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 i

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!