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An interesting debate: - Democratically elected government of a sovereign country decides to regulate its market. - An foreign entity is trying to blackmail t
by stiray 6y ago
An interesting debate:
- Democratically elected government of a sovereign country decides to regulate its market.
- An foreign entity is trying to blackmail the government to listen to non Australian entity how they should have their market set.
- And point of the writers here is that the Australian government governing its own country and market is wrong and
hostile and ... and the Google has right to blackmail it?
Are you serious?
- solresol 6y agoWe just had the Chinese government telling us (essentially) to shut down free speech and eliminate the multi-party system. Now it's the corporate world's turn to tell us what to do.
- yhoneycomb 6y agoahh hacker news and sinophobia a classic duo
- LatteLazy 6y agoAustralia has a right to tax Google. Google has a right to decide the taxes are too high and withdraw from the market. Neither is blackmailing the other. At worst, they're negotiating.
- dbetteridge 6y agoTo remove some of the nonsense I've seen spread around. It's not blackmail, Google merely stated that if they are unable to make revenue above the cost of implementing these new laws they will be forced to withdraw from Australia. You cannot on the left hand say "You must do X (Paying news sites for linking to them)" but also in the right hand say "You cannot do Y (Removing news sites from linking)", that effectively makes this a tax that is passed directly to news company coffers. They are also not willing to allow third parties to control the content and release timing of updates to their search algorithm, which seems reasonable.
- silexia 6y agoIn a free market, a company can choose to provide or not provide services based on whether they make money or not. If you require a search engine to pay for content it links to, it cannot make money. Google is correct in making the statement that it will need to exit Australia. You may not like Google, and I don't either do to it's abuse of small business on its Ads/ AdWords product, but I don't think any search engine could operate under these rules. Rupert Murdoch, and his extremely powerful company, have lobbied for special rules that harm democracy and free markets.
- intended 6y agoHow is discussion blackmail? Google is a private entity, they are able to make their choices. Australia, and Murdoch are also able to enforce their views. Let google go. If they do, someone else will come into the Australian market and if they work well with the new laws, it will be a new business model and moat to take on Goog.