France is doing the same thing and Google is fine with it.
It's about the detail that Google is required to share all algorithm changes with news co's four weeks in advance of them. This massively ties their hands and would require the AU news to effectively use an entirely different stack of logic and rules to display news articles...which are worth basically nothing to google because they have to pay handsomely for it.
Also very little of the money goes to smaller orgs and there are incredibly nonsensical rules around what content qualifies you for payment.
Oh and be aware of a dark detail here: The reporting on this is biased in nature because it directly aligns with the ability for increased money for the reporter reporting. This is why they are ignoring the reason why Google is actually leaving. Kinda like the McDonalds hot coffee thing, it's a whitewash over the truth. (Not that google is the good guy either, part of their game here is based on scaring other governments to not do this.)
> France is doing the same thing and Google is fine with it.
Is it? Several countries have proposed laws that they hoped would force Google to pay for links to news sites, and every time, Google's response has been to not list those news site. And if the law didn't allow that, they just left that market entirely.
The simple fact is that most sites in the Web like being found through search engines. If news sites want to be paid money to be listed, then the only obvious result of that will be that search engines won't list them.
I keep getting surprised by countries trying the same thing over and over again. In the end, you can't force a company to do business. It has to be attractive for the company to do business.
I don't like Google's dominance in search and advertising any more than anyone else, but these bizarre laws trying to extract money from them seem very ill-advised. But if Google is forced to abandon a country, there will still be other search engines available.
Maybe not quite the same thing, notably the AU law requires a certain percentage of articles too. But pretty much, these news companies will regret this pretty badly eventually. Like 'Congrats, you de-indexed your entire business'
There's a second effect too. Let's say governments get their wish and Google/FB cave. Now Google and Facebook have a direct financial incentive to destroy news organisations, or perhaps create their own (Twitter, FB and perhaps Youtube would make incredible platforms to create a crowdsourced news agency or publication, I would love to see how far they'd get)
When the News industry is already dying, this would change the dynamic from competing for eyeballs to social media companies actively trying to destroy news media, preventing their articles from having anything newsworthy or interesting at all.
You'd think the News industry would try to avoid picking this particular fight when they're already struggling to stay alive ... But I guess you'd be wrong.
Also, if getting listed as news is enough to get money, then that's not necessarily an incentive that encourages investigative journalism. We've already seen that making up lies and calling it news is cheaper than thorough investigative journalism. If governments want to protect investigative journalism, they should probably just subsidise it directly, instead of forcing other parties to subsidise various news articles.
So it's clearly not a matter of principle for them. As far as I understand, Google sending traffic to the news organisations will count as payment, which is probably why it's acceptable. If they don't want to pay any money for the text they copy from the articles, they can just increase the number of links to that organisation to compensate so they don't have to pay.
> “Google’s threat to withdraw its search engine from Australia is chilling to anyone who cares about democracy.”
Is it? Or have they just realised they may have just stopped the business model that has kept search engines free?
Even if you think the business model survives, how is this even close to chilling? So you get competitors in its place. How does that hurt democracy?
What hurts democracy is Media companies lobbying for laws that suit only them. Giving them money for their content won't make them produce actual news.
If they want to be paid extra for listing, then that should make them rank lower. That's how business works - their news is more costly, and therefore of lower value. This law smacks of protectionism.
I think the supposition is that if Google and FB have to pay for news articles from proper news outlets with proper journalists, they may decide not do. At the same time, people will not change their habits of getting their news from social media. This will lead to most people getting "news" from writers that are not qualified journalists, increasing the echo chamber effect and narrowing the range of information people have to reason with. This is the danger to democracy.
You're 100% correct, as it stands there's not a great outcome. What we need is for social media to have to pay for the information they profit from, whilst at the same time ensuring that official media outlets have to produce quality, well researched, fact-led journalism. If we have both of these things then we win.
I'm wondering if Google and others can claim that what's put out by outlets like Fox news are not actually news but entertainment and the laws don't apply to that. They use that argument constantly in court to wiggle out of lawsuits.
> Perhaps the Government really did come around to the importance of journalism — including that which is critical of the Government — to Australian society?
> There’s one big problem with that hypothesis. If that was the case, then surely the Government would have ensured that funding for media companies would have included the most trusted news brand in Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Company?
> And yet, they excluded it.
This is the first of many articles on this subject I've seen on HN that has mentioned this detail.
The short version is that the whole “google and facebook stole news and profit off it” narrative is false. But because the media has an immense conflict of interest in reporting on itself, they spread this narrative.
Have a look at the chart in the medium article. Did circulation fall when google or facebook were founded or became popular? Nope, the decline started in the late 1980s.
You can’t even spot google and Facebook or the internet in the circulation per capita chart. It’s just a steady downwards decline.
What role do facebook and google play for media today? They send them traffic. So much so that newspapers complained mightily when google news pulled out of spain and france. They need the traffic! Meanwhile news is not how google makes its money.
It is perfectly valid to dislike Google or dislike Facebook. But on this issue too many otherwise reasonable people fall for the media’s line that it is the media that supports social media giants. This just isn’t so and none of the data support it. Indeed for social media networks arguably Instagram, Snapchat and Tiktok are successful precisely because they are set up not to have news and instead they’re just fun to use.
A functioning press is vital for society. But as Thompson says if we want to support it why not subsidize it directly? It is lunacy to pretend that the value exchange us from news to social media rather than the reverse.
