation as I haven't seen the actual law, and the afr.com article is behind paywall for me.
- rosege 6y agohttps://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
- sjy 6y ago“Discrimination in this context will be considered to occur if the news content of a registered news business is disadvantaged in comparison to other news content in terms of the crawling, indexing, ranking, display, presentation or other process undertaken by the digital platform on any service provided by the digital platform, on the basis of the registered news business' participation in the code.” https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20EM%20-%20NEWS%20MEDIA%20AND%20DIGITAL%20PLATFORMS%20MANDATORY%20BARGAINING%20CODE%20BILL%202020.pdf https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20EM%2...
- dannyw 6y agoActually the law seems to ban Google from “discriminating” based on this mandatory agreement entirely, including banning them from algorithimically burying their results. Aka: show and pay News Corp or GTFO out of Australia. Sad.
- sesutton 6y agoSo this is just a very roundabout way of subsidizing Australian news media without having to call it that.
- eastendguy 6y agoSubsidizing? I would call it stop freeloading... Quality news has a cost.
- barney54 6y agoHow is it freeloading? I don’t understand this point of view, but I want to understand your perspective.
- eastendguy 6y agoReporter A spends 50 hours researching and writing about a topic. She publishes it on her own blog. Now I scrape this text (as summary) and display it on my own "Latest news" blog and the original author does often not even get a click-through. I do not think that is fair towards the original author.
- eastendguy 6y agoPS: Downvoting just because you disagree is not how a discussion is supposed to work :-(
- mafuy 6y agoI can't even downvote on this site, but I think it is because your post seems to say Google News copies news without a link to the source, which is not the case.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 6y agoWell, this is easy: remove the news. Also deals with all accusations of bias at the same time. > pay Australia media companies ~$1b This is Rupert Murdoch, isn't it.
- Mandatum 6y agoMurdoch is the Australian Bezos - except he has way more political clout in a larger area of the world, and has been running his empire for 30+ years. Bezos is building those relationships with his expansions, and he's obviously got more cash to fund them - but Murdoch's empire shouldn't be underestimated.
- monkeynotes 6y agoHis organization also has significant clout in the US and UK where he owns big media corporations. He's long influenced British politics, and through Fox US politics. This bill looks to be sponsored, and crafted by Murdoch.
- ehsankia 6y agoAt least Bezos provides us with an arguably useful service. What the hell has Murdoch provided the people other than FUD?
- afterburner 6y agoWeird way of putting it. People in North America who pay attention to politics have known about Murdoch for decades because of Fox News, before they bounced Bezos' name around nearly as freely.
- onetimemanytime 6y agoNo love lost between Google and newspapers. Money is gonna from their ads to Google. So have readers.
- ardy42 6y ago> Well, this is easy: remove the news. Also deals with all accusations of bias at the same time. Not so easy, since if you do that, you've just given an opening to a competitor that people will start using when they want to search for a news article.
- HALtheWise 6y agoI'm just imagining, similarly to how some search results in the US have a "some search results removed for copyright infringement" footer, many search results in Australia having a "some search results removed for news content" footer. The interesting thing is that since this _explicitly_ only applies to Facebook and Google, any company repackaging Google or Bing search won't have this restriction, at least until they get big enough to be worth rewriting the law for.
- sukilot 6y agoOnly Google and Facebook?
- dodobirdlord 6y ago1.30 The Government has announced that the code will apply to Facebook and Google. Accordingly, the Treasurer is expected to make an instrument specifying Facebook Inc. and Google LLC as designated digital platform corporations. Called out by name as the only two companies the law applies to.
- kiba 6y agoGoogle: OK. Australian news media: No, come back! I don't see how their demand work out well for them.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoThere's a lot of countries moving this direction. The problem is, Google is more powerful than most countries these days. Google can afford to cut a country off and let them suffer until they relent. All of these countries need to unify on this requirement at the same time. Google can cut Australia off, but can they cut off Australia, France, and Spain off? What about Australia and the entire European Union?
- kiba 6y agoI think the media companies are in the wrong. Google is providing a beneficial arrangement, and the media companies are demanding that google pays them.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoGoogle has been bleeding the media dry. One of the graphs shown yesterday during the antitrust hearing was about how Google has shifted it's original business model of showing ads on third party sites (where they have to give most of the revenue to those sites, funding those sites) to a business model of showing ads predominantly on it's own sites, where it keeps all of the ad revenue. Every single year, Google's ad business shifts more revenue from the "shares with third party sites" segment over to the "keeps all of it" segment. So while Google Search used to heavily fund news, every year, Google's cut gets bigger, and news orgs' cut gets smaller. The second graph here is what was shown in the hearing, and shows the numbers pulled from Alphabet's reports: https://medium.com/beyond-devices/googles-increasing-reliance-on-its-own-sites-15b7327c4855 https://medium.com/beyond-devices/googles-increasing-relianc... "Google Network Members" effectively refers to website owners like news publishers which display ads.
- jefftk 6y ago
- arkanciscan 6y agoI feel like this is going to backfire. What if Google just dualists Australian media from search results because they don't want to pay royalties? What if they start charging the media companies to be included in search results in order to cover the cost?
- beached_whale 6y agoCould they just not operate in Australia and give the proverbial middle finger to their government. Then just continue to link as they choose?
- cooljacob204 6y agoYes and I hope they do. It's a bad law. If you have your news open and accessible on the internet without users having to authorize themselves then it's public information at that point. Block it by a paywall. But they wouldn't do that because they would stop showing up in search engines. Google is providing a free service by directing traffic to these companies. Reminds me of the LinkedIn case about bots crawling their website.
- thirdsun 6y agoThey don't even need a paywall. If they don't want to be listed on Google they can always use robots.txt. We've been through this in Germany. Publishers demanded to be paid for Google usage of results and news snippets. Google thankfully didn't give in to such a ridiculous demand and gave publishers the option to de-index them or keep listing them for free. Obviously all of them opted for the latter.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoAustralia is not the first country to pass a law like this. Spain and France have both done some version of this as well. There's going to be a point where enough countries stand up to them that they can't just withdraw without substantially hurting their own business long-term.
- frockington1 6y agoI haven't noticed any affect from Spain and France doing this. Recent earning shave been great. As long as they have the US they'll fine. And I don't see Asian ex-China and Eastern Europe pulling this any time soon
- syshum 6y ago
- foobarian 6y agoWhy is it not possible to just change their robots file and cut out Google that way. Then if they don't like it they can discuss terms, no law needed.
- ipsum2 6y agoThat way they won't be able to profit off of Facebook and Google's successes :)
- dodobirdlord 6y agoThey could any time they wanted to, googlebot respects robots.txt prohibitions. They want google to direct traffic to their websites and they want google to pay for the privilege...
- jimmydorry 6y agoI feel like this is the weakest take on the argument. They want google to pay for re-hosting /lifting any content (previews, headlines, etc.). Linking is just caught in the crossfire, if it's even mentioned. If we are being honest, the majority of people read headlines and don't bother with more than the first paragraph or summary of the article. This is all displayed on Google properties where users don't even leave the Google infrastructure. Is Google providing a service? Definitely. Does online news depend on Google? Definitely. Is Google's relationship with them abusive? Definitely.
- bryan_w 6y ago> They want google to pay for re-hosting That's odd, usually companies pay Google to host their content via GCP
- peroporque 6y agoSo in the future, all news about Australian politics will only come from Russian and Chinese "news" websites...?