16 ms·

Response to Google open letter

375 points by ajdlinux 6y ago

Thorentis 6y ago
Google misrepresenting something which might cut into their profits? Who'd have thought it? I hate AMP, and this law might see the death or at least reigning in of it. I hate the way Google has killed niche websites by scraping their content and then profiting from it. I hate the way Google says they want to keep user data safe, while also using that data to increase their ad revenue. Fuck Google.
- rsa25519 6y ago
  > I hate the way Google says they want to keep user data safe, while also using that data to increase their ad revenue Yet, from the perspective of many users, this is keeping their data safe. Many people I know are completely fine with advertising. In terms of keeping data safe from being lost, leaked, or hacked, I think Google is probably one of the safest places out there.
- brokenmachine 6y ago
  I also hate all those things, but I don't see why we should be funneling that money into Murdoch's coffers. Why should the ABC/SBS be exempt from this moneygrab?
cblconfederate 6y ago
I feel like this time it's different , google (and big tech it represents) will get little sympathy on reddit and other watering holes. Even if the law seems restricting, it's Google who broke the social contract of the internet and turned from a benevolent rent-seeker to a feudal lord. (E.g. check this: https://www.google.com/search?q=money+for+nothing https://www.google.com/search?q=money+for+nothing , google just pastes the lyrics and there is NO link to read them on the original site. Even if musixmatch is getting paid , they are made irrelevant and this is a poisoned pill). Reading the defenses here in HN, I have become personally partial to conspiracy theories that too many paid commenters are among the crowd here. Plus i don't get what the fuss is about google news. I don't think it's used much outside the US, and even these websites aren't just going to lose all their traffic, because people are addicted to news. They 'll be partly visiting local websites more often, and this shift may actualy be enough to revive the income-starved journalism profession.
- threeseed 6y ago
  Google's lyrics are licensed from Musixmatch. They are not scraping them from websites who as always are completely free to exempt themselves from searches via the sitemap.xml file.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    The license is basically a death sentence (or alternatively a fragile lifeline) if the lyrics page is not being linked to. Former content producers for the open web have turned to content producers for Google. This is how serfdom works
    - aahortwwy 6y ago
      You could've chosen a better example of "content producers for the open web" than lyrics websites. Musixmatch didn't write Money For Nothing.
    - adriancr 6y ago
      Lyrics are not produced by the page hosting them, if anything those are a cancer of ads and malware that I steer away from. Google can probably do voice recognition now on songs and get the lyrics without outside parties (see youtube cc which is pretty good). Or they can strike a deal with music companies to get lyrics when they get the songs...
    - sukilot 6y ago
      You've got it exactly backwards! Lyrics are copyrighted. Google is the serf here, renting lyrics from musixmatch.
  - JimWestergren 6y ago
    >exempt themselves from searches via the sitemap.xml file Nitpick: you mean meta noindex and/or robots.txt
  - nabla9 6y ago
    I think what cblconfederate is getting into is the business environment with nothing but bad options. It's the Walmart conundrum for suppliers except for internet content production. Google and Facebook are the Walmart in this. The success of Walmart created an environment where only good business decisions in a short term destroyed of the brand and profits in the long term. (1) If supplier did not deal trough Walmart, their market gradually declined because Big-Box Retailers squeezed out alternative channels. (2) Eventually supplier made deal with Walmart to stop decline in the market share. First years saw profits increase and huge increase in sales. But Walmart buyers come in regularly every year and demand smaller price. And they don't take no as an answer. They are ruthless negotiators and religious about cutting prices. First supplier profit margins drop, then absolute profits, then they must cut the quality of the product. Eventually they have destroyed their brand and the product. There are hundreds of suppliers who suffered this fate. Destruction of Levi Strauss brand and quality is classic business case.
_-___________-_ 6y ago
The misinformation seems to be in the ACCC letter, since the Google letter [0] doesn't claim that they'd have to charge for Google Search or Youtube. Not surprising that they would try to use the current mood regarding tech companies to defend the government's position though. [0] https://about.google/intl/ALL_au/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/ https://about.google/intl/ALL_au/google-in-australia/an-open...
- hkt 6y ago
  The Google letter pretty clearly makes overtures about "threats" to their free services. "Nice free search you got there. Shame if something were to.. happen.. to it."
  - loktarogar 6y ago
    Yeah. The Google letter insinuates a lot. The ACCC just said "it's not going to be a problem unless Google makes it a problem". No more uncertainty.
  - stephen_g 6y ago
    Well, that's up to them though. The context of the "shame if something were to happen to it" quote is about destroying/stealing the other person's property, or hurting them. That's quite different to stopping providing a service to them which is currently provided under no compulsion... Google is trying to say that the law won't make providing a free service viable. Is that an over-exaggeration? Perhaps. But maybe not...
threeseed 6y ago
They really should stop saying "Australian news media" when they are referring to commercial entities only. The fact that the public ABC and SBS media are not allowed to be compensated says everything about the intent and motivation of this policy.
- hkt 6y ago
  That's.. awful. A Murdoch bill, then. Do you know if bloggers etc can be compensated?
  - pwc 6y ago
    To be eligible for the scheme, the proposed bill requires annual revenues of at least[0] $150,000 (amongst other things), so I imagine it would exclude most independent-journalist-running-a-blog situations [0] see section 52G of the draft bill - https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/news-media-bargaining-code/draft-legislation https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/news-m...
    - Jaxkr 6y ago
      Thanks for sharing. An explicit revenue minimum... incredible how blatant this legislation is. Not about supporting journalism at all.
    - chrismorgan 6y ago
      A common solution for such situations is to have some kind of association of or platform for independents which can hold the relevant registration.
    - hkt 6y ago
      Wow, that's vile. So clearly about incumbent media power rather than promoting diversity. I wonder if eg wordpress, or ghost, would be able to create a situation for their hosted blogs in which authors were paid for their content by virtue of the organisation itself having the minimum level of revenue.
gundmc 6y ago
> Google will not be required to charge Australians for the use of its free services such as Google Search and YouTube, unless it chooses to do so. > Google will not be required to share any additional user data with Australian news businesses unless it chooses to do so. I don't think Google actually made either of these claims in their letter. They didn't mention charging for services at all. They said "the free services you use may be at risk". Given the context, I took that to mean the quality of the service would tank if they had to share their algorithm changes. The data portion is a little less clear. Google was very weasel wordy - they definitely wanted it to sound like they would have to turn over user data, but if you read carefully they only say they would have to share data about how they collect the user data.
- ImaCake 6y ago
  They certainly imply they will either be removing services or putting them behind a paywall. Some choice quotes from the google letter: > Hurting the free services you use ... demands that would put our free services at risk.
  - mikemotherwell 6y ago
    That implies Google will change what Australians see vs other countries. No more. No less. Some possibile outcomes: Imagine a page with only foreign results. Plenty of news entities cover Australian news, and a result like this: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=victoria+australia+covid https://www.google.com.au/search?q=victoria+australia+covid could very easily nix the news box, and any and all Australian news results and content. Google could take the attitude that all Australian news sites that require payment have a robots.txt with: Disallow: / I can't imagine any law that both demands Google crawl sites AND demands payment for it will survive being contested in the courts. You can't both compel and enforce - it is one or tother, and if it costs Google to crawl your site, why should Google crawl your site? I can see a news site, like The Guardian, agreeing to give Google their news for free, and getting all the SERP links as a consequence. I can imagine Google doing deals with all manner of sites for nothing, where the value of 100% of News traffic from Google is likely millions. I have no idea what the proposal of the ACCC is (and I'm Australian) but this seems a really weird case, where the unintended consequences could be almost anything, and the likely outcome is more likely to be bad for Australian sites than beneficial.
