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Google looks at pulling all or part of its search engine from Australia

46 points by mafro 6y ago

BelenusMordred 6y ago
Will be interesting to see how this plays out. Australia is tiny in the grand scheme of things but the average revenue per user is huge, there's still a lot of money on the table here, along with the domino effect. The government will face huge amount of pressure and be forced to backflip within days if they actually go through with it, but perhaps that is what they want, to set up this narrative that these entities have far more power than any democratically elected government, which for the most part I think is entirely correct, these companies can make or break many governments on Earth. And while I support them in what they are doing, in the back of my mind all I can think is that Rupert Murdoch probably pulled some strings to make this happen for his own benefit and it's corrupt all the way down.
- mrep 6y ago
  From the article, it sounds like google will stop putting news websites in their search results altogether and still provide search results for other websites. I doubt they will have much effect on them because I doubt they make much money on news related searches. I've never seen an ad on the news tab. Also from the article, Facebook has also already said that if the law goes through, they will stop Australians from posting news in their news feed.
- liaukovv 6y ago
  If any australian politician is even semi-competent they will have no trouble presenting it as google trying to strong-arm the nation
  - stephen_g 6y ago
    It might surprise a lot of people from other countries just how few competent politicians there are in the governing party. But the News Ltd and Nine/Fairfax duopoly run a kind of protection racket which helps them retain power, and it'll be the papers that come up with the talking points (they lobbied for the attempted double-dip "media bargaining code" in the first place).
  - squiggleblaz 6y ago
    I think there will be some difficulty about that, since a lot of people in Australia already know that News Ltd owns a majority share in the Liberal party (the balance being owned by the coal industry). Therefore, a lot of people will see this as Google sharing their interests insofar as harming News helps them. Also, liberalism has been sufficiently successful in Australia that the argument "new business should not be compelled to serve interests of old business" will have some currency. Whether these two sectors will be enough to win an election fought on this argument (widely expected in the second half of this year) remains to be seen.
    - seunosewa 6y ago
      The notion that corporations are actually allowed to own parties in Australia seems shocking. You mean they are top donors, right?
      - manicdee 6y ago
        The Liberal Party of Australia runs/is run by a think tank called "Institute of Public Affairs" which is in turn run by a bunch of rich people who take marching orders from Murdoch. It doesn't become much more transparent than, say, senior members of the Liberal Party government travelling to the USA to visit Rupert but not any US politicians or diplomats. News Corp may not own the title deeds for any property, but they have all the receipts for money paid and souls bought.
      - stephen_g 6y ago
        Yeah, not literal shares. It’s more that a lot of the staffers working for the conservative party (confusingly called the Liberal Party) come from the News Ltd media and mining companies, and a lot of executives of mining/resource companies and journalists and executives at the Nine/Fairfax and News Ltd. duopoly are ex-politicians, political staffers, etc. - lots of revolving doors between them. For example, the current PM’s chief of staff came straight from Rio Tinto, previous PM Tony Abbot’s chief of staff (Peta Credlin) now has a show on Sky News, as does ex-PM Turnbull’s (Chris Kenny, from when Turnbull was opposition leader), who also writes for The Australian newspaper. On the other side of the duopoly, the chairman of Nine/Fairfax is an ex-Liberal Party treasurer (basically the most powerful cabinet minister apart from the PM), and they held fundraising events for the party at their studios during the last election. So the media run positive stories about the Government, and downplay or fail to run stories about, for example, serious allegations of corruption against multiple cabinet ministers of the Government, while policy proposals from the opposition are scrutinised far more closely and savagely than actual policy from the actual Government, and often rubbished. The media runs character assassinations against opposition party leaders and MPs and puff pieces about the Government ministers, the PM’s wife and her fashion choices, etc. - it’s pretty shameless. Then there are links between Government, the media and big business (again, mostly mining here) through a bunch of think tanks like the IPA (extreme far-right), the Sydney Institute, etc. As long as environmental protections are kept weak enough for the miners, and tax cuts keep being promised for the wealthy, none of them rock the boat.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > presenting it as google trying to strong-arm the nation Sounds like they'd be complying with the law, not trying to strong-arm anyone.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    Being able to present something a certain way and it actually being that way are two different things. The nation is considering a law that says, if you link to news you have to pay X. Google is trying to figure out if the money they make from linking to news Y is greater than X. If Y < X, why would they continue linking to news? It's not a strong arm tactic, just a simple cost-benefit move. And it's not a demonstration of market power either. The proposed regulation only applies to companies already deemed to have market power, so only such companies are considering reacting to the regulation this way. But if the law applied universally, you would obviously see the exact same calculation happen at companies that don't have market power. Most would come to the same conclusion as Google seems to have done: it's not worth it to link to news under these terms.
