> Responding to a threat definitely validates it. I'm not sure what you mean by "valid threat". If you mean the capability of the threat to cause damage if ca

> Responding to a threat definitely validates it. I'm not sure what you mean by "valid threat". If you mean the capability of the threat to cause damage if carried through, that's something we don't find out until the party that made the threat tries to carry it out. If you mean the grounds on which the threat was made, such as here, the Australian governments claim that Google owes Murdoch money, then that's not something that is "validated" by a response. A response to a spurious threat, or an illegitimate threat can be prudent whether the threat is real, imagined, justified, or totally bogus. In this case, will the Australian government actually impose a tax on Google's practice of linking to content which is allowed by the sites own robots.txt? That seemed pretty audacious to me when I first heard about it, particularly since I don't buy the case that Google owes Murdoch money. But maybe they will try, if they think they can get away with it at the ballot box. I don't know how to predict that outcome. At first I thought it would backfire on the government, but Google's ham-fisted bluff to exit Australia might end up backfiring on Google, if Google even carries out that counter threat, which is by no means certain. We'll see.