ferros 6y ago
This media release is confusing. It was almost as if somebody said you need to put out a press release so find something to put in it, rather than we have something really important to say so we must put out a press release. Who is making these decisions?
nl 6y ago
From the ACCC's own release: In addition, the platforms must give news media businesses clear information about the data they collect through users’ interactions with news on digital platforms; for example how long users spend on an article, how many articles they consume in a certain time period, and other information about user engagement with news content across digital platform services.[1] Sure sounds like they have to collect and share user data to me. [1] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/australian-news-media-to-negotiate-payment-with-major-digital-platforms https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/australian-news-media-...
- RVuRnvbM2e 6y ago
  > Sure sounds like they have to collect and share user data to me. This seems to be aimed at AMP. News sources get any information that google collect about users reading the articles. Seems fair. Google could always not collect that information in the first place if they wanted to actually take the moral high ground. But of course they won't do that.
  - nl 6y ago
    I doubt that. Don't forget it's FB that also has to pay.
  - morei 6y ago
    No it doesn't seem fair. Why should my information be given to the news publishers!? I trust Google with my browsing history _way_ more than that random commercial news org.
RVuRnvbM2e 6y ago
Google is totally in the wrong here, and ACCC is doing its usual good work of protecting the Aussie consumer. It's interesting to watch Google try to squirm out of this though - they probably see it for the precedent it is. Google relies heavily on third-party content that they don't pay for in search results. If this law forces them to negotiate payment for that practice then I'm all for it.
- louissm_it 6y ago
  But don’t third-party content providers rely just as much on Google as the inverse?
- dannyr 6y ago
  I mean it's a search engine so it should rely heavily on third-party content in its search results. Google links to these news sites in search results and drives traffic to them. If Google grabs significant parts of news articles that users don't need to visit the sites, then Google should pay them. But Google is not doing that.
  - RVuRnvbM2e 6y ago
    > If Google grabs significant parts of news articles that users don't need to visit the sites, then Google should pay them. But Google is not doing that. So what is AMP then?
    - shakna 6y ago
      The news site giving Google the article. As much as I dislike AMP... Google aren't the ones creating the AMP page.
      - RVuRnvbM2e 6y ago
        > While AMP itself isn't a ranking factor, speed is a ranking factor for Google Search. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp It's pretty blatantly the case that AMP provides a SEO boost. What hosting service could possibly compete with the speed at which Google can retrieve content from their _own_ servers? That's the whole point of this legislation: to give news orgs means to stop Google from twisting their arm in this way.
thu2111 6y ago
I'm very curious how this law wouldn't violate various free trade deals Australia has struck. Surely a tax that explicitly names only foreign companies is the opposite of free trade? Sure, China has driven a truck through the whole concept of the WTO over decades and so I doubt anything will happen. Free trade deals are very much toothless, on the assumption that they are supposed to make sense on their own terms so enforcement is not required. But I can see the USA especially if Trump wins a second term deciding that Australia should be trade sanctioned for discrimination against US businesses. The White House won't want to see tech firms become piggybanks for failed industries and economies around the world.
- loktarogar 6y ago
  "Pay for what you use" isn't a tax. Also, AFAIK the government gets none of this money, but I might be wrong on that.
  - vermilingua 6y ago
    The government gets this money back in a) “business lunches”, gifts, etc; b) guaranteed industry “jobs” when their political careers end, which is far in the future due to; c) endless re-elections, as the entire media in this country exists as a Liberal Party PR firm.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - mcv 6y ago
    You're right, it's not a tax it's an involuntary contract. Google is required to get a license to link to these news sites, and isn't allowed not to link to them or abandon the whole concept of linking to Australian news sites. It violates every concept of free trade and free enterprise. I'm all for sensible regulation and taxing big corporations, but this doesn't sound like that.
- yorwba 6y ago
  The draft does not explicitly name foreign companies, it only refers to generic "digital platforms", so it's not a free trade issue. Free trade agreements tend to only be concerned with equal treatment, e.g. Most Favored Nation status. If, say, a country requires mining companies to implement certain minimum safety standards, that's totally acceptable from a free trade perspective if it applies to all companies, even if almost all mines are operated by international conglomerates. Such a law might make it more difficult for foreign companies to keep operating, but without providing an advantage for domestic companies who have to abide by the same regulations. I also disagree that China has driven a truck through the WTO, since it was China that had to agree to various concessions as part of WTO accession. https://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/iclr/vol27/iss2/6/ https://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/iclr/vol27/iss2/6/ When people complain about hurdles for foreign companies in China, their information tends to be either outdated (e.g. joint venture requirements) or the same hurdles apply to Chinese companies (e.g. need to censor your website if you have one).
harryf 6y ago
> A healthy news media sector is essential to a well-functioning democracy. This part at the end is interesting. If this fight goes down that rabbit hole, bearing in mind filter bubbles, Cambridge Analytica etc. it may lead to a discussion worth having
vermilingua 6y ago
> A healthy news media sector is essential to a well-functioning democracy. This feels like a slap in the face. Whoever wrote this would be fully aware that our media sector is anything but healthy, and that our “democracy” flatlined years ago. I can only imagine that this was written by a committee that was sinking beers and laughing their asses off as they watched this post go live.
- marcusverus 6y ago
  Why are you air-quoting Australian democracy? Aussies have one of the healthiest democracies in the world--9th out of 167 ranked countries according to the EUI annual 'Democracy Index'.[0] Is it posh to pretend to be misrepresented and/or oppressed nowadays? [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_Index_by_country_2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_Inde...
  - vermilingua 6y ago
    Do you live in Australia, or follow Australian politics? If not, it may interest you to know that we once had a carbon tax. It wasn’t stalled in the house or amended into nonexistence like a lot of politically charged law, but was repealed. The influence that the coal industry (leveraged by NewsCorp) has in this country is insane. It may also interest you to know that Kevin Rudd, a previous prime minister, was (is) the subject of a relentless smear campaign on the part of NewsCorp. He was removed from power not by an election, but via a leadership spill brought on by the pressure exerted by Murdoch. It may also interest you to investigate how our second wave of COVID-19 is being reported in Australian media. The second wave began in Federally funded and operated aged care facilities; however has been branded entirely as the “Melbourne wave”, pinning the blame on the Labour Party (the opposition to the party controlling the federal govt) and its state leader. We are misrepresented. The Democracy Index is published by The Economist. They may not be owned by NewsCorp, but you can be damn sure they feel their gaze.
    - 0xy 6y ago
      The Labor party you speak of issued full-throated endorsements of metadata retention legislation as well as the encryption ban. Forgive me for not picking up the violin.
zmmmmm 6y ago
This is a very disappointing response from the ACCC. It seems to be extremely misleading in its own right. > Google will not be required to charge Australians for the use of its free services Google did not state this. The ACCC - the supposed detached "fair" regulator, in charge of creating this code, just made something up to suit their own ends. > Google will not be required to share any additional user data with Australian news businesses The code [1] literally says: "The responsible digital platform must ... give information about how the registered news business corporation can gain access to ... the data that the digital platform service collects (whether or not it shares the data with the registered news business)about the registered news business’ users through their engagement with covered news content made available by the digital platform service" (Page 10, Section 52M). The ACCC here is straight up lying. I would like any of the people vocally defending it here to say what they think about this. NB: I think it is quite telling that it's quite hard to dig out the actual draft code [1] - they don't seem to link to it in any of their press releases etc. They actually don't want people to be able to discuss this openly from what I can tell: [1] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill%20-%20TREASURY%20LAWS%20AMENDENT%20%28NEWS%20MEDIA%20AND%20DIGITAL%20PLATFORMS%20MANDATORY%20BARGAINING%20CODE%29%20BILL%202020.pdf https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill...
