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As non-australian this debate sounds very incomprehensible to me. I understand that old media is complaining that tech is making money with their content while

As non-australian this debate sounds very incomprehensible to me. I understand that old media is complaining that tech is making money with their content while the authors get nothing. To me that is the equivalent of complaining that someone else is using your house because you left the door open. So what is the problem with locks, pay-walls, creating accounts or blocking links? Could it possible be the case that the old media actually wants the burglars inside?

adrianb 6y ago
That has been my question for years. Back in the day when I was only hearing of this thing called the Internet, people mentioned how they can read the New York Times online or another famous paper. Coming from a small town in Eastern Europe that was amazing. But I also wondered why they were able to read it for free. I wonder what made the newspapers post their content online for free - probably because the internet was a fringe curiosity and they only realized it's becoming important when it was too late.
- lazide 6y ago
  It's still an open question because you're confusing what they are saying with what is going on, and not looking at what they are doing first as a source of truth. News that no one pays for doesn't help them. But also, news no one knows they have first is also news no one will pay for - or tell any of their friends to go to them for! They're in a catch 22 re: their business model - they need visibility, they need people to be able to see them and know they have something insightful to add or they're dead in the water. Now that means the search engines and aggregators, as that is where most people are looking. Most people also won't pay for random links sent by friends, or even an insightful article if they can get it somewhere else (even at a lower quality). It's an even more brutal version of what the music and movie industry deal with around streaming (and will again in movies due to the proliferation of half baked streaming services).
martin_a 6y ago
> Could it possible be the case that the old media actually wants the burglars inside? We see this in Germany, too. On the one hand, "old media" is eager to take any traffic that Google et al. send to them, but on the other hand they don't like aggregration and ask Google et al. to pay for text snippets. This has already led to bizzare laws, driven by old media and conversative politicians.
- contravariant 6y ago
  Couldn't they just use robot.txt to prevent Google from listing them? Not that I completely understand why exactly they don't want to show up on google.
  - jowsie 6y ago
    They do want to show up on google, they just don't want the small page summary, as in a lot of cases, most people are happy with the title and a 2 line summary, never actually visiting the article.
    - stephen_g 6y ago
      That’s possible for a site to do, as far as I’m aware (in webmaster tools?) - I’ve seen results with a title and link and “this website doesn’t allow us to show a preview before). This ‘debate’ in Australia is not actually about that - most people supporting the bill haven’t been able to make an argument with enough complexity to distinguish between the sentence or so summary and displaying the whole article, and they generally try to make it sound like the latter is happening!
      - Symbiote 6y ago
        It's done with meta tags in the HTML: https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_t...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
stephen_g 6y ago
It’s pretty simple if you understand the political landscape. The old media have massive power in our politics, especially with the conservative party that is in power federally. They are losing subscribers though and have generally failed to keep up with technology. I’m not sure if it’s a symptom or part of the cause, but the quality of reporting in this country has also massively gone downhill with both companies in the oligopoly (Murdoch’s News Ltd one one side, Nine/Fairfax on the other). So they see that Google and Facebook have a lot of money, no have lobbied hard to get these laws made. Unfortunately the ACCC (competition watchdog) seems to be complicit, having done a big research study into anticompetitive behaviour in ad tech etc., which is used to justify the law even though the law doesn’t actually go any way towards actually solving any of the problems with any of that, and only serves to try and funnel money from Google and Facebook to a few big media companies. It’s pretty frustrating, because the waters are being muddied and reporters writing a lot of falsehoods about Facebook and Google apparently using or ‘stealing’ content, but they don’t - we’re literally talking about just links here!
kgwxd 6y ago
It's more like complaining that someone else is listing the address of your house because it's public knowledge.
anotherevan 6y ago
As an Australian this debate sounds very incomprehensible to me, too. That's because what it really is is a fairly unnuanced shake-down by the government on behalf of Murdoch media[1][2]. [1] https://youtu.be/2BPLBIgKjN8 https://youtu.be/2BPLBIgKjN8 [2] https://buzzmachine.com/2021/02/18/murdochs-law-and-the-net/ https://buzzmachine.com/2021/02/18/murdochs-law-and-the-net/

