Not an Australian, but I don't find it entirely silly. Google delisting Australian news would be the inevitable outcome. It's worth almost nothing to them. T

Not an Australian, but I don't find it entirely silly. Google delisting Australian news would be the inevitable outcome. It's worth almost nothing to them. They're evening out the playing field. Google can shrug off Australian news, but they're going to have to think carefully about whether they're willing to turn off Search for a first world country. One loophole I'm very curious about is Google creating their own news organization. Not even a news organization, really just a news licenser and republisher. They have access to everyone's Google searches. I would imagine they're capable of creating a piece of software that calculates how much they're paying to news organizations for what keyword searches, then automatically purchasing an article about that from another publisher that scores better for those keywords (putting them above the other publishers in the searches) and publishing it. Bonus points if they don't even pay for it, they have a human write an article summarizing the other articles, and run it through their scoring pipeline so the writer can tweak it until their SEO score is better than the other articles. Then Australian news will really be screwed. Little money from Google, and even fewer clicks than they got before. The one thing I do think was silly is making it adversarial. If you want news agencies to make more money, making Google pay to send them traffic is a bad way to go about that. They should have done something like introducing a tax on Google, and then refunding part of the tax when Google sends people to an Australian news site instead of a foreign one.