- RVuRnvbM2e 6y ago
  > > Google will not be required to share any additional user data with Australian news businesses You misquoted the legislation. It says that the digital platform must provide to the news organisations: > a list and explanation of the data that the digital platform service collects (whether or not it shares the data with the registered news business) A _list and explanation of_ the data. Not the data itself. > The ACCC here is straight up lying. No, they really aren't.
  - zmmmmm 6y ago
    I am not sure why you are saying this when every word I cited is literally copied and pasted from the draft legislation? You have cited section 52M(b) as if that is the only clause in that section, ignoring 52M(a) which I have exactly quoted from. Why are you ignoring that subsection?
jay_kyburz 6y ago
This whole thing is really weird. We're bending over backwards to try and accommodate Google being allowed to profit from other peoples content. How about we simply ban Google and Facebook from reproducing news on their own site? And if we are truly believe "A healthy news media sector is essential to a well-functioning democracy." we need to punish both Google and content creators for publishing things that are demonstrably false. Fake News in otherwords.
- austhrow743 6y ago
  Australia has IP laws already.
- threeseed 6y ago
  > How about we simply ban Google and Facebook from reproducing news on their own site? You can. Just add the robots.txt to the website. But the news sites need Facebook/Google more than the other way around.
  - RVuRnvbM2e 6y ago
    > But the news sites need Facebook/Google more than the other way around. This is oft-quoted, but the media organisations seemed to be doing better before Google/Facebook became the middle-man siphoning off advertising revenue.
    - Ivoirians 6y ago
      User behavior has changed. Look what happened when a similar law was passed in Spain. Google News pulled out and people stopped visiting Spanish news sites, they didn't flock back to purchasing subscriptions and physical newspapers.
- fungi 6y ago
  > How about we simply ban Google and Facebook from reproducing news on their own site? News Corp is and always has been free to not have its content on Google (https://www.robotstxt.org/ https://www.robotstxt.org/). But that's not what they want, they want a Money just for appearing in search results. Seems more like a rent seeking for News Corp. > We're bending over backwards to try and accommodate Google The funny/bizzare bit is we are bending over backwards to accommodate 2 multinational American corporate monopolies that don't even pay tax in this country.
nocturnial 6y ago
Let's put aside whether Google had justified concerns about this legalislation. What's more appriopriate? Having a company incite the people in a foreign country to change laws or do it using diplomacy using experts in your state departement? We are only talking about allied countries to the US because google doesn't do this with, for example, china, russia, north korea, etc... I'm NOT advocating they should do this with those countries. Rather they should get out of the politics business or accept the regulations that come with it.
- mcv 6y ago
  Note that this legislation is the direct result of other companies getting involved in the politics business and pushing for this regulation. Google is seeing their business model made impossible and warns for the consequences, as they should, and certainly have the right to do. Sometimes legislation can make a business model impossible or undesirable. For example, making information available in China with a strong censorship regime. Or in this case, being required to link to news sites while being forced to pay for it. If this loses Google more money than it's worth, they may have to abandon Australia.
- stephen_g 6y ago
  Problem is, once you get to a certain size, it's almost impossible to just "stay out of the politics" - because other companies won't stay out of it. The whole reason this bill exists is because another American multinational company that pays no tax in Australia and owns 70% of the readership of Australian news media is very effective in its politics. And they didn't do it by telling the public to ask for it - they have close ties with politicians, they give favourable coverage, they take all the Government's leaks and publish anonymously, they will minimise stories the Government doesn't want published...
  - deleted 6y ago
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phuongpp 6y ago
hihi
cwhiz 6y ago
I am for any law or policy that hurts Google. And I really don’t care whether it’s fair or unfair. I’m not sure any two companies have caused more worldwide carnage, in the history of the world, than FB and Google.
- renaicirc 6y ago
  I'd say News Corp (Fox News, Sky News, NY Post, etc.) ranks pretty high on the list of damaging companies, and this law was clearly written to benefit them.
- Quarrel 6y ago
  This is an idiotic attitude when the law is purely for the purposes of benefiting NewsCorp, who have surely done even worse. If it gave consumers a better outcome, then maybe, but it won't.
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    It’s not about choice. It’s about destroying Google as a company. They are a spyware business that have destabilized the entire internet economy.
infinkaramazov 6y ago
I'm Australian, and I created an account just to comment on this issue. Imagine Google News or the Facebook news feed were normal news websites. If you count their traffic as the amount of times people went to those websites just to read news, their raw traffic would dwarf any other news website in Australia by an order of magnitude. Journalistic websites have editorial standards, and at least some relationship and commitment to the truth (even the Murdoch ones). A news feed, while algorithmically generated, is for all intents and purposes the front page of a newspaper for many, many people. There is no editor of a news feed. No one checks that what bubbles up to the top passes basic fact checking standards. Most importantly, there's no consequences for misinformation and conspiracy theories being on the same front page as a story about some construction disrupting your commute tomorrow. The main gist of the new code of conduct, to me, seems like the ability for news websites to collectively bargain with a multinational corporation that essentially controls the news landscape in this country. We aren't the USA. Our news websites aren't the New York Times and the Washington Post. Unfortunately, the two biggest are owned by fairly evil companies (Channel nine and News Corp). Rupert Murdoch himself controls 70% of the Australian media landscape. When he dies, however, this law will still exist. We've seen the consequences of a journalistic landscape that exists solely through social media without any significant independent news sources in Myanmar in 2015. Australia won't end up like that, but allowing independent journalism to wither on the vine distorts our ability to participate in democracy. As a collective, if every single news organisation decided to go on strike from Facebook or Google tomorrow, the amount of money advertisers would pay them would drop off a cliff. Google is scared by this because they know that the value they give to the consumer is the sum of Australian journalism, a tasting menu of all the best stuff that newspapers have to offer. Why, then, shouldn't that sum itself have the ability to bargain against Google and get itself a better deal?
- kevincox 6y ago
  For Google at least they have the option to opt-out. They can add a robots.txt file to prevent indexing. It isn't clear to me why special legislation is required to give the media companies bargaining power. They already have the power to say no if they don't think the arrangement is fair. (For facebook it is less clear, because you can't really force people to stop sharing your links)
rbg246 6y ago
It might have the unintended social positive of Google not indexing or allowing people to link to news limited on their services.
mattoxic 6y ago
Side issue, but... maybe Google can pay some tax in this country as a first step.
- pb7 6y ago
  How much tax does News Corp, for whom this law is designed for, pay?
jacquesm 6y ago
When Murdoch and Google duke it out using the Australian people as their human shield I find nothing to be happy about and plenty to be sad about. Both parties here are disingenuous about their stated positions, both are rather cynical in how the perform their negotiations. In the end the public, no matter what, will end up the loser because neither of these parties has their best interest at heart. Murdoch just wants money, Google wants to get as much content as they can for free and meanwhile whatever they agree on will be paid for by the public in one way or another. This is a disgusting spectacle at many levels.
- mattoxic 6y ago
