Here's the full bill if you want to wade into it (PDF): [1]
This [2] may provide some helpful commentary.
From Google/Facebook's viewpoint, one of the more distasteful aspects which is rarely mentioned in most coverage is that they must give two weeks notice of algorithm changes to registered news businesses.
There's a perception in some circles that this is a fairly unnuanced money grab by the government on behalf of Murdoch media[3]. A perception that was not helped by earlier drafts excluding the public Australian Broadcasting Corporation and SBS from the trough. Two organisations the current federal government is seen as being hostile towards.
As I understand it:
- The bill would not allow Google to simply drop Australian news sites from search results (hello Spain News!), hence really only leaving the option to block Oz altogether.
- There is no acknowledgement at all of the value search engines provide to media organisations by the links provided.
- The forced arbitration conditions are quite... forceful. (I'm not really across this aspect.)
A common nickname for our our Prime Minister among his detractors is "Scotty from Marketing" [4]
In summary, when you say, "My way or the highway," perhaps you shouldn't get pissy when they choose the highway.
From a foreign (non-US) perspective I find these Australian laws quite understandable, practical and rational.
Google and Facebook are both US companies, with a strong online presence and great influence in Australia (and other countries). But obviously it is in Australia's national interest to see that this kind of influence is directed by Australia themselves, rather than corporate or some foreign interest.
It is undeniable that due to overwhelming monopolist control that many of these foreign US companies have over today's internet, stronger government oversight and regulation is a must to protect the national interests and sovereignty of any democratic country.
To this end, ideally we need the regulator to mainly:
- Implement strong privacy rules in favour of the citizen (with strong emphasis in limiting data collection, sharing and usage without users permission, and ensuring data is stored not outside the country, among other things).
- Create legal standard "templates" of the "terms of conditions" (on behalf of the citizens) for the various common online services and force the corporates to use these, instead of the ever-frequently-changing and one-sided contracts they force us to accept.
- Ensure online discourse is limited from foreign influence (e.g. to fight foreign online troll armies that try to influence elections).
The fact that it is newsworthy to say something like this seems to indicate that Google is at least a de-facto monopoly in the search sector. It seems hard to argue against that when folks cannot even agree if there are any viable alternatives at all.... This is a huge problem that is only getting worse. I don't really see any way to fix this outside of government trust-busting. (But I have little faith in the bumbling of modern politicians in Australia or anywhere else...)
Personally, I use DuckDuckGo for searching and find the experience to be better than Google, but YMMV.
How can google be a monopoly if it is that easy to switch away? The truth is competing search engines are at least 90% as good as google, and literally a click away.
People don’t, and there is some browser default lock in, but it’s hardly like an electric grid, water or broadband monopoly. Or Standard Oil for that matter.
I've been using DDG for the last few months. It's okish but sometimes I feel like I don't see the results I expect to find, I google them on Google (do you see what I'm doing? there is a reason for that after all) and I find them.
This is even more true for technical searches in my job (web development, mostly backend.) Google finds the answer, DDG less often so.
I can't imagine Microsoft is anymore interested in paying these fees than Google or Facebook is. I think it's an empty threat, and likely its the Government trying to prove their serious (although, I suspect it won't pass its next vote). What Microsoft gets out of it, not sure.
I think he's just saying Google isn't the game in town. Having said that the whole situation is deplorable, it's not driven by valid concerns, just the Murdoch media in league with our weak government. I wish they'd picked a battle I could get behind.
This is quite ridiculous. I’d say it’s obviously ridiculous but others may have a different point of view. The government there is eager to side with Murdoch and his friends for favorable coverage so that they can pocket money from this extortion stunt while disregarding the impact to its many many citizens. Suggesting Bing is good enough is stupid because if their citizens were to use it over google if google quits that market, what then ? Government goes after them and if it does what if Microsoft also gets out? And if government doesn’t then doesn’t that show to the world that it was personal with google? People shouldn’t be stupid. It’s a low bar to clear.
People want local news and content, because they have lives outside of the Internet and they want to consume (at least partially) content that relates to their lives. How would American content creators create Australian local content without operating in Australia, and fall under Australian regulative protections?
Searching for "plumbers in my area", "hospital near me", "Bondi Beach weather this weekend", "2021 Australian federal election" all starts to break or show dated results. Latency won't be the problem, relevance will be the problem.
My guess would be that Australian regulators could consider it as Google trying to play a loophole around their rules, so Google could be forced to exit the Australian market altogether.
Though I, personally, doubt it will get to that. Either Google will come to a satisfactory solution that won't piss off the Australian regulators or pre-emptively exit the market
The majority of Australians are pretty indifferent/apathetic here. Murdoch vs Google is Goliath vs Goliath, nobody cares who wins, everyone hopes they both get wrecked in the process.
The best outcome here is if Google stops linking to news organisations in Australia.
Zero fucks would be given and independent journalism would be able to grow in a healthy environment.
