> But the pretense is bizarre - that google has to pay Murdoch because it steals his content. That's not exactly the pretext. The Australian regulation is bei

> But the pretense is bizarre - that google has to pay Murdoch because it steals his content. That's not exactly the pretext. The Australian regulation is being proposed under the office of competition; it's effectively a proposed anti-trust regulation. It's not alleging that Google is engaging in some sort of copyright infringement or "theft" of proprietary News Corp property, but rather that it's abusing its market position. From some of the terms of the proposed law (namely information regarding treatment of paywalls and coverage of news-adjacent content like sports), I think that one claim to unfairness is "Google makes it hard for News Corp to have a profitable paywall because it directs people to other sources." That's not particularly convincing to me, but I'm not an Australian regulator.