  The Australian consumer has already lost. This whole country is an exercise in trussing up the public and making sure they pay the very most for the very least. I've long given up on Australian journalism - at least in the main stream. Obviously the Murdoch papers are garbage, but the Age and SMH are almost (and becoming) as appalling. The ABC and SBS have been cowered to the extent that they jump at their own shadows and now _have_ to include cometary from utter fuckwits like Gerard Henderson or that vast twit Greg Sheridan lest they appear biased. It now seems that the ABC almost has to ask permission to publish a story. The Age was a great newspaper, now it's almost unreadable - apart form the NYTimes and Wapo stories they run. Google are not the good guys. They are a rapacious monopoly that have their shareholders interest at heart, NOT the Google consumer. And in terms of "trusting them with our data" - like that's the very least we'd expect from a product that purports to do this - and they don't do this for free - WE pay for it. Like cry me a river Google - like News Corp, they pay fuck all tax in Australia, and, just like Murdoch, are more than happy to take advertising from fake news and conspiracy pushers that does nothing but fatten their profits and damage society. There is good media out there - Crikey, The Guardian, New Matilda, new Daily etc, but it isn't mainstream, one has to, dare I say, search for it.
  - NamTaf 6y ago
    You and the parent post both sum up my feelings better than I can. We Aussies are being used as meat in the grinder between two companies that are each pretty awful in their own ways. I struggle to feel bad for either of them, really. Probably the most depressing of all of this is how the ACCC - what has always been a very closely treasured and respected independent government body - has been used here as a pawn by the government-media oligarchy. It really soils all the really good work they've done to give us very robust and fair consumer laws and protections we enjoy. They've been used as the shitkickers for what is obviously a Murdoch-driven government play, where (not unlike the Five Eyes playbook) he hopes to ram through some draconian bullshit here as a proving ground, to which he can later point in the UK and US for similar laws there. One of the best decisions I ever made was adding Newscorp's bullshit to my ad blocker so accidentally clicking URLs to it fails to load. One of the other best was disconecting myself from Google as much as I have.
microcolonel 6y ago
This response does not respond to the claims made in the open letter. The bill as drafted is pure corporate rent-seeking, and appears to serve no genuine public good.
Karupan 6y ago
Looks like Google has now started showing a popup [0] in Australia which links to the open letter [1]. [0] https://i.imgur.com/A3IPkQy.png https://i.imgur.com/A3IPkQy.png [1] https://about.google/intl/ALL_au/google-in-australia/an-open-letter https://about.google/intl/ALL_au/google-in-australia/an-open...
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Desperately in need of footsoldiers.
  - senectus1 6y ago
    yeah my 12 yr old son just got this pop up on his phone. His response was "not cool Gov.." I had to explain that the situation is actually more complicated than that and he shouldn't trust one source for the truth. I think he's starting to understand that there is no good guy here.
shusson 6y ago
TLDR: - google has monopoly on search results. - traditional news companies not making enough money, blame google. - Australian government decides it knows what is best, regulate the monopoly. I would love to hear some input from actual journalists. It's telling that in the whole 29 page draft, journalist is mentioned twice and consumer(as a natural person) is mentioned once[1]. From the draft, I don't get the feeling the Australian government is really interested in a healthy news media sector but rather, making the existing news media sector happy. [1] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill%20-%20TREASURY%20LAWS%20AMENDENT%20%28NEWS%20MEDIA%20AND%20DIGITAL%20PLATFORMS%20MANDATORY%20BARGAINING%20CODE%29%20BILL%202020.pdf https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill...
specialist 6y ago
For the health of society, all recommender algorithms have to be daylighted. For a start. Yes, the gamification will be terrible. So what? Is maximal advertising revenue for monopolies societally important? Every other efficient open market is heavily regulated. Accountability, transparency, fair play, information symmetry, prohibit self-dealing & conflicts of interest, tort, etc. Right now we can't even imagine applying casino level scrutiny to social media. What's so special about social media that it doesn't warrant some hygiene, some guard rails?
- Grimm1 6y ago
  I don't disagree with you but not all reccomenders are causing the political issues we see now. As an example, what Netflix movies are being recommended to you is, in my opinion, immaterial. I think there needs to be nuanced law here maybe just targeting and regulating recommendations on what we would consider news or communications platforms.
  - specialist 6y ago
    IDK. I feel pretty siloed on Netflix today. And I wander how 3rd party content producers feel about Netflix's recommenders.
    - Grimm1 6y ago
      I think that's a product issue though and not something that requires regulation. I feel the exact opposite, I barely look at them and get my recs from friends or other sites I frequent.
- esrauch 6y ago
  > Yes, the gamification will be terrible. So what? Is maximal advertising revenue for monopolies societally important? I don't really see how gamification being terrible will only cause ad revenue to drop. Surely it will also make the results worse and less relevant to you? As in, if SEO spam managed to take over the top results of major queries, it doesn't just drop ad revenue but actually makes Search suck, right?
Bloggerzune 6y ago
As a website owner, security is important because: https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/05/WordPress-security-issues-and-tips.html?m=1 https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/05/WordPress-security-issue... People may not engage on your site (purchase your products & services) if it's unsecure Google Chrome (the most popular browser) is cracking down on insecure sites, and we have seen that Google and other popular search engines do tend to prioritize SSL-secured sites over non-secured sites When your site gets hacked, that triggers a chain reaction that can lead to loss of data, breach of user data (your customer data becoming public), loss of sales, visitors trust, getting blacklisted on search engines and browsers, legal issues, and tons of wasted time and money Go ahead and take these three steps before the end of January to make your business more secure online:
r0m4n0 6y ago
I’m just curious if anyone knows... does this specifically call out Google or does this also potentially have implications for other news aggregators that work in a similar way? Could this also target reddit or even hacker news? I couldn’t find where they define the platform that is Google.
- dlubarov 6y ago
  The draft doesn't name Google or Facebook, but 52C gives the Treasurer the ability to deem specific corporations and services "designated digital platform corporations/services", and they have announced that Google and Facebook will be the initial targets. E.g. in the explanatory materials, > In the first instance, the Government has announced that the mandatory code of conduct will apply to Facebook and Google. However, the Treasurer may also make subsequent instruments in the future designating other platforms where fundamental bargaining power imbalances with Australian news businesses emerge.
shirro 6y ago
A small number of media owners control old media in Australia. There is a single national newspaper and most cities have a single daily. They are generally owned by the same person. That person flies in people at election time to aggressively campaign for the government of their choice. This only makes sense if there is some quid pro quo. I have no love for Facebook or Google but the Australian government does what it must to keep favour with media proprietors or risk toxic campaigns against them.
shruubi 6y ago
To fully understand this, it would be a good idea to understand the degree of influence that the Murdoch media has on the Australian landscape. Murdoch media owns the vast majority of newspapers across Australia and is also more or less the only cable TV provider in Australia. A good highlight of the power the Murdoch press has over Australia would be to look at the fact that the vast majority of journalists who work in the Canberra press gallery (parliamentary journalists), work for The Australian or other Murdoch entities, and have such a stranglehold on political journalism that it is a commonly accepted truth in Australian journalism that "if you want to know tomorrows news, read The Australian today." The real kicker is that the Murdoch presses political biases are not subtle or secret, they are about as overt and blatant as you can possibly get with The Australian frequently running full front-page articles trashing one political party (Labor, the "left" leaning party) and heaping praise on the other (Liberal/National, the "right" leaning party). With all of that context, the bill suddenly takes on a slightly more sinister tone when you realise that it is more or less designed to benefit one man and his media empire.
aplummer 6y ago
> This will address a significant bargaining power imbalance between Australian news media businesses and Google and Facebook. This is so untrue. News Corp is easily the most powerful political entity in Australia. It’s not a stretch to say they pick prime ministers.