- BLKNSLVR 6y ago
  > corrupt all the way down I'm sure I read somewhere, possibly also on Crikey, that News Corp practically wrote the legislation for the Australian Government, and that some amendments were necessary so that the state-funded ABC would not be excluded from the deal. I'll try to find reference to that. Edit, stinging Crikey article here[1] Edit two, here's an article mentioning including state broadcasters in the code[2] Stratechery did an in-depth breakdown of elements of the legislation[0] [0]https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargaining-code-breaking-down-the-code-australias-fake-news/ https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargainin... [1]https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/08/28/google-facebook-accc-changes/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/08/28/google-facebook-accc-ch... [2]https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/nov/25/google-and-facebook-news-payments-to-include-abc-and-sbs-after-change-to-draft-code https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/nov/25/google-and-fac...
  - creata 6y ago
    Wow, I wonder why Crikey's tone on this legislation changed so much between August 2020 and now.
    - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
      Different journalists. Bernard Keane is a firebrand. I find that a good sign that Crikey doesn't get too editorially involved in the journalism.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > News Corp practically wrote the legislation for the Australian Government That makes sense. It fits in with News Corps long war on news aggregating tech firms (Google, largely) and their several failed attempts to lead alternative services controlled by the traditional publishing industry (with themselves in the steering seat.) So, having failed to compete, they’ve just decided to lobby government to put its finger on the scale to impose a plan as nonviable as their own prior commercial ventures: if they can’t succeed in the news aggregating portal business, they’ll make news aggregation and search a business in which success is brutally punished with terms that make the business completely nonviable.
- gonzo41 6y ago
  Rupert Murdoch is really old. I don't think he's that involved any more. But yes he's created a self sustaining corruption engine. It'd be very interesting to see google drop Australia. Watch us all start using duckduckgo. It'd be great if they did it. It's an election year and It'd be nice to see such a foolish move by our lazy government.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    > I don't think he's that involved any more. Where in the hell did you pull this nonsense from? Also would like to see Google do it. Good riddance imo. It will rock the nation but will spur interior innovation which we sorely need seeing as housing and the mining booms are over.
  - stephen_g 6y ago
    From what I’ve read, apparently Rupert Murdoch still informs editors what direction to take on certain issues. But a lot of editors don’t need direct instruction all the time - I recall an interview - must have been an ex-editor of one of his papers who said they very quickly get into a pattern of thinking where their first thought on a story is “how would Rupert want this reported?”. So while he probably wasn’t directly involved, I’m sure he had very strong input on what direction the people leading the lobbying effort should take. But even if he wasn’t, I’ve also heard the son who still works there (the one who didn’t quit in disgust over the organisation’s editorial direction) is just as bad...
cblconfederate 6y ago
I think it's more like, Australia cancelling google
- philjohn 6y ago
  Murdoch putting his grubby hands all over a democratically elected country to try and further his own aims. The Murdoch empire has far more sway over public discourse, and who gets into power than any of the big tech firms, but of course the Murdoch dominated press ignores that ...
bovermyer 6y ago
I think Google is overestimating its value. If Australia no longer has access to Google, they'll just find alternatives, and then discover that they never needed Google after all.
- visarga 6y ago
  Nobody said "Australia no longer has access to Google". Google could simply skip Australian news in search results - deplatforming only the news, maybe later reopen access under a new agreement with the willing newspapers. But that could backfire and Google's power to deplatform a company or a whole market without recourse could be bad for their anti-trust lawsuits. They are benefiting from their powerful status of being a central internet infrastructure without wanting to be subjected to the rigors we set for other infrastructure, such as buildings, roads, energy and food. Would you agree to have the hypothetical 90% monopolist in road construction and operation ban your business or town, so you can eat your freedom and drive on unpaved roads?
  - creata 6y ago
    > Nobody said "Australia no longer has access to Google" That's not true: the article's title intentionally misled on that front, and the article body continued to raise fears about a "restricted" search product.
