News Corp [1] is pretty much the definition of the Australian news companies, because of the stranglehold they have on news properties and regulators in the cou

News Corp [1] is pretty much the definition of the Australian news companies, because of the stranglehold they have on news properties and regulators in the country. Google has been fighting this basic idea across Europe as well, and just recently came down on the side of accepting French antitrust terms to pay out news publishers for snippets or even headlines of news in search. I personally think the French antitrust regulators held their ground well in the sense that withholding search access to further a Google news property seems clearly like antitrust abuse. That said, Australia's news market (as well as many other European news markets) have so effectively captured their own regulators that it's just likely all downside for consumers all around. Access to independent news will decrease, competition will decrease, and everyone will rejoice at the Pyrrhic victory over the global behemoth that is Google regardless of the benefits to the consumer, which were never the concern in the first place. Facebook will quickly follow suit, and there will be another celebration of the loss of independent media access by the masses. IMO, this kind of thing is really the true censorship apparatus at work: the censorship of ideas across journalism broadly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Corporation