375 points by ajdlinux 6y ago

Google misrepresenting something which might cut into their profits? Who'd have thought it? I hate AMP, and this law might see the death or at least reigning in of it. I hate the way Google has killed niche websites by scraping their content and then profiting from it. I hate the way Google says they want to keep user data safe, while also using that data to increase their ad revenue. Fuck Google.

rsa25519 6y ago
> I hate the way Google says they want to keep user data safe, while also using that data to increase their ad revenue Yet, from the perspective of many users, this is keeping their data safe. Many people I know are completely fine with advertising. In terms of keeping data safe from being lost, leaked, or hacked, I think Google is probably one of the safest places out there.
brokenmachine 6y ago
I also hate all those things, but I don't see why we should be funneling that money into Murdoch's coffers. Why should the ABC/SBS be exempt from this moneygrab?

cblconfederate 6y ago

I feel like this time it's different , google (and big tech it represents) will get little sympathy on reddit and other watering holes. Even if the law seems restricting, it's Google who broke the social contract of the internet and turned from a benevolent rent-seeker to a feudal lord. (E.g. check this: https://www.google.com/search?q=money+for+nothing https://www.google.com/search?q=money+for+nothing , google just pastes the lyrics and there is NO link to read them on the original site. Even if musixmatch is getting paid , they are made irrelevant and this is a poisoned pill). Reading the defenses here in HN, I have become personally partial to conspiracy theories that too many paid commenters are among the crowd here. Plus i don't get what the fuss is about google news. I don't think it's used much outside the US, and even these websites aren't just going to lose all their traffic, because people are addicted to news. They 'll be partly visiting local websites more often, and this shift may actualy be enough to revive the income-starved journalism profession.

threeseed 6y ago
Google's lyrics are licensed from Musixmatch. They are not scraping them from websites who as always are completely free to exempt themselves from searches via the sitemap.xml file.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  The license is basically a death sentence (or alternatively a fragile lifeline) if the lyrics page is not being linked to. Former content producers for the open web have turned to content producers for Google. This is how serfdom works
  - aahortwwy 6y ago
    You could've chosen a better example of "content producers for the open web" than lyrics websites. Musixmatch didn't write Money For Nothing.
  - adriancr 6y ago
    Lyrics are not produced by the page hosting them, if anything those are a cancer of ads and malware that I steer away from. Google can probably do voice recognition now on songs and get the lyrics without outside parties (see youtube cc which is pretty good). Or they can strike a deal with music companies to get lyrics when they get the songs...
  - sukilot 6y ago
    You've got it exactly backwards! Lyrics are copyrighted. Google is the serf here, renting lyrics from musixmatch.
- JimWestergren 6y ago
  >exempt themselves from searches via the sitemap.xml file Nitpick: you mean meta noindex and/or robots.txt
- nabla9 6y ago
  I think what cblconfederate is getting into is the business environment with nothing but bad options. It's the Walmart conundrum for suppliers except for internet content production. Google and Facebook are the Walmart in this. The success of Walmart created an environment where only good business decisions in a short term destroyed of the brand and profits in the long term. (1) If supplier did not deal trough Walmart, their market gradually declined because Big-Box Retailers squeezed out alternative channels. (2) Eventually supplier made deal with Walmart to stop decline in the market share. First years saw profits increase and huge increase in sales. But Walmart buyers come in regularly every year and demand smaller price. And they don't take no as an answer. They are ruthless negotiators and religious about cutting prices. First supplier profit margins drop, then absolute profits, then they must cut the quality of the product. Eventually they have destroyed their brand and the product. There are hundreds of suppliers who suffered this fate. Destruction of Levi Strauss brand and quality is classic business case.

_-___________-_ 6y ago

The misinformation seems to be in the ACCC letter, since the Google letter [0] doesn't claim that they'd have to charge for Google Search or Youtube. Not surprising that they would try to use the current mood regarding tech companies to defend the government's position though. [0] https://about.google/intl/ALL_au/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/ https://about.google/intl/ALL_au/google-in-australia/an-open...

hkt 6y ago
The Google letter pretty clearly makes overtures about "threats" to their free services. "Nice free search you got there. Shame if something were to.. happen.. to it."
- loktarogar 6y ago
  Yeah. The Google letter insinuates a lot. The ACCC just said "it's not going to be a problem unless Google makes it a problem". No more uncertainty.
- stephen_g 6y ago
  Well, that's up to them though. The context of the "shame if something were to happen to it" quote is about destroying/stealing the other person's property, or hurting them. That's quite different to stopping providing a service to them which is currently provided under no compulsion... Google is trying to say that the law won't make providing a free service viable. Is that an over-exaggeration? Perhaps. But maybe not...

threeseed 6y ago

They really should stop saying "Australian news media" when they are referring to commercial entities only. The fact that the public ABC and SBS media are not allowed to be compensated says everything about the intent and motivation of this policy.

hkt 6y ago
That's.. awful. A Murdoch bill, then. Do you know if bloggers etc can be compensated?
- pwc 6y ago
  To be eligible for the scheme, the proposed bill requires annual revenues of at least[0] $150,000 (amongst other things), so I imagine it would exclude most independent-journalist-running-a-blog situations [0] see section 52G of the draft bill - https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/news-media-bargaining-code/draft-legislation https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/news-m...
  - Jaxkr 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing. An explicit revenue minimum... incredible how blatant this legislation is. Not about supporting journalism at all.
  - chrismorgan 6y ago
    A common solution for such situations is to have some kind of association of or platform for independents which can hold the relevant registration.
  - hkt 6y ago
    Wow, that's vile. So clearly about incumbent media power rather than promoting diversity. I wonder if eg wordpress, or ghost, would be able to create a situation for their hosted blogs in which authors were paid for their content by virtue of the organisation itself having the minimum level of revenue.

gundmc 6y ago

> Google will not be required to charge Australians for the use of its free services such as Google Search and YouTube, unless it chooses to do so. > Google will not be required to share any additional user data with Australian news businesses unless it chooses to do so. I don't think Google actually made either of these claims in their letter. They didn't mention charging for services at all. They said "the free services you use may be at risk". Given the context, I took that to mean the quality of the service would tank if they had to share their algorithm changes. The data portion is a little less clear. Google was very weasel wordy - they definitely wanted it to sound like they would have to turn over user data, but if you read carefully they only say they would have to share data about how they collect the user data.

ImaCake 6y ago
They certainly imply they will either be removing services or putting them behind a paywall. Some choice quotes from the google letter: > Hurting the free services you use ... demands that would put our free services at risk.
- mikemotherwell 6y ago
  That implies Google will change what Australians see vs other countries. No more. No less. Some possibile outcomes: Imagine a page with only foreign results. Plenty of news entities cover Australian news, and a result like this: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=victoria+australia+covid https://www.google.com.au/search?q=victoria+australia+covid could very easily nix the news box, and any and all Australian news results and content. Google could take the attitude that all Australian news sites that require payment have a robots.txt with: Disallow: / I can't imagine any law that both demands Google crawl sites AND demands payment for it will survive being contested in the courts. You can't both compel and enforce - it is one or tother, and if it costs Google to crawl your site, why should Google crawl your site? I can see a news site, like The Guardian, agreeing to give Google their news for free, and getting all the SERP links as a consequence. I can imagine Google doing deals with all manner of sites for nothing, where the value of 100% of News traffic from Google is likely millions. I have no idea what the proposal of the ACCC is (and I'm Australian) but this seems a really weird case, where the unintended consequences could be almost anything, and the likely outcome is more likely to be bad for Australian sites than beneficial.

ferros 6y ago

This media release is confusing. It was almost as if somebody said you need to put out a press release so find something to put in it, rather than we have something really important to say so we must put out a press release. Who is making these decisions?

nl 6y ago

From the ACCC's own release: In addition, the platforms must give news media businesses clear information about the data they collect through users’ interactions with news on digital platforms; for example how long users spend on an article, how many articles they consume in a certain time period, and other information about user engagement with news content across digital platform services.[1] Sure sounds like they have to collect and share user data to me. [1] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/australian-news-media-to-negotiate-payment-with-major-digital-platforms https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/australian-news-media-...

