Yes, that's been a big hole in their argument from day one. They tried to avoid this by putting in provision to not let Facebook/Google just block Australian ne

Yes, that's been a big hole in their argument from day one. They tried to avoid this by putting in provision to not let Facebook/Google just block Australian news material or just the ones that qualify for payment, but didn't think they would go this far of not letting anybody in Australia post any news. The other point is that the news sources could easily use robots.txt and other methods to completely cut off Facebook and Google from scraping their content. If their content was as valuable to Facebook and Google as they say it is, a few players organising a boycott and cutting them off for a bit would be a very powerful bargaining tool. Or if they just felt the content was being misused, they could just block them on principal. But they don't do either. Why not, if it's so valuable to Google and Facebook?