- dageshi 6y ago
  Whatever search engine receives the majority of the traffic that google loses presumably then faces the same problem under the law?
  - squiggleblaz 6y ago
    Well, they'd have to have some significant Australian nexus; Duck Duck Go is probably relatively safe from this but Bing would obviously be at risk. I suspect there would be some tendency to prefer the browser that is immune if this code is as unpopular as I imagine it will be.
- 6y ago
mathlover2 6y ago
Australia really should not have done this. This didn't work in Spain. It won't work in Australia.
- rafaelturk 6y ago
  Can you elaborate?
  - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
    Not OP and very basically: Roughly the same situation occurred in Spain, Google stopped their Spanish News service and Spanish news media revenue went down a non-trivial percentage.
    - rurban 6y ago
      Didn't the same thing happen in Germany also? German news demanded a certain percentage of ad revenue from Google if they continue to copy content from them for their preview. Was that already solved? Ah yes, Google won this lawsuit. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-germany-publishers/google-wins-legal-battle-with-german-publishers-over-fee-demands-idUSKCN1VX0R2 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-germany-publishers...
      - brummm 6y ago
        The EU is not Australia, so court cases in the EU have 0 impact on Australian ones, no? Further, it seems that Google won through a technicality, that the European Commission hadn't been notified of the new regulation and on these ground the case was dismissed. That's very different from actually ruling on the underlying issue.
    - gonzo41 6y ago
      If Australian news was of the quality of the washington post, or Deutsche Welle, I'd pay for it. But it's not, and Australians love talking about price signals.
wombatmobile 6y ago
The move by Murdoch to force Google to pay for linking to news articles, which are paywalled anyway, was always audacious and unlikely to succeed on first principles, because Google's indexing is not copyright violation. It is a service to help Murdoch's readers find Murdoch's articles. When customers click through, they end up on Murdoch web properties. The fact that Murdoch's scheme got this far just shows how much power he has over the Liberal Party in Australia.
- yostrovs 6y ago
  Thing is that most people mostly read only the headlines. The headlines themselves had value. People would scan over a newspaper's headlines, flipping the pages, being exposed to the ads. Now people just scroll through Google News reading the headlines and the first sentence or two, which is enough in most cases to get the idea that there was a murder or something. So the newspapers don't get visitors just browsing through headlines anymore on their front page. That's the problem I believe that is real and partly killing the publishers.
  - timbit42 6y ago
    They should craft their headlines to look interesting without giving away the details people want to see.
    - wombatmobile 6y ago
      Your jaw will drop when you see who is doing this right now!
erlich 6y ago
Crikey is sensationalist link-bait crap, just as this article's headline and the article itself.
- creata 6y ago
  Yep. In this very thread we see people with the misunderstanding that Google is going to block Australians from using its search engine.
- BLKNSLVR 6y ago
  I'm a Crikey subscriber so factor that bias in to your opinion of my reply. Crikey is an Australian publication of limited circulation and had covered the developments of this legislation quite thoroughly since it cropped up in August last year, so most Crikey readers would know the context upon reading the headline. Crikey being sensationalist link bait goes against their, generally, subscriber-only access. 'crap' judgement is up to the reader.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    Hope you're not a friendly jordies fan also.
- erlich 6y ago
  Well...turns out this is what they are now threatening to do.
zerof1l 6y ago
It will be interesting to see how this whole thing will play out. Google and Facebook are major players and easy targets. But will the government and companies go after every single search engine like DDG? Will there be "pirate" news search engines? Like for torrents. I don't believe that every single news website in Australia agrees with this law. Some would want to be listed in the search results without getting money. Will there be an opt-in?
- oneweekwonder 6y ago
  > Will there be an opt-in? There is a opt-out[0]. But "the protocol is purely advisory and relies on the compliance of the web robot" so maybe laws is needed to punish crawlers not following the exclusion standard? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
- jsnell 6y ago
  > Will there be an opt-in? There can't be. The way the law is written, if Google and Facebook serve any news links in Australia, even from non-Australian sites, Murdoch gets to shake them for unbounded amounts of money.
stevespang 6y ago
FLUSH Google down the drain. Google prefers the Chinese commies over our brothers, the Aussies.
pjc50 6y ago