RVuRnvbM2e 6y ago
> Sure sounds like they have to collect and share user data to me. This seems to be aimed at AMP. News sources get any information that google collect about users reading the articles. Seems fair. Google could always not collect that information in the first place if they wanted to actually take the moral high ground. But of course they won't do that.
- nl 6y ago
  I doubt that. Don't forget it's FB that also has to pay.
- morei 6y ago
  No it doesn't seem fair. Why should my information be given to the news publishers!? I trust Google with my browsing history _way_ more than that random commercial news org.

RVuRnvbM2e 6y ago

Google is totally in the wrong here, and ACCC is doing its usual good work of protecting the Aussie consumer. It's interesting to watch Google try to squirm out of this though - they probably see it for the precedent it is. Google relies heavily on third-party content that they don't pay for in search results. If this law forces them to negotiate payment for that practice then I'm all for it.

louissm_it 6y ago
But don’t third-party content providers rely just as much on Google as the inverse?
dannyr 6y ago
I mean it's a search engine so it should rely heavily on third-party content in its search results. Google links to these news sites in search results and drives traffic to them. If Google grabs significant parts of news articles that users don't need to visit the sites, then Google should pay them. But Google is not doing that.
- RVuRnvbM2e 6y ago
  > If Google grabs significant parts of news articles that users don't need to visit the sites, then Google should pay them. But Google is not doing that. So what is AMP then?
  - shakna 6y ago
    The news site giving Google the article. As much as I dislike AMP... Google aren't the ones creating the AMP page.
    - RVuRnvbM2e 6y ago
      > While AMP itself isn't a ranking factor, speed is a ranking factor for Google Search. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp It's pretty blatantly the case that AMP provides a SEO boost. What hosting service could possibly compete with the speed at which Google can retrieve content from their _own_ servers? That's the whole point of this legislation: to give news orgs means to stop Google from twisting their arm in this way.

thu2111 6y ago

I'm very curious how this law wouldn't violate various free trade deals Australia has struck. Surely a tax that explicitly names only foreign companies is the opposite of free trade? Sure, China has driven a truck through the whole concept of the WTO over decades and so I doubt anything will happen. Free trade deals are very much toothless, on the assumption that they are supposed to make sense on their own terms so enforcement is not required. But I can see the USA especially if Trump wins a second term deciding that Australia should be trade sanctioned for discrimination against US businesses. The White House won't want to see tech firms become piggybanks for failed industries and economies around the world.

loktarogar 6y ago
"Pay for what you use" isn't a tax. Also, AFAIK the government gets none of this money, but I might be wrong on that.
- vermilingua 6y ago
  The government gets this money back in a) “business lunches”, gifts, etc; b) guaranteed industry “jobs” when their political careers end, which is far in the future due to; c) endless re-elections, as the entire media in this country exists as a Liberal Party PR firm.
  - deleted 6y ago
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- mcv 6y ago
  You're right, it's not a tax it's an involuntary contract. Google is required to get a license to link to these news sites, and isn't allowed not to link to them or abandon the whole concept of linking to Australian news sites. It violates every concept of free trade and free enterprise. I'm all for sensible regulation and taxing big corporations, but this doesn't sound like that.
yorwba 6y ago
The draft does not explicitly name foreign companies, it only refers to generic "digital platforms", so it's not a free trade issue. Free trade agreements tend to only be concerned with equal treatment, e.g. Most Favored Nation status. If, say, a country requires mining companies to implement certain minimum safety standards, that's totally acceptable from a free trade perspective if it applies to all companies, even if almost all mines are operated by international conglomerates. Such a law might make it more difficult for foreign companies to keep operating, but without providing an advantage for domestic companies who have to abide by the same regulations. I also disagree that China has driven a truck through the WTO, since it was China that had to agree to various concessions as part of WTO accession. https://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/iclr/vol27/iss2/6/ https://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/iclr/vol27/iss2/6/ When people complain about hurdles for foreign companies in China, their information tends to be either outdated (e.g. joint venture requirements) or the same hurdles apply to Chinese companies (e.g. need to censor your website if you have one).

harryf 6y ago

> A healthy news media sector is essential to a well-functioning democracy. This part at the end is interesting. If this fight goes down that rabbit hole, bearing in mind filter bubbles, Cambridge Analytica etc. it may lead to a discussion worth having

vermilingua 6y ago

> A healthy news media sector is essential to a well-functioning democracy. This feels like a slap in the face. Whoever wrote this would be fully aware that our media sector is anything but healthy, and that our “democracy” flatlined years ago. I can only imagine that this was written by a committee that was sinking beers and laughing their asses off as they watched this post go live.

marcusverus 6y ago
Why are you air-quoting Australian democracy? Aussies have one of the healthiest democracies in the world--9th out of 167 ranked countries according to the EUI annual 'Democracy Index'.[0] Is it posh to pretend to be misrepresented and/or oppressed nowadays? [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_Index_by_country_2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_Inde...
- vermilingua 6y ago
  Do you live in Australia, or follow Australian politics? If not, it may interest you to know that we once had a carbon tax. It wasn’t stalled in the house or amended into nonexistence like a lot of politically charged law, but was repealed. The influence that the coal industry (leveraged by NewsCorp) has in this country is insane. It may also interest you to know that Kevin Rudd, a previous prime minister, was (is) the subject of a relentless smear campaign on the part of NewsCorp. He was removed from power not by an election, but via a leadership spill brought on by the pressure exerted by Murdoch. It may also interest you to investigate how our second wave of COVID-19 is being reported in Australian media. The second wave began in Federally funded and operated aged care facilities; however has been branded entirely as the “Melbourne wave”, pinning the blame on the Labour Party (the opposition to the party controlling the federal govt) and its state leader. We are misrepresented. The Democracy Index is published by The Economist. They may not be owned by NewsCorp, but you can be damn sure they feel their gaze.
  - 0xy 6y ago
    The Labor party you speak of issued full-throated endorsements of metadata retention legislation as well as the encryption ban. Forgive me for not picking up the violin.

zmmmmm 6y ago

This is a very disappointing response from the ACCC. It seems to be extremely misleading in its own right. > Google will not be required to charge Australians for the use of its free services Google did not state this. The ACCC - the supposed detached "fair" regulator, in charge of creating this code, just made something up to suit their own ends. > Google will not be required to share any additional user data with Australian news businesses The code [1] literally says: "The responsible digital platform must ... give information about how the registered news business corporation can gain access to ... the data that the digital platform service collects (whether or not it shares the data with the registered news business)about the registered news business’ users through their engagement with covered news content made available by the digital platform service" (Page 10, Section 52M). The ACCC here is straight up lying. I would like any of the people vocally defending it here to say what they think about this. NB: I think it is quite telling that it's quite hard to dig out the actual draft code [1] - they don't seem to link to it in any of their press releases etc. They actually don't want people to be able to discuss this openly from what I can tell: [1] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill%20-%20TREASURY%20LAWS%20AMENDENT%20%28NEWS%20MEDIA%20AND%20DIGITAL%20PLATFORMS%20MANDATORY%20BARGAINING%20CODE%29%20BILL%202020.pdf https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill...

