If the australian law applied to the web broadly, hacker news would have to pay for all the links. In reality, being linked to on the web is extremely valuable

If the australian law applied to the web broadly, hacker news would have to pay for all the links. In reality, being linked to on the web is extremely valuable. Google has had to ban the practices of sites paying to be linked to. The Australian law completely gets the value chain backwards, forcing tech companies to pay for a specific subset of links, and not allowing them to decline to link either.