> (1) For the purposes of this Part, a service makes content available if:
19 (a) the content is reproduced on the service, or is otherwise
20 placed on the service; or
21 (b) a link to the content is provided on the service; or
22 (c) an extract of the content is provided on the service.
I wonder what will happen to the Google Australia offices.
Is not even a landmark law... Spain and Germany did it first... My understanding is it didn't work too well for publishers due to the decreased traffic...
According to Australia bill they want to sign into law, Google will be forced to include the links. Which makes sense why Google wants to withdraw from the country.
If you have the guns, you can do what you want. This is the case with australia in australia. Of course google can choose to leave, and they seem to think that would be preferable to paying.
Indeed, the problem is that Google is incredibly powerful, and one country at a time fighting them doesn't work. Google cuts them off until they back down.
We basically need a large group of countries to agree, at the same time, to make the same demands, to give Google no choice but to comply, or exit the business. (To some degree, the EU is capable of doing this, but enforcement and interpretation of EU directives can be a bit piecemeal.)
It's time for countries to start treating Google more like an enemy foreign power than a mere company, especially if it wants to act on that stage.
Isn't the point here that Google did exit the business when local laws required it to do so, but that turned out to hurt the media who were previously complaining more than it helped them?
> No, Australia is trying to get Google to pay any time they link to a news website.
Reality is ... always more complicated.
The problem they are trying to solve is Google is a monopoly in Australia (government claims 95% market share). The news businesses are a disorganised rabble. And rabble is putting it politely - more like a pack of thieves, stealing content off each other.
Being a thief was accepted because it didn't matter business wise. Their business was selling a daily dose of ads printed on dead trees. The "news" they are now fighting over was just the bait printed on those dead trees to entice people to read the ads. (Corollary: you're the product, not the customer goes back way longer than the internet.) Geography limits how far you can distribute dead trees (aka, newspapers), so each newspaper (or "masthead") operated over a limited area: about as far as you can transport a truck load of newspapers between midnight and dawn, so people could read your product over breakfast. Ergo, travel about 200km and any direction, and you were likely to find a new masthead, so there are lots of them, all fiercely independent.
The thing they stole of each other, and still steal off each other, is the bait, the "news", the thing they are so pissed off at Google for stealing. They didn't outright steal it of course, it was massaged by what they call a journalist into something that almost identical but side stepped copyright issues. The end result being if you look at two mastheads not too distant from each other, you will see very similar news featured on each. It didn't matter because the thing they were selling was the ads and they had a geographic monopoly. It wasn't stealing, it was cooperative behaviour driven by cost minimisation and it benefited everybody. I exaggerating of course as there is also paid for syndicated news and reprints of press releases, but much of what you read is tarted up tweets, internet posts, and scraped from other papers. It's only bait remember. It could be kitchen floor sweepings for all they care. All that matters is people lap it up, so they read those precious ads.
Then Google came along, following the industry practice of stealing content, to the point modifying by reducing it to a sentence or two so copyright didn't apply, but then sold ads to all their customers. Stealing customers and their revenue is a whole other thing.
The solution for the news businesses has always been obvious, just negotiate with Google for a price on the news. It's highly unlikely Google would forgo all news in their search engine, and there is only one place they could readily get it: the Australian newspapers. Google is already paying some Australian outlets for their content so they aren't complete Machiavellian pricks. But they are businessmen, so they've tested the market and found there were literally hundreds of outlets all selling the same merchandise and of course they had a highly valuable thing to offer in return: if we link to you, you get to display your ads. The response on the undisciplined rabble was to undercut each other trying to get that lucrative link, driving the price to zero.
The ironic thing is Google already gives them the tools they need to withhold their content: robots.txt and other more selective things. Google respects it https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/in... , so all they had to do is use it. But like a pack of two years olds tasked with fairly sharing a bag lollies they couldn't, so they asked the government to do it for them. And that's what worked in France: the government rounded them up and forced them to negotiate as a single entity, so it was one monopoly negotiating with another, and after much haggling they came at a price.
I'm not a lawyer, but this Australian legislation appears to insisting on one on one negotiations between Google and each newspaper, with the government setting the price if they don't agree. This changes nothing, it’s still a 95% monopoly presented with a turkey shoot, so it’s inevitable they won’t agree. The idea of the Government setting forcing a price when two monopolies could just sort it out between them is I'm guessing what Google objects to, and I'm pretty sympathetic.
But now I'm floored. Google has retorted like some spoiled child: well we will just turn off Google search in Australia. It's, well, insane. It's making for great political theatre in Australia. We were regaled with nightly TV news footage of the pollies in parliament milking it for all it's worth (the Prime Ministers response "we make the rules" being just one of them). It's like Google walked into their home ground, and handed over their head on a platter.