Does this mean that Microsoft (or its Bing subsidiary?) will not have to pay the same tax, even if it becomes the dominatn search engine in Australia? Or is it not an issue, because the relevant subsidiary of Microsoft makes no profit, and therefore the amount due will be zero?
It means that the regulation itself isn't the issue but Google is just afraid that it destroys the idea that they cannot be regulated, and that other countries will follow suit.
Obviously anyone would take the entire Australian search market for some rather mundane regulation. If someone came to you and said you can have an entire country worth of Google's market, you just have to fork over some money for news headlines you link to you'd say no?
Microsoft in contrast to Google is a diversified firm that doesn't really rely on avoiding regulatory scrutiny that much, so they don't care.
Not sure if anyone's the same, but I find Google search the least sticky of their services, i.e. I could manage fine if forced to use Bing (probably not as good, but probably good enough), but I would really struggle if Gmail or Google photos access was axed in my region.
I'm the opposite - search is the only Google service I use (apart from occasionally recce-ing bike rides on Street View). I've tried to wean myself off it, and have succeeded for casual browsing on mobile, but for programming queries I don't find Bing or DDG anywhere near as good.
> “Look, these are big technology companies. And what’s important for Australia is that we set the rules that are important for our people,” Morrison said.
When Morrison says "our people", he means Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch.
How does this new law work? If Google doesn't want to pay media for content, couldn't they just not have newspaper links in their search results? Why would they have to pull out of all the other things that people search for?
"“Are you confident that alternate search engines are going to be able to fill a massive void left by Google and Australians won’t be left worse off?”"
This is going to be a tough one.
On one hand I absolutely hate how google is trying to strongarm this deal through their various properties. On the other hand, google pulling out of Australia will definitely impact a lot of businesses badly.
Its more of a case of Australia trying to strong-arm Google and Facebook to protect their News Corp interests (but I imagine that this is all a matter of perspective).
If the australian law applied to the web broadly, hacker news would have to pay for all the links.
In reality, being linked to on the web is extremely valuable. Google has had to ban the practices of sites paying to be linked to.
The Australian law completely gets the value chain backwards, forcing tech companies to pay for a specific subset of links, and not allowing them to decline to link either.
Someone in the US govt should write a bill that forces Fox News to pay Google/Facebook/Twitter for the cost of spreading misinformation on their platforms. Should equalize things quite a bit.
While this has been playing out a while in Australia and elsewhere, I think anyone who presupposed non-partisanship and openness by large social networks and other conduits of information knows after the Twitter, FB, YT and others’ hamfisted approaches to setting narratives dispelled that notion and gave reason to every government to review the influence these players have on the respective constituencies.
The steady eclipse of traditional media by Big Tech services has led the USA to a situation where a significant minority actually believe that Trump is a sort of superhero saving the world from pedophiles (QAnon) and a larger minority who really think the Democrat party somehow stole the recent presidential election, and that storming the Capitol is a reasonable response. The view from Down Under is that we need to avoid such civic disasters and propping up the traditional media is an essential part of that.
Like most people, I'm astonished at how social media mediated news seems to disable so many people's bullshit detectors, but there's no denying that it is so.
Anyone who wants to persuade Australians that their government should not go ahead with the planned regulation of FB and Google needs to come up with an alternative suggestion that would keep Australia's democracy functional. I can't see anything in the anti-regulation commentary on HN that passes this test.
[+] [-] anotherevan|5 years ago|reply
This [2] may provide some helpful commentary.
From Google/Facebook's viewpoint, one of the more distasteful aspects which is rarely mentioned in most coverage is that they must give two weeks notice of algorithm changes to registered news businesses.
There's a perception in some circles that this is a fairly unnuanced money grab by the government on behalf of Murdoch media[3]. A perception that was not helped by earlier drafts excluding the public Australian Broadcasting Corporation and SBS from the trough. Two organisations the current federal government is seen as being hostile towards.
As I understand it:
- The bill would not allow Google to simply drop Australian news sites from search results (hello Spain News!), hence really only leaving the option to block Oz altogether.
- There is no acknowledgement at all of the value search engines provide to media organisations by the links provided.
- The forced arbitration conditions are quite... forceful. (I'm not really across this aspect.)
A common nickname for our our Prime Minister among his detractors is "Scotty from Marketing" [4]
In summary, when you say, "My way or the highway," perhaps you shouldn't get pissy when they choose the highway.
[1] https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...
[2] https://www.gtlaw.com.au/insights/its-here-news-media-digita...
[3] https://youtu.be/2BPLBIgKjN8
[4] https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2020/01/where-the-legend-of-sc...
[+] [-] BLKNSLVR|5 years ago|reply
Google: the highway
Scotty from Marketing: we don't respond to threats[0]
[0]: https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-22/scott-morrison-goo...
[+] [-] canadianfella|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] webmobdev|5 years ago|reply
Google and Facebook are both US companies, with a strong online presence and great influence in Australia (and other countries). But obviously it is in Australia's national interest to see that this kind of influence is directed by Australia themselves, rather than corporate or some foreign interest.