> if the code goes ahead, it will stop Australians posting news in their News Feed Everything is fine, citizens, nothing to see here! Can we direct the usual "censorship" outrage onto censoring all the news? Unfortunately this is a fight between two or more parties both of which have dirt on their hands. The "news" in question in Australia is mostly Murdoch propaganda. It's not great for FB/Google to profit off embedding other people's intellectual property but "information wants to be free" and we don't want precedents set for how and whether you can link to websites. Edit: I agree with https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/08/28/google-facebook-accc-changes/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/08/28/google-facebook-accc-ch... "For the avoidance of doubt, it couldn’t happen to two nicer companies. There are sound policy reasons to loathe Google and Facebook — for their relentless accumulation and abuse of personal data, for their anti-competitive acquisitions of smaller rivals, for their tax dodging, for their complicity in the spread of highly damaging, often literally lethal misinformation and propaganda. But their alleged theft of news content isn’t one."
- Guthur 6y ago
  Quite frankly I'm at a lose to understand why we think these partisan profit driven companies (news corps) should enjoy any sort of privileged status. I quite happily move through life without them. I bump into their paywalls or adblocker checks and go else and still find myself more informed about nonsense i've no influence upon than is good for me.
  - squiggleblaz 6y ago
    Rupert Murdoch seems to be able to select the Australian prime minister; certainly, two former prime ministers whose parties dumped them between elections have gone on the record saying they believe he has a significant amount of power. Consequently, since his company owns the governing Liberal party, it's no surprise that his interests magically become the interests of the government and through them the country. You are of course right. But there is very little media competition in Australia. In a best case scenario, the opposition wins the election expected later this year and drops this policy. But is that a likely scenario? I wouldn't bet a horse on it.
avsteele 6y ago
I can't understand the support for this scheme among readers here. As I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong) The AUS government passed a law aimed at a making a specific search engine pay other private entities for including links to them among its results. Seems nuts! Of course Google has to decide to either comply or pull out of the market, that's always their right.
- nix23 6y ago
  >The AUS government passed a law aimed at a making a specific search engine pay other private entities for including links to them among its results. True and i as Google would just say, hey if you want your link in our Australian search-result you have to pay upfront. Problem solved. If Australia has, for some time just white pages then the peoples will probably do something about it...in the meantime google get a butt-load of money, and Australia looses allot of it.
  - rognjen 6y ago
    And the AUS government can would then say "You're in breach of this code, billions please."
    - nix23 6y ago
      Why? You then don't show any links (or any results at all), and even funnier the Australian new-outlets now have to pay too be even found. And maybe just maybe Australia makes his own search-engine (which would be a good thing)
      - squiggleblaz 6y ago
        Who in Australia couldn't name at least one of Rupert Murdoch's news websites? No one needs to use Google to find their front pages. This will be an own goal, but even as it backfires it will help Murdoch since it will make it much harder for a new news media site to get established. Ftr, this law is by and for Rupert Murdoch.
mola 6y ago
Seems like a good thing for everyone. People can still find the news sites and consume the news. The news sites can start to disentangle from the attention economy and clickbaity headlines in favor of more in-depth analysis that give actual value to users. News on facebook and google search highlight, is just bad news.
shp0ngle 6y ago
Does Google want out entirely of Australia, or just for Google News? This article seems to confuse the two, as if the user never used Google. (What's that bit about "yellow pages for internet"? Does he describe catalogues from the 90s? What?)
- squiggleblaz 6y ago
  The article is not entirely clear and requires some context. It is not just Google News, but also Google Search. People will often type in breaking news stories into Google Search to get information. It does not apply to products like Google Mail and Google Maps since they aren't platforms to get eyeballs onto content written for Rupert Murdoch. The suggested alternative is that instead of serving up Google Search in Australia (i.e. the thing produced by crawling websites), they might serve up an entirely opt-in service. Think of sites like the old dmoz.org. It will suck about as much as it sounds like it will suck. If they do that, I would expect Australian web search traffic to go mostly to the new Google Services Directory and spread gradually to Bing and Duck Duck Go and Yahoo. Microsoft and Yahoo will probably actively strive to avoid becoming the universal default, because as long as they aren't big enough they won't attract the burdens of this law.
gumby 6y ago
Let's be clear: despite the implication of the headline, this isn't google planning to stop indexing free resources nor planning to stop offering free searches. This solely refers to published news which, not surprisingly, many journalists consider the important part of the web. A common economic aphorism is "if you want less of something, tax it." Google is responding to regulatory+market signals as intended. Other countries have tried the same thing (e.g. Spain) and found that they haven't liked the results. Separately, the news sites trying to restrict people from forwarding articles in their own feeds is nuts.
- nojs 6y ago
  Yeah, the headline is very misleading.