I don't understand any of this. It's like we are dealing with a couple two year olds whose negotiating skills amount to making demands and throwing tantrums. What are they thinking?
How exactly does a country get off making a law about what the businesses in another country are able to do over the internet? I’m sure there are countries that would like to get rid of free speech and prosecute homosexuality or speaking against a state religion perhaps? Why should we ignore them while listening to Australia’s ridiculous demands for linking to sites available via public DNS?
If you want to do business, collect money, or have offices or employees in a sovereign country, you have to follow their laws. If you don't like it, you can leave. It's that straightforward.
Sorry. Linking to (not even requesting) a public domain does not give any sovereign nation the right to demand funds. No one who is having funds demanded of them is visiting said country or said site, so no leaving is necessary. It’s frivolous money grabs like this that rob credibility from legitimate intellectual property
Google has offices, employees, multiple registered businesses of various types, and a bunch of physical hardware. They very much are subject to Australian law if they want to stay here.
(That said, the law is insane, and neatly demonstrates how badly our politicians are beholden to Murdoch).
Or conversely having a public domain does not give the right to any private enterprise to do business in a sovereign country. I guess that's a pretty solid argument and that's what most people argue for.
I agree Australia doesn't get to dictate what people do over the internet from remotely.
Neither does the EU.
Neither does China.
If you violate China's laws with your website, they block you. They don't need you to change your website. It's very simple.
If you violate GDPR, the EU is welcome to block you.
If you violate weird Australian laws, Australia is welcome to block you.
No different. Just that (hee hee) we know the EU and Australia won't dare set up national firewalls. But from the perspective of the website owner, they're welcome to set up a firewall if they don't like the website. But the website isn't going anywhere.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Australian govt is pretty open to implementing draconian laws. We've already got mandatory ISP metadata retention; we don't have a bill of rights like USA, we're basically a cryptotheocracy with the head of the Anglican Church as our head of state.
Who exactly would this firewall be protecting? Bitbucket, Jira and other competing Australian tech products would be dumped by anyone Australia firewalls off and there would be a dozen Silicon Valley startups to take their place over night.
Presumably they only need to filter out selective websites from being displayed inside Australia and not prevent Australian products from working outside of Australia.
The EU's attempts to force extra-territorial enforcement of the GDPR are hardly uncontroversial. It remains to be seen what will happen if and when it comes up against another big fish that is willing to take that fight.
As probably the most obvious example, looking at the relative development of the tech sector in the US compared to the EU, particularly now the UK has left, I don't think it takes a genius to work out who loses if the EU really tries to cut off US tech for not playing nicely with EU rules (GDPR or otherwise) and the US government retaliates.
It's laughable how preferentially they try to enforce GDPR on the US vs. other countries.
For example, Tencent has a lot of WeChat users in the EU but the EU haven't done a thing about their gross privacy violations that don't align with GDPR. Or Xiaomi Roborock vacuum cleaners, which are sold in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, but send Wi-Fi SSIDs, passwords, GPS, and floor maps back to their server with no option to disable that behavior and no option to request deletion of user data.
They mostly target Silicon Valley companies and don't seem to particularly care if other countries' companies violate GDPR.
Is it really protectionism when it disproportionately affected EU businesses detrimentally? It's more like they'll apply where the rule of law applies and yet they're too scared to take on China in this case.
> it disproportionately affected EU businesses detrimentally
Well that’s a very interesting take. Enforcement is overwhelmingly targeted at foreign companies, and primarily from the US and EU. I guess you can be the judge of whether it’s a just coincidence that those are the countries that the EU has the most contentious trade relationships with. Aside from China of course, which I’d say you have correctly observed would simply not tolerate the EU trying to enforce its laws extraterritorially.
The EU trying to enforce its laws on citizens of other countries who have never entered theirs is like that loud neighbor in the trailer park who talks about himself in the third person and keeps showing up drunk in his underwear to flirt with your wife and to rant that that your guest wifi isn’t fast enough.
From the text of the bill "(1) For the purposes of this Part, a service makes content available if:... 21 (b) a link to the content is provided on the service..."
This is pay for linking. It means anyone linking to a content provider is putting themselves at financial risk. Even if Google withdraws from Oz, whoever becomes the "Baidu" of Australia will essentially be faced with the same issue: They would have built their user base because user search engine demand is driven by content on the internet, one of the main purposes of a search engine is to provide links to that content, and this law exposes any search that links to content to claims on their revenue.
Of course, small sites need not worry, we hope, unless people can use the law to launch frivolous lawsuits and nuisance claims, but whoever would replace Google (even DDG) would face the same claims from news providers.
The reality is, the news business has been disrupted by the internet. They used to face competition only from a few local or regional competitors, but now the internet puts them into competition with all news providers around the world at the touch of a button. There's no going back to the way things were.