It is undeniable that due to overwhelming monopolist control that many of these foreign US companies have over today's internet, stronger government oversight and regulation is a must to protect the national interests and sovereignty of any democratic country.
To this end, ideally we need the regulator to mainly:
- Implement strong privacy rules in favour of the citizen (with strong emphasis in limiting data collection, sharing and usage without users permission, and ensuring data is stored not outside the country, among other things).
- Create legal standard "templates" of the "terms of conditions" (on behalf of the citizens) for the various common online services and force the corporates to use these, instead of the ever-frequently-changing and one-sided contracts they force us to accept.
- Ensure online discourse is limited from foreign influence (e.g. to fight foreign online troll armies that try to influence elections).
[+] [-] jlkuester7|5 years ago|reply
Personally, I use DuckDuckGo for searching and find the experience to be better than Google, but YMMV.
[+] [-] graeme|5 years ago|reply
People don’t, and there is some browser default lock in, but it’s hardly like an electric grid, water or broadband monopoly. Or Standard Oil for that matter.
[+] [-] pmontra|5 years ago|reply
This is even more true for technical searches in my job (web development, mostly backend.) Google finds the answer, DDG less often so.
[+] [-] LatteLazy|5 years ago|reply
If Google abused that position so no one could replace them because they're no longer the best but still big, that's a problem. We're not there yet
[+] [-] chr1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nness|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danmur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justaguy88|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobcostas55|5 years ago|reply
AFAICT the law is targeted at Google and Facebook only, Microsoft would not have to pay.
[+] [-] thatguy0900|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markpapadakis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xyzzy123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jozvolskyef|5 years ago|reply
1. google.com.au redirects to google.com
2. google.com stops indexing australian content
3. australians barely notice, except perhaps for the latency
4. australian content creators collapse
edit: 5. american content creators adapt and cater to their new audiences
[+] [-] rsstack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeyjeremiah|5 years ago|reply
Searching for "plumbers in my area", "hospital near me", "Bondi Beach weather this weekend", "2021 Australian federal election" all starts to break or show dated results. Latency won't be the problem, relevance will be the problem.
[+] [-] filoleg|5 years ago|reply
Though I, personally, doubt it will get to that. Either Google will come to a satisfactory solution that won't piss off the Australian regulators or pre-emptively exit the market
[+] [-] waheoo|5 years ago|reply
The majority of Australians are pretty indifferent/apathetic here. Murdoch vs Google is Goliath vs Goliath, nobody cares who wins, everyone hopes they both get wrecked in the process.
The best outcome here is if Google stops linking to news organisations in Australia.
Zero fucks would be given and independent journalism would be able to grow in a healthy environment.
[+] [-] RL_Quine|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Arnt|5 years ago|reply
I haven't a clue here, I'm just surprised.
[+] [-] jay_kyburz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Barrin92|5 years ago|reply
Obviously anyone would take the entire Australian search market for some rather mundane regulation. If someone came to you and said you can have an entire country worth of Google's market, you just have to fork over some money for news headlines you link to you'd say no?
Microsoft in contrast to Google is a diversified firm that doesn't really rely on avoiding regulatory scrutiny that much, so they don't care.
[+] [-] JonoW|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Doctor_Fegg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] progre|5 years ago|reply
The name alone seems like something that Australians might like.
[+] [-] wombatmobile|5 years ago|reply
When Morrison says "our people", he means Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-17/scott-morrison-murdoc...
[+] [-] ryan-allen|5 years ago|reply
I honestly can't believe this is happening.
I do not want to be forced to switch to Bing :/
[+] [-] myle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meibo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Isinlor|5 years ago|reply
Pretty much "Our way or the highway" and seems like Google my by preferring the highway.
[+] [-] flukus|5 years ago|reply
The whole thing is a boondoggle for Rupert Murdoch, even our government funded media is excluded.
[+] [-] nailer|5 years ago|reply
> that would force tech giants like Google and Facebook to pay media companies for their content.
What's they're omitting: the rule forces Google and Facebook to include big media sites.
Always be wary of the media reporting on the media.
[+] [-] m0llusk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doublejay1999|5 years ago|reply
this is what a planted question looks like :-)
[+] [-] shash7|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nness|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graeme|5 years ago|reply
In reality, being linked to on the web is extremely valuable. Google has had to ban the practices of sites paying to be linked to.
The Australian law completely gets the value chain backwards, forcing tech companies to pay for a specific subset of links, and not allowing them to decline to link either.
[+] [-] dontblink|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fadzlan|5 years ago|reply
ie. if its not favorable for MS, maybe they just want to ditch the country too?
[+] [-] pjfin123|5 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/zj2r948rUkQ
[+] [-] antman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] explodingman|5 years ago|reply
Like most people, I'm astonished at how social media mediated news seems to disable so many people's bullshit detectors, but there's no denying that it is so.
Anyone who wants to persuade Australians that their government should not go ahead with the planned regulation of FB and Google needs to come up with an alternative suggestion that would keep Australia's democracy functional. I can't see anything in the anti-regulation commentary on HN that passes this test.