46 points by mafro 6y ago

Will be interesting to see how this plays out. Australia is tiny in the grand scheme of things but the average revenue per user is huge, there's still a lot of money on the table here, along with the domino effect. The government will face huge amount of pressure and be forced to backflip within days if they actually go through with it, but perhaps that is what they want, to set up this narrative that these entities have far more power than any democratically elected government, which for the most part I think is entirely correct, these companies can make or break many governments on Earth. And while I support them in what they are doing, in the back of my mind all I can think is that Rupert Murdoch probably pulled some strings to make this happen for his own benefit and it's corrupt all the way down.

mrep 6y ago
From the article, it sounds like google will stop putting news websites in their search results altogether and still provide search results for other websites. I doubt they will have much effect on them because I doubt they make much money on news related searches. I've never seen an ad on the news tab. Also from the article, Facebook has also already said that if the law goes through, they will stop Australians from posting news in their news feed.
liaukovv 6y ago
If any australian politician is even semi-competent they will have no trouble presenting it as google trying to strong-arm the nation
- stephen_g 6y ago
  It might surprise a lot of people from other countries just how few competent politicians there are in the governing party. But the News Ltd and Nine/Fairfax duopoly run a kind of protection racket which helps them retain power, and it'll be the papers that come up with the talking points (they lobbied for the attempted double-dip "media bargaining code" in the first place).
- squiggleblaz 6y ago
  I think there will be some difficulty about that, since a lot of people in Australia already know that News Ltd owns a majority share in the Liberal party (the balance being owned by the coal industry). Therefore, a lot of people will see this as Google sharing their interests insofar as harming News helps them. Also, liberalism has been sufficiently successful in Australia that the argument "new business should not be compelled to serve interests of old business" will have some currency. Whether these two sectors will be enough to win an election fought on this argument (widely expected in the second half of this year) remains to be seen.
  - seunosewa 6y ago
    The notion that corporations are actually allowed to own parties in Australia seems shocking. You mean they are top donors, right?
    - manicdee 6y ago
      The Liberal Party of Australia runs/is run by a think tank called "Institute of Public Affairs" which is in turn run by a bunch of rich people who take marching orders from Murdoch. It doesn't become much more transparent than, say, senior members of the Liberal Party government travelling to the USA to visit Rupert but not any US politicians or diplomats. News Corp may not own the title deeds for any property, but they have all the receipts for money paid and souls bought.
    - stephen_g 6y ago
      Yeah, not literal shares. It’s more that a lot of the staffers working for the conservative party (confusingly called the Liberal Party) come from the News Ltd media and mining companies, and a lot of executives of mining/resource companies and journalists and executives at the Nine/Fairfax and News Ltd. duopoly are ex-politicians, political staffers, etc. - lots of revolving doors between them. For example, the current PM’s chief of staff came straight from Rio Tinto, previous PM Tony Abbot’s chief of staff (Peta Credlin) now has a show on Sky News, as does ex-PM Turnbull’s (Chris Kenny, from when Turnbull was opposition leader), who also writes for The Australian newspaper. On the other side of the duopoly, the chairman of Nine/Fairfax is an ex-Liberal Party treasurer (basically the most powerful cabinet minister apart from the PM), and they held fundraising events for the party at their studios during the last election. So the media run positive stories about the Government, and downplay or fail to run stories about, for example, serious allegations of corruption against multiple cabinet ministers of the Government, while policy proposals from the opposition are scrutinised far more closely and savagely than actual policy from the actual Government, and often rubbished. The media runs character assassinations against opposition party leaders and MPs and puff pieces about the Government ministers, the PM’s wife and her fashion choices, etc. - it’s pretty shameless. Then there are links between Government, the media and big business (again, mostly mining here) through a bunch of think tanks like the IPA (extreme far-right), the Sydney Institute, etc. As long as environmental protections are kept weak enough for the miners, and tax cuts keep being promised for the wealthy, none of them rock the boat.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > presenting it as google trying to strong-arm the nation Sounds like they'd be complying with the law, not trying to strong-arm anyone.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Being able to present something a certain way and it actually being that way are two different things. The nation is considering a law that says, if you link to news you have to pay X. Google is trying to figure out if the money they make from linking to news Y is greater than X. If Y < X, why would they continue linking to news? It's not a strong arm tactic, just a simple cost-benefit move. And it's not a demonstration of market power either. The proposed regulation only applies to companies already deemed to have market power, so only such companies are considering reacting to the regulation this way. But if the law applied universally, you would obviously see the exact same calculation happen at companies that don't have market power. Most would come to the same conclusion as Google seems to have done: it's not worth it to link to news under these terms.
BLKNSLVR 6y ago
> corrupt all the way down I'm sure I read somewhere, possibly also on Crikey, that News Corp practically wrote the legislation for the Australian Government, and that some amendments were necessary so that the state-funded ABC would not be excluded from the deal. I'll try to find reference to that. Edit, stinging Crikey article here[1] Edit two, here's an article mentioning including state broadcasters in the code[2] Stratechery did an in-depth breakdown of elements of the legislation[0] [0]https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargaining-code-breaking-down-the-code-australias-fake-news/ https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargainin... [1]https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/08/28/google-facebook-accc-changes/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/08/28/google-facebook-accc-ch... [2]https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/nov/25/google-and-facebook-news-payments-to-include-abc-and-sbs-after-change-to-draft-code https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/nov/25/google-and-fac...
- creata 6y ago
  Wow, I wonder why Crikey's tone on this legislation changed so much between August 2020 and now.
  - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
    Different journalists. Bernard Keane is a firebrand. I find that a good sign that Crikey doesn't get too editorially involved in the journalism.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > News Corp practically wrote the legislation for the Australian Government That makes sense. It fits in with News Corps long war on news aggregating tech firms (Google, largely) and their several failed attempts to lead alternative services controlled by the traditional publishing industry (with themselves in the steering seat.) So, having failed to compete, they’ve just decided to lobby government to put its finger on the scale to impose a plan as nonviable as their own prior commercial ventures: if they can’t succeed in the news aggregating portal business, they’ll make news aggregation and search a business in which success is brutally punished with terms that make the business completely nonviable.
gonzo41 6y ago
Rupert Murdoch is really old. I don't think he's that involved any more. But yes he's created a self sustaining corruption engine. It'd be very interesting to see google drop Australia. Watch us all start using duckduckgo. It'd be great if they did it. It's an election year and It'd be nice to see such a foolish move by our lazy government.
- waheoo 6y ago
  > I don't think he's that involved any more. Where in the hell did you pull this nonsense from? Also would like to see Google do it. Good riddance imo. It will rock the nation but will spur interior innovation which we sorely need seeing as housing and the mining booms are over.
- stephen_g 6y ago
  From what I’ve read, apparently Rupert Murdoch still informs editors what direction to take on certain issues. But a lot of editors don’t need direct instruction all the time - I recall an interview - must have been an ex-editor of one of his papers who said they very quickly get into a pattern of thinking where their first thought on a story is “how would Rupert want this reported?”. So while he probably wasn’t directly involved, I’m sure he had very strong input on what direction the people leading the lobbying effort should take. But even if he wasn’t, I’ve also heard the son who still works there (the one who didn’t quit in disgust over the organisation’s editorial direction) is just as bad...