In much the same way that music and tv got disrupted by Spotify and Netflix's models, the publishing world needs new business model, and trying to siphon off search engines I don't think is sustainable. They need a Spotify for News. And by that, I mean, content publicly discoverable, but paywalled behind a subscription service, that needs to be super low overhead.
A number of distributed mechanisms have been tried, by both Google, and others, at micropayments, but it seems to me that micropayment systems have largely failed for some reason.
News media from big corporations is dying, nothing can save it because it's all pretty much clickbait trash or propaganda. So little of the real journalism these media empires did remains.
Independent journalism has to be the future, and whoever provides a platform for that will win.
Is this law protectionism? Remove the foreign incumbents to give local businesses a chance to establish themselves, then slowly remove the restrictions?
Considering the two leading search engine companies are in the Fortune 25, I think it's absolutely sustainable to siphon off search engines. They make a massive amount of pure profit, and are amongst the richest companies in the planet in raw cash on hand.
And it's also very fair, because search engines are, functionally and fundamentally, content scrapers. Everything they have and everything they offer is done by consuming the work of others.
But search itself isn't the paying feature for either company. If they say "no, thank you" then what do you replace it with? A worse search engine that also loses money? How do Australians come out ahead in this?
> And it's also very fair, because search engines are, functionally and fundamentally, content scrapers. Everything they have and everything they offer is done by consuming the work of others.
I guarantee that if you make Google pay everyone they link to, they will charge everyone they link to that much + overhead, and everyone except weird hobby sites that don't care how many visitors they get will pay it. Google provides value to websites as well as consuming value from them.
The internet/web was founded on permission-less, innovation, permissiveness, and openness. People were invited to share content, to aggregate, to link, and relink. 99% of the people reading this now, who learned to code on the Web, learned by copying other people's code snippets, and not paying them a dime. Scraping content isn't a bug, it's a feature. View Source is a the primary feature of published Web content. Content scraping with transformation, is fair use, and a feature.
IMHO, if you publish something on the web, and you don't have a paywall, and you don't block in robots.txt, and you don't have a LICENSE that covers use, people are free to link to your content. Otherwise, why even participate in the web when you don't want to be part of it (the linking).
If people start charging for links, you may as well pack up the open web.
If there was an federated free search engine, like bitcoin-like for search, these news publishers would still be in trouble, and they'd have no one go after, which suggests the problem is fundamentally, something with their business model.
They're talking about purely scraped content without anything added, like someone mirroring another site, wholesale copying without any change. "Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site;"
This is pretty easy to understand and I don't think controversial. Scrape your site and transform some of the information to make a useful service? Yes. Scrape your whole site and just host its pages? No.
Maybe your site is a medical blog and over the years has written about pretty much every condition. If someone else were to scrape this, and make an interactive map of the human body, where if you click on a part, it lists links to the original blog, plus a pop-up summative snippet, very few people are going to scream "You did nothing! This guy spent years writing medical articles, and you come along and make a fancy interactive body as a way to linking to his articles, and now you're getting ad revenue and traffic!" Obviously, if lots of people are using this new interactive service, it's a value add.
But what if instead, I setup a site like WebMD, supposedly with expertly written medical content from the Web's best medical bloggers, but I just scrape all their articles, and host those pages on my own site, as if they had written the articles as contributors to my site.
And you don't think the latter should be downranked?
Do you think GPT-3 should somehow pay someone everytime it generates an answer? What if future search engines crawl the web and build giant transformer models which just answer questions by whole-sale authoring a new article from scratch, how do we compare that to a human being doing the same thing?
Scraping is how human beings learn and there's a big difference between wholesale piracy, and transformation.
One way you can see it is not fair in the least is that Google would decline to index the content were it allowed. That suggest that the content has little economic value to google.
They can threaten but ultimately it would be a self-defeating move as, after they withdraw, the sky won't fall and other countries will quickly come to the conclusion that crossing Google is a viable option. A dangerous game for Google and a potential win for alternative search engine options.
But wouldn't that law apply to other search engines as well?
From what I could gather from the article it's a really stupid ill-thought out law and damages the whole internet in Australia for the benefit of few news companies.
Potentially, but realistically not unless the engine has reached a critical mass. Per the draft code[0] whether or not it applies to your company is up to the Treasurer[1] - see relevant section: https://i.imgur.com/7RSqXDJ.png
There's a major issue here because as a search company you could wake up one day to find that a single person has decided your revenue and expenditure has changed drastically. Even if you believe the spirit of this law is good, the way this is written is downright dangerous.
Sure, it's a stupid law, but that's a separate issue to the idea that Google's response is also self-defeating. We're already laughing at the idea of Google search no longer being available, like do they think we haven't heard of DDG and Startpage?
