The article claims that the ABC would benefit from deals with Google, but wasn't the ABC (and SBS) expressly excluded from the law?
It's clear that it is a lobby vs lobby situation. Murdoch is a king maker. He will likely prevail. I am not as optimistic about a positive outcome for Australians.
I believe they were, due to them being publicly funded. Which is to say nothing of the fact that such public funding has been continuously stripped back under Liberal governments (while continuing to give investment to Foxtel, a private company owned by, guess who, old mate Rupert)
Does it matter if Rupert doesn't get money from Google? His news assets still have print versions, his channels still have media versions, and if Google exits, they'll just concede the entire Aus market to Bing/DDG. Sure the people won't like it, but the more Google actually goes through with its threat, the more evidence it will provide for an antitrust case back home.
I disagree, Google is not making a threat and is not abusing its market position. A search engine simply cannot exist if it is required to pay for links to content.
Rupert Murdoch and his corporations are incredibly damaging to Australia and to the USA. We should oppose his lobbying efforts everywhere we can.
I think Google is now no longer a good company, but it is not nearly as bad as Fox News or Comcast or other companies that truly abuse their market position.
The one area that Google does actually abuse is Google Ads, the auction system there is basically a scam against small business unfortunately.
A search engine can also simply post titles and links, without indexing content.
Google is much worse than Fox News. At least Fox News doesn't harvest my information when I browse CNN and target ads at me. Not to mention the stuff Google does while lobbying without our knowledge.
Google is 92% ads, so if it abuses that portion, it's abusing 92% of its business monopolistically.
I still can't see why google can't just remove Australian news sites from the index? It should be a very small list for Australia. They already do this for copyright claims.
Not an Australian, but I don't find it entirely silly. Google delisting Australian news would be the inevitable outcome. It's worth almost nothing to them.
They're evening out the playing field. Google can shrug off Australian news, but they're going to have to think carefully about whether they're willing to turn off Search for a first world country.
One loophole I'm very curious about is Google creating their own news organization. Not even a news organization, really just a news licenser and republisher. They have access to everyone's Google searches. I would imagine they're capable of creating a piece of software that calculates how much they're paying to news organizations for what keyword searches, then automatically purchasing an article about that from another publisher that scores better for those keywords (putting them above the other publishers in the searches) and publishing it. Bonus points if they don't even pay for it, they have a human write an article summarizing the other articles, and run it through their scoring pipeline so the writer can tweak it until their SEO score is better than the other articles.
Then Australian news will really be screwed. Little money from Google, and even fewer clicks than they got before.
The one thing I do think was silly is making it adversarial. If you want news agencies to make more money, making Google pay to send them traffic is a bad way to go about that. They should have done something like introducing a tax on Google, and then refunding part of the tax when Google sends people to an Australian news site instead of a foreign one.
Sure, and I can think up means down, but but when trying to communicate a point or giving directions, people should be aware of what the common understanding is
In this case, the post is just noise, without meaning.
Im not sure what point they were trying to make beyond "I don't like this thing", even substituting some of the other definitions.
The article on Ars suggests that the new law would not allow them to delist one provider and allow another.
This is not law yet, this is part of the proposal. I am still looking for some evidence that they are not allowed to delist all news sources. This may be my lack of understanding the legalese. There is maybe some 'poison pill' in just delisting news and they are going the nuclear option in Australia.
In my mind, following through on their threat is the worst thing Google could do. If they leave and Australia’s business and government suffer, other countries are going to make laws to ensure this doesn’t happen to them.
Google has to push back to stop this happening in other countries. In any case, they can negotiate with price on SERP results ads and on the ads they no doubt place on Murdochs sites. Things will balance out if it does go ahead.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Google leave briefly to fully illustrate their power in the marketplace - I doubt it's an empty threat. If I ran a AU based business that's dependent on Google I'd be emergency planning right now.
I'm curious to see what would happen in this case. Would DuckDuckGo or Bing get a boost that Google? Would Google struggle to recover that market share when it inevitably returned? Would public perception of Google take a dip, or would Australians respect someone standing up to the Rupert Murdoch press?
My guess is Australians would continue to use a non localised version of Google. Bing and by extension DDG is awful for Australian results in my experience.
My suspicion would be that more tech workers leave Australia for the US than move there, and if the government were to combine kicking Google out with domestic industry programs it could have a positive effect on retaining talent.
I’m an Australian that would be delighted to work in public service on ambitious projects.
My confidence in the government being able to make it work is essentially zero. It’ll take decades to fix what’s broken in Australia’s public IT sector, and with the Liberal party in power we ain’t starting today. Just having Scott Morrison read The Entrepreneurial State would be a start, but I’m not convinced that the man actually reads books.
For a lot of folks reading HN, who are trying to excise Google from their lives, if they were in Australia, this would be a dream come true. How do you make Google go away? Force them to pay.
Showing a link to a site is "using their content"? What's really ridiculous is that this law would not allow them to not show a link to Australian news sites that are demanding payment either. The law is literally forcing Google to "use their content" (as you call it) and forcing them to pay for it.
Australia is not a singular entity. Are Australians who lost jobs better off now?
Reductio ad absurdum Australia would flourish with no people in it whatsoever, just automated resource extraction operations by Rio Tinto strip mining whole continent to the benefit of few stock holders.
Back in the 80s or 90s, one of the Labor Industrial politicians concluded that it would be cheaper to give every GM and Ford worker a million dollars payoff than to continue to heavily subsidise both Ford and GM car manufacturing in Australia. And then to remove all tariffs on imported cars from overseas, giving better, cheaper cars for Australians.
This has finally been done. As for those Australian workers who lost jobs to overseas manufacturing, it's pretty much the same as all those workers in other developed countries whose jobs have been outsourced.
Australia used to have tariff barriers to support local car manufacturers. Ford, GM, Chrysler/Mitsubishi set up. From that we got a local industry and poor quality, expensive cars. Tariff barriers were removed, GM shut down local production. Is that a good thing now Toyotas are cheaper? Opinions vary. Were the jobs working for GM that were lost made up elsewhere as s result of the end of the tariffs? You guessed it, opinions vary.
Google don't pay meaningful tax in Australia so it's hard to like them here.
Let me try again: Like you loved Altium leaving? I didnt mention Toyota because it might seem like a win in some peoples eyes (invaders retreating). Yay for cheaper cars you cant afford because your manufacturing job was moved to Thailand due to half assed half-free trade deals. Sooner or later you will either work in a mine, or in service industry feeding/taking care for the miners.
A win-win situation for Australia would be for Google to withdraw from Australia and Rupert to not get any money from Google.