adrianb 6y ago

That has been my question for years. Back in the day when I was only hearing of this thing called the Internet, people mentioned how they can read the New York Times online or another famous paper. Coming from a small town in Eastern Europe that was amazing. But I also wondered why they were able to read it for free. I wonder what made the newspapers post their content online for free - probably because the internet was a fringe curiosity and they only realized it's becoming important when it was too late.

lazide 6y ago
It's still an open question because you're confusing what they are saying with what is going on, and not looking at what they are doing first as a source of truth. News that no one pays for doesn't help them. But also, news no one knows they have first is also news no one will pay for - or tell any of their friends to go to them for! They're in a catch 22 re: their business model - they need visibility, they need people to be able to see them and know they have something insightful to add or they're dead in the water. Now that means the search engines and aggregators, as that is where most people are looking. Most people also won't pay for random links sent by friends, or even an insightful article if they can get it somewhere else (even at a lower quality). It's an even more brutal version of what the music and movie industry deal with around streaming (and will again in movies due to the proliferation of half baked streaming services).

martin_a 6y ago

> Could it possible be the case that the old media actually wants the burglars inside? We see this in Germany, too. On the one hand, "old media" is eager to take any traffic that Google et al. send to them, but on the other hand they don't like aggregration and ask Google et al. to pay for text snippets. This has already led to bizzare laws, driven by old media and conversative politicians.

contravariant 6y ago
Couldn't they just use robot.txt to prevent Google from listing them? Not that I completely understand why exactly they don't want to show up on google.
- jowsie 6y ago
  They do want to show up on google, they just don't want the small page summary, as in a lot of cases, most people are happy with the title and a 2 line summary, never actually visiting the article.
  - stephen_g 6y ago
    That’s possible for a site to do, as far as I’m aware (in webmaster tools?) - I’ve seen results with a title and link and “this website doesn’t allow us to show a preview before). This ‘debate’ in Australia is not actually about that - most people supporting the bill haven’t been able to make an argument with enough complexity to distinguish between the sentence or so summary and displaying the whole article, and they generally try to make it sound like the latter is happening!
    - Symbiote 6y ago
      It's done with meta tags in the HTML: https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_t...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

stephen_g 6y ago

It’s pretty simple if you understand the political landscape. The old media have massive power in our politics, especially with the conservative party that is in power federally. They are losing subscribers though and have generally failed to keep up with technology. I’m not sure if it’s a symptom or part of the cause, but the quality of reporting in this country has also massively gone downhill with both companies in the oligopoly (Murdoch’s News Ltd one one side, Nine/Fairfax on the other). So they see that Google and Facebook have a lot of money, no have lobbied hard to get these laws made. Unfortunately the ACCC (competition watchdog) seems to be complicit, having done a big research study into anticompetitive behaviour in ad tech etc., which is used to justify the law even though the law doesn’t actually go any way towards actually solving any of the problems with any of that, and only serves to try and funnel money from Google and Facebook to a few big media companies. It’s pretty frustrating, because the waters are being muddied and reporters writing a lot of falsehoods about Facebook and Google apparently using or ‘stealing’ content, but they don’t - we’re literally talking about just links here!

kgwxd 6y ago

It's more like complaining that someone else is listing the address of your house because it's public knowledge.

anotherevan 6y ago

As an Australian this debate sounds very incomprehensible to me, too. That's because what it really is is a fairly unnuanced shake-down by the government on behalf of Murdoch media[1][2]. [1] https://youtu.be/2BPLBIgKjN8 https://youtu.be/2BPLBIgKjN8 [2] https://buzzmachine.com/2021/02/18/murdochs-law-and-the-net/ https://buzzmachine.com/2021/02/18/murdochs-law-and-the-net/