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From the text of the bill "(1) For the purposes of this Part, a service makes content available if:... 21 (b) a link to the content is provided on the service..

From the text of the bill "(1) For the purposes of this Part, a service makes content available if:... 21 (b) a link to the content is provided on the service..." This is pay for linking. It means anyone linking to a content provider is putting themselves at financial risk. Even if Google withdraws from Oz, whoever becomes the "Baidu" of Australia will essentially be faced with the same issue: They would have built their user base because user search engine demand is driven by content on the internet, one of the main purposes of a search engine is to provide links to that content, and this law exposes any search that links to content to claims on their revenue. Of course, small sites need not worry, we hope, unless people can use the law to launch frivolous lawsuits and nuisance claims, but whoever would replace Google (even DDG) would face the same claims from news providers. The reality is, the news business has been disrupted by the internet. They used to face competition only from a few local or regional competitors, but now the internet puts them into competition with all news providers around the world at the touch of a button. There's no going back to the way things were. In much the same way that music and tv got disrupted by Spotify and Netflix's models, the publishing world needs new business model, and trying to siphon off search engines I don't think is sustainable. They need a Spotify for News. And by that, I mean, content publicly discoverable, but paywalled behind a subscription service, that needs to be super low overhead. A number of distributed mechanisms have been tried, by both Google, and others, at micropayments, but it seems to me that micropayment systems have largely failed for some reason.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Considering the two leading search engine companies are in the Fortune 25, I think it's absolutely sustainable to siphon off search engines. They make a massive amount of pure profit, and are amongst the richest companies in the planet in raw cash on hand. And it's also very fair, because search engines are, functionally and fundamentally, content scrapers. Everything they have and everything they offer is done by consuming the work of others.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  But search itself isn't the paying feature for either company. If they say "no, thank you" then what do you replace it with? A worse search engine that also loses money? How do Australians come out ahead in this?
- renata 6y ago
  > And it's also very fair, because search engines are, functionally and fundamentally, content scrapers. Everything they have and everything they offer is done by consuming the work of others. I guarantee that if you make Google pay everyone they link to, they will charge everyone they link to that much + overhead, and everyone except weird hobby sites that don't care how many visitors they get will pay it. Google provides value to websites as well as consuming value from them.
- cromwellian 6y ago
  The internet/web was founded on permission-less, innovation, permissiveness, and openness. People were invited to share content, to aggregate, to link, and relink. 99% of the people reading this now, who learned to code on the Web, learned by copying other people's code snippets, and not paying them a dime. Scraping content isn't a bug, it's a feature. View Source is a the primary feature of published Web content. Content scraping with transformation, is fair use, and a feature. IMHO, if you publish something on the web, and you don't have a paywall, and you don't block in robots.txt, and you don't have a LICENSE that covers use, people are free to link to your content. Otherwise, why even participate in the web when you don't want to be part of it (the linking). If people start charging for links, you may as well pack up the open web. If there was an federated free search engine, like bitcoin-like for search, these news publishers would still be in trouble, and they'd have no one go after, which suggests the problem is fundamentally, something with their business model.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    Ironically, Google seems to feel scraper sites that aren't Google are bad. For instance, https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/scraped-content https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline... Google has regularly defended deranking or banning competitors for allegedly scraping content without providing value as well.
    - cromwellian 6y ago
      They're talking about purely scraped content without anything added, like someone mirroring another site, wholesale copying without any change. "Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site;" This is pretty easy to understand and I don't think controversial. Scrape your site and transform some of the information to make a useful service? Yes. Scrape your whole site and just host its pages? No. Maybe your site is a medical blog and over the years has written about pretty much every condition. If someone else were to scrape this, and make an interactive map of the human body, where if you click on a part, it lists links to the original blog, plus a pop-up summative snippet, very few people are going to scream "You did nothing! This guy spent years writing medical articles, and you come along and make a fancy interactive body as a way to linking to his articles, and now you're getting ad revenue and traffic!" Obviously, if lots of people are using this new interactive service, it's a value add. But what if instead, I setup a site like WebMD, supposedly with expertly written medical content from the Web's best medical bloggers, but I just scrape all their articles, and host those pages on my own site, as if they had written the articles as contributors to my site. And you don't think the latter should be downranked? Do you think GPT-3 should somehow pay someone everytime it generates an answer? What if future search engines crawl the web and build giant transformer models which just answer questions by whole-sale authoring a new article from scratch, how do we compare that to a human being doing the same thing? Scraping is how human beings learn and there's a big difference between wholesale piracy, and transformation.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  One way you can see it is not fair in the least is that Google would decline to index the content were it allowed. That suggest that the content has little economic value to google.
Aerroon 6y ago
Is this law protectionism? Remove the foreign incumbents to give local businesses a chance to establish themselves, then slowly remove the restrictions?
throwaway3699 6y ago
News media from big corporations is dying, nothing can save it because it's all pretty much clickbait trash or propaganda. So little of the real journalism these media empires did remains. Independent journalism has to be the future, and whoever provides a platform for that will win.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