RVuRnvbM2e 6y ago
> > Google will not be required to share any additional user data with Australian news businesses You misquoted the legislation. It says that the digital platform must provide to the news organisations: > a list and explanation of the data that the digital platform service collects (whether or not it shares the data with the registered news business) A _list and explanation of_ the data. Not the data itself. > The ACCC here is straight up lying. No, they really aren't.
- zmmmmm 6y ago
  I am not sure why you are saying this when every word I cited is literally copied and pasted from the draft legislation? You have cited section 52M(b) as if that is the only clause in that section, ignoring 52M(a) which I have exactly quoted from. Why are you ignoring that subsection?

jay_kyburz 6y ago

This whole thing is really weird. We're bending over backwards to try and accommodate Google being allowed to profit from other peoples content. How about we simply ban Google and Facebook from reproducing news on their own site? And if we are truly believe "A healthy news media sector is essential to a well-functioning democracy." we need to punish both Google and content creators for publishing things that are demonstrably false. Fake News in otherwords.

austhrow743 6y ago
Australia has IP laws already.
threeseed 6y ago
> How about we simply ban Google and Facebook from reproducing news on their own site? You can. Just add the robots.txt to the website. But the news sites need Facebook/Google more than the other way around.
- RVuRnvbM2e 6y ago
  > But the news sites need Facebook/Google more than the other way around. This is oft-quoted, but the media organisations seemed to be doing better before Google/Facebook became the middle-man siphoning off advertising revenue.
  - Ivoirians 6y ago
    User behavior has changed. Look what happened when a similar law was passed in Spain. Google News pulled out and people stopped visiting Spanish news sites, they didn't flock back to purchasing subscriptions and physical newspapers.
fungi 6y ago
> How about we simply ban Google and Facebook from reproducing news on their own site? News Corp is and always has been free to not have its content on Google (https://www.robotstxt.org/ https://www.robotstxt.org/). But that's not what they want, they want a Money just for appearing in search results. Seems more like a rent seeking for News Corp. > We're bending over backwards to try and accommodate Google The funny/bizzare bit is we are bending over backwards to accommodate 2 multinational American corporate monopolies that don't even pay tax in this country.

nocturnial 6y ago

Let's put aside whether Google had justified concerns about this legalislation. What's more appriopriate? Having a company incite the people in a foreign country to change laws or do it using diplomacy using experts in your state departement? We are only talking about allied countries to the US because google doesn't do this with, for example, china, russia, north korea, etc... I'm NOT advocating they should do this with those countries. Rather they should get out of the politics business or accept the regulations that come with it.

mcv 6y ago
Note that this legislation is the direct result of other companies getting involved in the politics business and pushing for this regulation. Google is seeing their business model made impossible and warns for the consequences, as they should, and certainly have the right to do. Sometimes legislation can make a business model impossible or undesirable. For example, making information available in China with a strong censorship regime. Or in this case, being required to link to news sites while being forced to pay for it. If this loses Google more money than it's worth, they may have to abandon Australia.
stephen_g 6y ago
Problem is, once you get to a certain size, it's almost impossible to just "stay out of the politics" - because other companies won't stay out of it. The whole reason this bill exists is because another American multinational company that pays no tax in Australia and owns 70% of the readership of Australian news media is very effective in its politics. And they didn't do it by telling the public to ask for it - they have close ties with politicians, they give favourable coverage, they take all the Government's leaks and publish anonymously, they will minimise stories the Government doesn't want published...
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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phuongpp 6y ago

hihi

cwhiz 6y ago

I am for any law or policy that hurts Google. And I really don’t care whether it’s fair or unfair. I’m not sure any two companies have caused more worldwide carnage, in the history of the world, than FB and Google.

renaicirc 6y ago
I'd say News Corp (Fox News, Sky News, NY Post, etc.) ranks pretty high on the list of damaging companies, and this law was clearly written to benefit them.
Quarrel 6y ago
This is an idiotic attitude when the law is purely for the purposes of benefiting NewsCorp, who have surely done even worse. If it gave consumers a better outcome, then maybe, but it won't.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  It’s not about choice. It’s about destroying Google as a company. They are a spyware business that have destabilized the entire internet economy.

infinkaramazov 6y ago

I'm Australian, and I created an account just to comment on this issue. Imagine Google News or the Facebook news feed were normal news websites. If you count their traffic as the amount of times people went to those websites just to read news, their raw traffic would dwarf any other news website in Australia by an order of magnitude. Journalistic websites have editorial standards, and at least some relationship and commitment to the truth (even the Murdoch ones). A news feed, while algorithmically generated, is for all intents and purposes the front page of a newspaper for many, many people. There is no editor of a news feed. No one checks that what bubbles up to the top passes basic fact checking standards. Most importantly, there's no consequences for misinformation and conspiracy theories being on the same front page as a story about some construction disrupting your commute tomorrow. The main gist of the new code of conduct, to me, seems like the ability for news websites to collectively bargain with a multinational corporation that essentially controls the news landscape in this country. We aren't the USA. Our news websites aren't the New York Times and the Washington Post. Unfortunately, the two biggest are owned by fairly evil companies (Channel nine and News Corp). Rupert Murdoch himself controls 70% of the Australian media landscape. When he dies, however, this law will still exist. We've seen the consequences of a journalistic landscape that exists solely through social media without any significant independent news sources in Myanmar in 2015. Australia won't end up like that, but allowing independent journalism to wither on the vine distorts our ability to participate in democracy. As a collective, if every single news organisation decided to go on strike from Facebook or Google tomorrow, the amount of money advertisers would pay them would drop off a cliff. Google is scared by this because they know that the value they give to the consumer is the sum of Australian journalism, a tasting menu of all the best stuff that newspapers have to offer. Why, then, shouldn't that sum itself have the ability to bargain against Google and get itself a better deal?

kevincox 6y ago
For Google at least they have the option to opt-out. They can add a robots.txt file to prevent indexing. It isn't clear to me why special legislation is required to give the media companies bargaining power. They already have the power to say no if they don't think the arrangement is fair. (For facebook it is less clear, because you can't really force people to stop sharing your links)

rbg246 6y ago

It might have the unintended social positive of Google not indexing or allowing people to link to news limited on their services.

mattoxic 6y ago

Side issue, but... maybe Google can pay some tax in this country as a first step.

pb7 6y ago
How much tax does News Corp, for whom this law is designed for, pay?

jacquesm 6y ago

When Murdoch and Google duke it out using the Australian people as their human shield I find nothing to be happy about and plenty to be sad about. Both parties here are disingenuous about their stated positions, both are rather cynical in how the perform their negotiations. In the end the public, no matter what, will end up the loser because neither of these parties has their best interest at heart. Murdoch just wants money, Google wants to get as much content as they can for free and meanwhile whatever they agree on will be paid for by the public in one way or another. This is a disgusting spectacle at many levels.

