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Communications Minister touts the opportunities of a Google-less Australia
- nness 6y agoIf we ever needed any proof that Australia's Liberal (conservative) party was a puppet for News Corp, its this law.
- robin21 6y agoCan you explain?
- Gatsky 6y agoNews corp, headed Rupert Murdoch, owns a lot of media in Australia. Most of this media is abjectly shithouse but heavily consumed by people aged 60+. Murdoch wields undue political power because of this, which induces elected politicians to fawn over him. They gave him the order of Australia the other week for example, which seems nonsensical to many actual Australian citizens, to whom he appears to be a rich prick sabotaging the national conversation. The frankly embarrassing attempt to siphon money from Google into Murdoch’s pockets is simply the current conservative government ensuring they get excellent media coverage at the next election. If I have to use a VPN to get decent search results because of this nonsense I will NOT be pleased.
- dazc 6y ago'If I have to use a VPN to get decent search results because of this nonsense I will NOT be pleased.' Good news then because you can use Duck Duck Go and get reasonable results without being stalked around the internet or run the risk of your parents clicking a scam ad because 'it has 5 gold stars beneath it'.
- paradox242 6y agoDuck Duck Go uses Bing (and Yahoo, lol) to complete all searches so he's really right back where he started (albeit Microsoft isn't tracking him).
- Gatsky 6y agoHave tried DDG before but wasn't that impressed. Will give it another look.
- robin21 6y agoMurdoch is 90yo this year. I find it hard to believe that he wants to line his pockets. He has more money than he can ever spend. Google is a worldwide monopoly. No one has any chance of negotiating with them. Even a country as it turns out without them threatening complete pull out. I see this as strong leadership standing up to monopolies. I would prefer the free market to sort it out honestly but what chance does anyone have against them.
- zensavona 6y agoPretty much this. Although Rupert Murdoch is a worldwide media mafioso, his home territory is Australia and he owns the vast majority of print media here - this proposed action is in his favour and his only. It even by design excludes public broadcasters like ABC and SBS.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y agoAs somebody who dislikes both the established old media firms of Murdoch & Co, but despises the parasitic Tech surveillance capitalism even more, I welcome this (regressive) attitude. Europeans are fighting for similar reasons which is loss of control of their own media and a takeover by US propaganda and norms by companies who have failed to pay their taxes again and again. imo it doesn't matter that many of these local outlets are backward, racist and populist rags (never criticizing the Australian concentration camps, or failure of capturing the idiocy of the AAbill, or whatever justifies being outraged about etc), the big guys (FB/Google) are expert in doing the same thing but at scale and with better PR (+ they can do so without paying their taxes). As long as it hurts BigTech it's the right move no matter what "appears" right or wrong. These firms and their management are parasites and they need to be treated as such until they a) pay their taxes and b) respect local laws. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detention_facilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detenti...
- zhd 6y agoRe: takeover by US firms, note that while Murdoch was born Australian he gave up Australian in favor of US citizenship... precisely because it would have been illegal to own such a stake in US media firms as a non- or dual-citizen. We would also like the Murdoch media and/or tech giants to pay tax in Australia, yes, but neither do at the moment.
- 908B64B197 6y agoWhy does Australia allows such a large percentage of it's medias to be owned by a foreigner?
- zzedd 6y agobecause 'the foreigner' controls the media. it's a race condition.
- throwaways885 6y ago'Australian concentration camps'?
- sanxiyn 6y agoAustralia could build its own Baidu, or Naver. I agree it's an exciting opportunity.
- coldcode 6y agoGood luck with that. What you will wind up with is Rupertoogle.
- Semiapies 6y agoI'd assume any description of the "exciting" opportunity to build another Baidu is sarcasm.
- viraptor 6y agoWhy build? There's a number of other search engines available - Google is not the only choice. As a national project, that would be a waste of money.
- hestefisk 6y agoAm I the only one who finds it hypocritical that the Liberal government is ok with Murdoch owning pretty much the entire Australian free press; yet they are against monopolisation of search and basic http-based news distribution (ie simple web scraping). The reason people read news online is because Aussie news papers are generally such racist garbage and their web sites are either paywalled or stuffed with ads. Sorry I don’t meant to come across as contrarian, but as a European and now Aussie citizen, the quality of reporting is really horrendous. This type of law doesn’t seem like anything designed to save the future of free, independent journalism, but simply the old boys club of the liberal party handing out free money to their mates in Newscorp. Not that the alternative (surveillance capitalism is much better though, but at least it doesn’t impose contradictory logic onto the basic infrastructure of the Internet (text and http).
- op03 6y agoContradictory logic pfft. Have you checked your families google app/news feed or whatever they are calling that thing these days. Its like Meghan Markle is the most important person in the world. I mean initially it was fun to rib my Dad about why he is getting so many Meghan Markle updates. But now I am just scared to even look at phones in the family, given the amount of addictive garbage that is being pumped into them non stop.
- MattGaiser 6y agoRoyals have been a favourite topic in the news since long before search engines existed. The algo is just picking up on the same trends tabloids did. Tons of people want to read that stuff.
- hi41 6y agoMy family valued education and I thought it was true for everyone. I didn’t think people read the cheap magazines about celebrities in the checkout aisle in supermarkets. I thought everyone read Dostoyevsky. Haha. Since such interest in garbage seems to exist in so many cultures, do you think there is a evolutionary benefit that comes from it?
- strken 6y agoThis is absolutely ridiculous legislation, because it doesn't give Google the option of just removing all these news sources from search results if their asking price is too high. In effect, there's no choice but to pull the entirety of search out of Australia, or pay whatever arbitrary price the arbitration process comes up with. It's like forcing internationally-owned supermarkets to stock newspapers at a price determined initially by the Murdoch press and in the case of disputes by a protectionist government panel, or leave the country entirely.
- nr2x 6y agoAnd yet google requires new users to agree to arbitration when creating accounts. Good for the goose...
- sandworm101 6y agoForcing the provider of a service to carry all local newspapers? Sounds a bit like net neutrality to me. If we see google news as a common carrier of sorts, forcing it to carry everything at fixed prices seems appropriate. Whether the price is too high, or whether one body or another should set the price, is something that can be negotiated.
- username90 6y agoGoogle already carry all local newspapers at a fixed rate. The Australian government just decided to increase the rate to a level Google argue they can't operate under and therefore would have to exit.
- levosmetalo 6y agoSo let them exit then. It's not like Google has the right to set prices for themselves. It's similar to Germany where, i.e. book prices are fixed, and every store must sell for the same price, whether they like it or not. Of course, they have a choice not to sell.
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- GizmoSwan 6y agoThey won't block google because they are aligned with US. Google will probably remove it's news tab in Australia. No matter which country. news organizations have to eventually find a way to organize and deal with their internet providers to get a fee based on quality and quantity of news they provide.
- throwaways885 6y agoImagine the outrage if your ISP told you the fee was going up to pay for Murdoch's propaganda machine.
- GizmoSwan 6y agoAfter he is gone, I don't think that his kids will stick around as long as he did but other entities will jockey up for the field and that process will continue if there are consumers of it . News and editorials have to be separated. Editorials and blogs should not be paid for via such funding in my opinion. ISP funding of various type of blogs, media, arts, etc should become elective via bundles that people select otherwise.
- jpollock 6y agoDoes this law impact all search engines or only google?
- MarkMc 6y agoIt's not just end users who would have to switch to Bing - the advertisers would also have to switch, and Google probably has better return on each advertising dollar spent on its platform. I wonder whether Google might withdraw their service for a day or even just a few hours, to apply pressure on the government.