cblconfederate 6y ago

I think it's more like, Australia cancelling google

philjohn 6y ago
Murdoch putting his grubby hands all over a democratically elected country to try and further his own aims. The Murdoch empire has far more sway over public discourse, and who gets into power than any of the big tech firms, but of course the Murdoch dominated press ignores that ...

bovermyer 6y ago

I think Google is overestimating its value. If Australia no longer has access to Google, they'll just find alternatives, and then discover that they never needed Google after all.

visarga 6y ago
Nobody said "Australia no longer has access to Google". Google could simply skip Australian news in search results - deplatforming only the news, maybe later reopen access under a new agreement with the willing newspapers. But that could backfire and Google's power to deplatform a company or a whole market without recourse could be bad for their anti-trust lawsuits. They are benefiting from their powerful status of being a central internet infrastructure without wanting to be subjected to the rigors we set for other infrastructure, such as buildings, roads, energy and food. Would you agree to have the hypothetical 90% monopolist in road construction and operation ban your business or town, so you can eat your freedom and drive on unpaved roads?
- creata 6y ago
  > Nobody said "Australia no longer has access to Google" That's not true: the article's title intentionally misled on that front, and the article body continued to raise fears about a "restricted" search product.
dageshi 6y ago
Whatever search engine receives the majority of the traffic that google loses presumably then faces the same problem under the law?
- squiggleblaz 6y ago
  Well, they'd have to have some significant Australian nexus; Duck Duck Go is probably relatively safe from this but Bing would obviously be at risk. I suspect there would be some tendency to prefer the browser that is immune if this code is as unpopular as I imagine it will be.
6y ago

mathlover2 6y ago

Australia really should not have done this. This didn't work in Spain. It won't work in Australia.