mattoxic 6y ago
The Australian consumer has already lost. This whole country is an exercise in trussing up the public and making sure they pay the very most for the very least. I've long given up on Australian journalism - at least in the main stream. Obviously the Murdoch papers are garbage, but the Age and SMH are almost (and becoming) as appalling. The ABC and SBS have been cowered to the extent that they jump at their own shadows and now _have_ to include cometary from utter fuckwits like Gerard Henderson or that vast twit Greg Sheridan lest they appear biased. It now seems that the ABC almost has to ask permission to publish a story. The Age was a great newspaper, now it's almost unreadable - apart form the NYTimes and Wapo stories they run. Google are not the good guys. They are a rapacious monopoly that have their shareholders interest at heart, NOT the Google consumer. And in terms of "trusting them with our data" - like that's the very least we'd expect from a product that purports to do this - and they don't do this for free - WE pay for it. Like cry me a river Google - like News Corp, they pay fuck all tax in Australia, and, just like Murdoch, are more than happy to take advertising from fake news and conspiracy pushers that does nothing but fatten their profits and damage society. There is good media out there - Crikey, The Guardian, New Matilda, new Daily etc, but it isn't mainstream, one has to, dare I say, search for it.
- NamTaf 6y ago
  You and the parent post both sum up my feelings better than I can. We Aussies are being used as meat in the grinder between two companies that are each pretty awful in their own ways. I struggle to feel bad for either of them, really. Probably the most depressing of all of this is how the ACCC - what has always been a very closely treasured and respected independent government body - has been used here as a pawn by the government-media oligarchy. It really soils all the really good work they've done to give us very robust and fair consumer laws and protections we enjoy. They've been used as the shitkickers for what is obviously a Murdoch-driven government play, where (not unlike the Five Eyes playbook) he hopes to ram through some draconian bullshit here as a proving ground, to which he can later point in the UK and US for similar laws there. One of the best decisions I ever made was adding Newscorp's bullshit to my ad blocker so accidentally clicking URLs to it fails to load. One of the other best was disconecting myself from Google as much as I have.

microcolonel 6y ago

This response does not respond to the claims made in the open letter. The bill as drafted is pure corporate rent-seeking, and appears to serve no genuine public good.

Karupan 6y ago

Looks like Google has now started showing a popup [0] in Australia which links to the open letter [1]. [0] https://i.imgur.com/A3IPkQy.png https://i.imgur.com/A3IPkQy.png [1] https://about.google/intl/ALL_au/google-in-australia/an-open-letter https://about.google/intl/ALL_au/google-in-australia/an-open...

jacquesm 6y ago
Desperately in need of footsoldiers.
- senectus1 6y ago
  yeah my 12 yr old son just got this pop up on his phone. His response was "not cool Gov.." I had to explain that the situation is actually more complicated than that and he shouldn't trust one source for the truth. I think he's starting to understand that there is no good guy here.

shusson 6y ago

TLDR: - google has monopoly on search results. - traditional news companies not making enough money, blame google. - Australian government decides it knows what is best, regulate the monopoly. I would love to hear some input from actual journalists. It's telling that in the whole 29 page draft, journalist is mentioned twice and consumer(as a natural person) is mentioned once[1]. From the draft, I don't get the feeling the Australian government is really interested in a healthy news media sector but rather, making the existing news media sector happy. [1] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill%20-%20TREASURY%20LAWS%20AMENDENT%20%28NEWS%20MEDIA%20AND%20DIGITAL%20PLATFORMS%20MANDATORY%20BARGAINING%20CODE%29%20BILL%202020.pdf https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill...

specialist 6y ago

For the health of society, all recommender algorithms have to be daylighted. For a start. Yes, the gamification will be terrible. So what? Is maximal advertising revenue for monopolies societally important? Every other efficient open market is heavily regulated. Accountability, transparency, fair play, information symmetry, prohibit self-dealing & conflicts of interest, tort, etc. Right now we can't even imagine applying casino level scrutiny to social media. What's so special about social media that it doesn't warrant some hygiene, some guard rails?

Grimm1 6y ago
I don't disagree with you but not all reccomenders are causing the political issues we see now. As an example, what Netflix movies are being recommended to you is, in my opinion, immaterial. I think there needs to be nuanced law here maybe just targeting and regulating recommendations on what we would consider news or communications platforms.
- specialist 6y ago
  IDK. I feel pretty siloed on Netflix today. And I wander how 3rd party content producers feel about Netflix's recommenders.
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    I think that's a product issue though and not something that requires regulation. I feel the exact opposite, I barely look at them and get my recs from friends or other sites I frequent.
esrauch 6y ago
> Yes, the gamification will be terrible. So what? Is maximal advertising revenue for monopolies societally important? I don't really see how gamification being terrible will only cause ad revenue to drop. Surely it will also make the results worse and less relevant to you? As in, if SEO spam managed to take over the top results of major queries, it doesn't just drop ad revenue but actually makes Search suck, right?

Bloggerzune 6y ago

As a website owner, security is important because: https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/05/WordPress-security-issues-and-tips.html?m=1 https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/05/WordPress-security-issue... People may not engage on your site (purchase your products & services) if it's unsecure Google Chrome (the most popular browser) is cracking down on insecure sites, and we have seen that Google and other popular search engines do tend to prioritize SSL-secured sites over non-secured sites When your site gets hacked, that triggers a chain reaction that can lead to loss of data, breach of user data (your customer data becoming public), loss of sales, visitors trust, getting blacklisted on search engines and browsers, legal issues, and tons of wasted time and money Go ahead and take these three steps before the end of January to make your business more secure online:

r0m4n0 6y ago

I’m just curious if anyone knows... does this specifically call out Google or does this also potentially have implications for other news aggregators that work in a similar way? Could this also target reddit or even hacker news? I couldn’t find where they define the platform that is Google.

dlubarov 6y ago
The draft doesn't name Google or Facebook, but 52C gives the Treasurer the ability to deem specific corporations and services "designated digital platform corporations/services", and they have announced that Google and Facebook will be the initial targets. E.g. in the explanatory materials, > In the first instance, the Government has announced that the mandatory code of conduct will apply to Facebook and Google. However, the Treasurer may also make subsequent instruments in the future designating other platforms where fundamental bargaining power imbalances with Australian news businesses emerge.

shirro 6y ago

A small number of media owners control old media in Australia. There is a single national newspaper and most cities have a single daily. They are generally owned by the same person. That person flies in people at election time to aggressively campaign for the government of their choice. This only makes sense if there is some quid pro quo. I have no love for Facebook or Google but the Australian government does what it must to keep favour with media proprietors or risk toxic campaigns against them.

shruubi 6y ago

To fully understand this, it would be a good idea to understand the degree of influence that the Murdoch media has on the Australian landscape. Murdoch media owns the vast majority of newspapers across Australia and is also more or less the only cable TV provider in Australia. A good highlight of the power the Murdoch press has over Australia would be to look at the fact that the vast majority of journalists who work in the Canberra press gallery (parliamentary journalists), work for The Australian or other Murdoch entities, and have such a stranglehold on political journalism that it is a commonly accepted truth in Australian journalism that "if you want to know tomorrows news, read The Australian today." The real kicker is that the Murdoch presses political biases are not subtle or secret, they are about as overt and blatant as you can possibly get with The Australian frequently running full front-page articles trashing one political party (Labor, the "left" leaning party) and heaping praise on the other (Liberal/National, the "right" leaning party). With all of that context, the bill suddenly takes on a slightly more sinister tone when you realise that it is more or less designed to benefit one man and his media empire.

aplummer 6y ago

> This will address a significant bargaining power imbalance between Australian news media businesses and Google and Facebook. This is so untrue. News Corp is easily the most powerful political entity in Australia. It’s not a stretch to say they pick prime ministers.