Considering the two leading search engine companies are in the Fortune 25, I think it's absolutely sustainable to siphon off search engines. They make a massive amount of pure profit, and are amongst the richest companies in the planet in raw cash on hand. And it's also very fair, because search engines are, functionally and fundamentally, content scrapers. Everything they have and everything they offer is done by consuming the work of others.

Aerroon 6y ago
But search itself isn't the paying feature for either company. If they say "no, thank you" then what do you replace it with? A worse search engine that also loses money? How do Australians come out ahead in this?
renata 6y ago
> And it's also very fair, because search engines are, functionally and fundamentally, content scrapers. Everything they have and everything they offer is done by consuming the work of others. I guarantee that if you make Google pay everyone they link to, they will charge everyone they link to that much + overhead, and everyone except weird hobby sites that don't care how many visitors they get will pay it. Google provides value to websites as well as consuming value from them.
cromwellian 6y ago
The internet/web was founded on permission-less, innovation, permissiveness, and openness. People were invited to share content, to aggregate, to link, and relink. 99% of the people reading this now, who learned to code on the Web, learned by copying other people's code snippets, and not paying them a dime. Scraping content isn't a bug, it's a feature. View Source is a the primary feature of published Web content. Content scraping with transformation, is fair use, and a feature. IMHO, if you publish something on the web, and you don't have a paywall, and you don't block in robots.txt, and you don't have a LICENSE that covers use, people are free to link to your content. Otherwise, why even participate in the web when you don't want to be part of it (the linking). If people start charging for links, you may as well pack up the open web. If there was an federated free search engine, like bitcoin-like for search, these news publishers would still be in trouble, and they'd have no one go after, which suggests the problem is fundamentally, something with their business model.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Ironically, Google seems to feel scraper sites that aren't Google are bad. For instance, https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/scraped-content https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline... Google has regularly defended deranking or banning competitors for allegedly scraping content without providing value as well.
  - cromwellian 6y ago
    They're talking about purely scraped content without anything added, like someone mirroring another site, wholesale copying without any change. "Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site;" This is pretty easy to understand and I don't think controversial. Scrape your site and transform some of the information to make a useful service? Yes. Scrape your whole site and just host its pages? No. Maybe your site is a medical blog and over the years has written about pretty much every condition. If someone else were to scrape this, and make an interactive map of the human body, where if you click on a part, it lists links to the original blog, plus a pop-up summative snippet, very few people are going to scream "You did nothing! This guy spent years writing medical articles, and you come along and make a fancy interactive body as a way to linking to his articles, and now you're getting ad revenue and traffic!" Obviously, if lots of people are using this new interactive service, it's a value add. But what if instead, I setup a site like WebMD, supposedly with expertly written medical content from the Web's best medical bloggers, but I just scrape all their articles, and host those pages on my own site, as if they had written the articles as contributors to my site. And you don't think the latter should be downranked? Do you think GPT-3 should somehow pay someone everytime it generates an answer? What if future search engines crawl the web and build giant transformer models which just answer questions by whole-sale authoring a new article from scratch, how do we compare that to a human being doing the same thing? Scraping is how human beings learn and there's a big difference between wholesale piracy, and transformation.
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
One way you can see it is not fair in the least is that Google would decline to index the content were it allowed. That suggest that the content has little economic value to google.

Aerroon 6y ago

Is this law protectionism? Remove the foreign incumbents to give local businesses a chance to establish themselves, then slowly remove the restrictions?

throwaway3699 6y ago

News media from big corporations is dying, nothing can save it because it's all pretty much clickbait trash or propaganda. So little of the real journalism these media empires did remains. Independent journalism has to be the future, and whoever provides a platform for that will win.