rafaelturk 6y ago
Can you elaborate?
- BLKNSLVR 6y ago
  Not OP and very basically: Roughly the same situation occurred in Spain, Google stopped their Spanish News service and Spanish news media revenue went down a non-trivial percentage.
  - rurban 6y ago
    Didn't the same thing happen in Germany also? German news demanded a certain percentage of ad revenue from Google if they continue to copy content from them for their preview. Was that already solved? Ah yes, Google won this lawsuit. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-germany-publishers/google-wins-legal-battle-with-german-publishers-over-fee-demands-idUSKCN1VX0R2 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-germany-publishers...
    - brummm 6y ago
      The EU is not Australia, so court cases in the EU have 0 impact on Australian ones, no? Further, it seems that Google won through a technicality, that the European Commission hadn't been notified of the new regulation and on these ground the case was dismissed. That's very different from actually ruling on the underlying issue.
  - gonzo41 6y ago
    If Australian news was of the quality of the washington post, or Deutsche Welle, I'd pay for it. But it's not, and Australians love talking about price signals.

wombatmobile 6y ago

The move by Murdoch to force Google to pay for linking to news articles, which are paywalled anyway, was always audacious and unlikely to succeed on first principles, because Google's indexing is not copyright violation. It is a service to help Murdoch's readers find Murdoch's articles. When customers click through, they end up on Murdoch web properties. The fact that Murdoch's scheme got this far just shows how much power he has over the Liberal Party in Australia.

yostrovs 6y ago
Thing is that most people mostly read only the headlines. The headlines themselves had value. People would scan over a newspaper's headlines, flipping the pages, being exposed to the ads. Now people just scroll through Google News reading the headlines and the first sentence or two, which is enough in most cases to get the idea that there was a murder or something. So the newspapers don't get visitors just browsing through headlines anymore on their front page. That's the problem I believe that is real and partly killing the publishers.
- timbit42 6y ago
  They should craft their headlines to look interesting without giving away the details people want to see.
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    Your jaw will drop when you see who is doing this right now!

erlich 6y ago

Crikey is sensationalist link-bait crap, just as this article's headline and the article itself.

creata 6y ago
Yep. In this very thread we see people with the misunderstanding that Google is going to block Australians from using its search engine.
BLKNSLVR 6y ago
I'm a Crikey subscriber so factor that bias in to your opinion of my reply. Crikey is an Australian publication of limited circulation and had covered the developments of this legislation quite thoroughly since it cropped up in August last year, so most Crikey readers would know the context upon reading the headline. Crikey being sensationalist link bait goes against their, generally, subscriber-only access. 'crap' judgement is up to the reader.
- waheoo 6y ago
  Hope you're not a friendly jordies fan also.
erlich 6y ago
Well...turns out this is what they are now threatening to do.

zerof1l 6y ago

It will be interesting to see how this whole thing will play out. Google and Facebook are major players and easy targets. But will the government and companies go after every single search engine like DDG? Will there be "pirate" news search engines? Like for torrents. I don't believe that every single news website in Australia agrees with this law. Some would want to be listed in the search results without getting money. Will there be an opt-in?

oneweekwonder 6y ago
> Will there be an opt-in? There is a opt-out[0]. But "the protocol is purely advisory and relies on the compliance of the web robot" so maybe laws is needed to punish crawlers not following the exclusion standard? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
jsnell 6y ago
> Will there be an opt-in? There can't be. The way the law is written, if Google and Facebook serve any news links in Australia, even from non-Australian sites, Murdoch gets to shake them for unbounded amounts of money.

stevespang 6y ago

FLUSH Google down the drain. Google prefers the Chinese commies over our brothers, the Aussies.

pjc50 6y ago

> if the code goes ahead, it will stop Australians posting news in their News Feed Everything is fine, citizens, nothing to see here! Can we direct the usual "censorship" outrage onto censoring all the news? Unfortunately this is a fight between two or more parties both of which have dirt on their hands. The "news" in question in Australia is mostly Murdoch propaganda. It's not great for FB/Google to profit off embedding other people's intellectual property but "information wants to be free" and we don't want precedents set for how and whether you can link to websites. Edit: I agree with https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/08/28/google-facebook-accc-changes/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/08/28/google-facebook-accc-ch... "For the avoidance of doubt, it couldn’t happen to two nicer companies. There are sound policy reasons to loathe Google and Facebook — for their relentless accumulation and abuse of personal data, for their anti-competitive acquisitions of smaller rivals, for their tax dodging, for their complicity in the spread of highly damaging, often literally lethal misinformation and propaganda. But their alleged theft of news content isn’t one."