That Newscorp is the beneficiary in Australia is additional spice to the story but this issue is even broader than that.
There are plenty of reasons to tax and regulate Google and Facebook and disrupt their respective monopolies, but the proposed legislation would have far reaching consequences for the Internet and set a poor precedent.
What happens to the likes of DuckDuckGo and any future new entrants?
It also highlights the fact that we need a better model of paying for content. Advertising is just unbearable, maintaining several subscriptions is a pain. A Spotify model would work better for news sites.
The article is spot on for highlighting the transfer of revenue from Google/Facebook to News Corp without anyone else benefiting.
Well, Google can gig source news from tens of millions of googlers - sure it will need editing for duplicates, originality and time priority, but they could link ad $$ to the wages based on clicks - that's what they can do.
Since Murdoch is the premier Australian news paper publisher ~~80% or so???, he will collect that same % of the take, and I do mean take.
Calling this a Fox News Tax is a stretch, which requires the author to make several connections to publishers, the first of which was the Wall Street Journal. Why not call it the WSJ Tax? Indicates this is a scammy title looking for clicks.
I think it's interesting how they use Fox News in the title, not News Corp. Sadly the makes it clear this is a agenda article not really about the people. The statement is made that the funds raised should goto the Australia citizens and not the news producers who's content is being used by big tech without compensation. While the law maybe bad it's not made clear by the anti "Fox News" agenda of the author, sadly this is what most news has come to not reporting but reporter agenda pieces.
Quick update, it's also very clear why ABC was left out from Wikipedia "The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is Australia's national broadcaster, founded in 1929. It is principally funded by the direct grants from the Australian government and is administered by a board appointed by the government of the day"
This is a blog post by one writer. It's not reflective of what "most news" is about any more than any random blog post is, i.e., not representative at all.
Google for Australia google news tax, and click news to see actual news sites, and not one in the first several pages (actually, I can find exactly zero) have a title like the one you complain is "what most news has come to".
Are to cite any real news (as in a major news publication) source as an example of your claimed bias? I can't find any.
>I think it's interesting how they use Fox News in the title, not News Corp. Sadly the makes it clear this is a agenda article not really about the people. The statement is made that the funds raised should goto the Australia citizens and not the news producers who's content is being used by big tech without compensation. While the law maybe bad it's not made clear by the anti "Fox News" agenda of the author, sadly this is what most news has come to not reporting but reporter agenda pieces.
I think it is perfectly valid to call out Fox News in the title, because most readers would not know who News Corp is but do know Fox News, and for the intents of this article they are very similar.
Moreover the reason why this is called in particularly the Fox News tax is because News Corp are the main beneficiary by quite a margin, they have >50% market share in Australia [1].
Furthermore Murdoch has a strong history of influencing Australian politics in his favour and the ruling liberal party has a history of implementing policy directly to benefit him.
The National Broadband Network was widely popular in Australia, however it threatened Murdoch's payTV business. So he had meetings with liberal party leadership, who promised to hamstring (or roll-back) the NBN. They were essentially voted into power with headlines of "vote these suckers out" (Labour was in power) and similar in all Murdoch papers and no none of the "left-leaning" papers ever did something remotely close to that. As a non-Australian it was quite shocking to observe how blatantly partisan those headlines were.
News corp is not media it is a far-right billionaire propaganda organisation.
This is exactly why we need micropayments on the web. Without correct solutions from the open source movement and the open Web, the State will end up doing stuff like this.
And furthermore, all these projects should start adopting the Web Monetization stardard, based on Interledger Protocol. Coil is a company started by Stefan Thomas (former CTO of Ripple) to effect micropayments on the Web. They teamed up with Mozilla to make this a standard. We are participating to implement it in all our open source community servers:
I don't think any normal person wants micropayments. It's a hassle, and if I have to pay for every thing I want to click on, I'm mostly not going to click anything at all. Even if it's just pennies. It is the epitome of 'getting nickled and dimed to death'.
I expect the future of the 'net is a collection of walled gardens, where you pay just once and get everything from news to music, movies, etc. Basically what Apple is trying to do now, among others. The independent news sources will have to negotiate contracts to be in these gardens, except for a few stand-out services that are so good people will pay for them directly.
We address that of course. Micropayments are supposed to be from communities to publishers, same as Netflix pays shows based on how many episodes or minutes are watched. You pay netflix and let them do the whole payout thing. They are an aggregator. Now decentralize that!
Isn't that some version of what we already have, though? When I think micropayments I'm thinking of the consumer side. I thought there was consensus on that term, but I might be wrong. Would hardly be the first time :)
France is doing the same thing and Google is fine with it.
It's about the detail that Google is required to share all algorithm changes with news co's four weeks in advance of them. This massively ties their hands and would require the AU news to effectively use an entirely different stack of logic and rules to display news articles...which are worth basically nothing to google because they have to pay handsomely for it. Also very little of the money goes to smaller orgs and there are incredibly nonsensical rules around what content qualifies you for payment.
Oh and be aware of a dark detail here: The reporting on this is biased in nature because it directly aligns with the ability for increased money for the reporter reporting. This is why they are ignoring the reason why Google is actually leaving. Kinda like the McDonalds hot coffee thing, it's a whitewash over the truth. (Not that google is the good guy either, part of their game here is based on scaring other governments to not do this.)