Guthur 6y ago
Quite frankly I'm at a lose to understand why we think these partisan profit driven companies (news corps) should enjoy any sort of privileged status. I quite happily move through life without them. I bump into their paywalls or adblocker checks and go else and still find myself more informed about nonsense i've no influence upon than is good for me.
- squiggleblaz 6y ago
  Rupert Murdoch seems to be able to select the Australian prime minister; certainly, two former prime ministers whose parties dumped them between elections have gone on the record saying they believe he has a significant amount of power. Consequently, since his company owns the governing Liberal party, it's no surprise that his interests magically become the interests of the government and through them the country. You are of course right. But there is very little media competition in Australia. In a best case scenario, the opposition wins the election expected later this year and drops this policy. But is that a likely scenario? I wouldn't bet a horse on it.

avsteele 6y ago

I can't understand the support for this scheme among readers here. As I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong) The AUS government passed a law aimed at a making a specific search engine pay other private entities for including links to them among its results. Seems nuts! Of course Google has to decide to either comply or pull out of the market, that's always their right.

nix23 6y ago
>The AUS government passed a law aimed at a making a specific search engine pay other private entities for including links to them among its results. True and i as Google would just say, hey if you want your link in our Australian search-result you have to pay upfront. Problem solved. If Australia has, for some time just white pages then the peoples will probably do something about it...in the meantime google get a butt-load of money, and Australia looses allot of it.
- rognjen 6y ago
  And the AUS government can would then say "You're in breach of this code, billions please."
  - nix23 6y ago
    Why? You then don't show any links (or any results at all), and even funnier the Australian new-outlets now have to pay too be even found. And maybe just maybe Australia makes his own search-engine (which would be a good thing)
    - squiggleblaz 6y ago
      Who in Australia couldn't name at least one of Rupert Murdoch's news websites? No one needs to use Google to find their front pages. This will be an own goal, but even as it backfires it will help Murdoch since it will make it much harder for a new news media site to get established. Ftr, this law is by and for Rupert Murdoch.

mola 6y ago

Seems like a good thing for everyone. People can still find the news sites and consume the news. The news sites can start to disentangle from the attention economy and clickbaity headlines in favor of more in-depth analysis that give actual value to users. News on facebook and google search highlight, is just bad news.

shp0ngle 6y ago

Does Google want out entirely of Australia, or just for Google News? This article seems to confuse the two, as if the user never used Google. (What's that bit about "yellow pages for internet"? Does he describe catalogues from the 90s? What?)

squiggleblaz 6y ago
The article is not entirely clear and requires some context. It is not just Google News, but also Google Search. People will often type in breaking news stories into Google Search to get information. It does not apply to products like Google Mail and Google Maps since they aren't platforms to get eyeballs onto content written for Rupert Murdoch. The suggested alternative is that instead of serving up Google Search in Australia (i.e. the thing produced by crawling websites), they might serve up an entirely opt-in service. Think of sites like the old dmoz.org. It will suck about as much as it sounds like it will suck. If they do that, I would expect Australian web search traffic to go mostly to the new Google Services Directory and spread gradually to Bing and Duck Duck Go and Yahoo. Microsoft and Yahoo will probably actively strive to avoid becoming the universal default, because as long as they aren't big enough they won't attract the burdens of this law.

gumby 6y ago

Let's be clear: despite the implication of the headline, this isn't google planning to stop indexing free resources nor planning to stop offering free searches. This solely refers to published news which, not surprisingly, many journalists consider the important part of the web. A common economic aphorism is "if you want less of something, tax it." Google is responding to regulatory+market signals as intended. Other countries have tried the same thing (e.g. Spain) and found that they haven't liked the results. Separately, the news sites trying to restrict people from forwarding articles in their own feeds is nuts.

nojs 6y ago
Yeah, the headline is very misleading.