I think the point is it doesn't matter whether it's self-defeating or not. If the law passes it becomes infeasible for Google search to continue to operate in Australia legally, so they have to shut it off; simple as that. Google isn't making threats, just stating facts.
Startpage is just using Google data, so presumably if it's able to still operate in Australia when Google does not, it'll be missing a lot of relevant recent data for the Australian market.
All the search engine has to do is direct traffic to the site where the article is, not host on AMP and thus collect all the royalties and ad revenue itself.
In the meantime, Google is “experimenting” with leaving out Australian media entirely which on one hand is good (starving Murdoch of oxygen) but on the other hand is terrible (starving everyone of oxygen).
The proposed law lets news companies charge search engines which simply direct traffic to their site (and does not allow search engines to delist the sites). AMP and all of Google's other moves beyond merely being a search engine are irrelevant here.
I'm not sure what exactly that would entail, but Google has quite big offices in Sydney and elsewhere. Google Maps came out of Sydney, and I believe a lot of its development still happens there.
Oh sure, it would impact them for sure. Just saying that if they do pull out of Australia, they don't need to stop serving Google Search to Australians. They can just serve it out of a foreign IP address just like Baidu would be for Australians to access.
If they served it out of Singapore or some other place in the region speeds would still be decent.
Simply withdrawing their business presence from Australia would not necessarily remove their liability or remove them from the jurisdiction of Australian courts. The lack of a business presence is not always a shield against long-arm jurisdiction.
How exactly do you think Australia is going to enforce this mandate if Google has no presence in Australia. Are they going to have the military invade California?
We have treaties addressing issues like these, and generally it is an accepted principle of international law that a country can regulate a company that chooses to business with its citizens.
But Google would not be doing business with Australian citizens. It would be serving them webpages, but it would not take nor give them any money. That said, I'm skeptical that such treaties exist. Would you like to point a specific instance of such a treaty out?
"Serving them webpages" is a business activity under international law. The consideration is the ads they show alongside search results.
As for resources on such treaties, visit the OECD website and you'll be inundated with the model treaties that form the basis of the actual treaties between countries. (Some treaties involve many parties, most are between two nations.) Since you're not paying me, I will simply point out that under America's tax treaty with Australia, the Technical Explanation would note that providing services to another country's citizens is an activity covered by the treaty, and Australia's tax office has plenty of documentation saying the same.
Yes but could they do anything? As you said, the lack of a business presence in China was not a shield, and the consequence is that China just blocked them.
Australia would be more than welcome to do the same.
(But hee hee, we secretly know their citizens would protest if they set up a national firewall.)
Would above mean Google stop serving ads in Australia? Clearly it's still in Google interest to serve them from afar but there must be some legalities about that. Previously Adwords for Australia was "run" and billed from Singapore for the tax benefits and they were pressured to end this.
And a plethora of marketing businesses will go batshit on the government if they force Adwords out of Australia. Adwords is a huge part of the industry. We're going to see this sector struggle for a while if they need to re-adjust.
I don't see why they can't serve ads in Australia for other businesses that are based outside Australia but do business in Australia and might want to serve ads to residents there, e.g. Coca-Cola or whatever.
All financial transactions would take place outside Australia, Google wouldn't need a legal entity there.
Exactly. Depart Australia entirely, serve Australians from a foreign IP address, still charge Australian businesses for ads & G-Suite but in USD (comparable rates using card conversion) further devaluing the Australian dollar.
On the one hand I'm usually pretty anti Google most of the time
On the other hand without looking at the actual law I remember when the Aussie prime minister said "the laws of mathematics are all well and good but in Australia the laws of Australia take precedence." When taking about backdoors for encryption that only the police could use.
I'm not the biggest fan of Googles near-monopoly, but as an Australian I am seriously concerned by the Murdoch monopoly. These laws wouldn't even be in consideration if it weren't for old Rupe pushing the blatantly pro-murdoch government for it.
Not sure if you're mocking the twitter censorship of Trump (after reading your post history, it would seem you are), but it's not concerning that Rupert Murdoch "wants" to do it, it's concerning that he has the power and influence over our public government to get it done.
Aside from the spirit / intent of this law, the way it is written is extremely poor / downright dangerous. Whether or not this law applies to your business online is not based on a set of metrics/rules/requirements, it's based on whether or not the Treasurer[0] of Australia decides it is: https://i.imgur.com/7RSqXDJ.png
As a company owner you can wake up one day to find that your company is now listed as an official designated digital platform corporation in the Federal Register of Legislation[1] and your finances have completely changed.
The whole thing looks like a desperate money grab. The primary purpose of a search engine is to provide links to content related to the user's search. This gives the content providers visibility. From my understanding this law requires that the search engine pay for listing some media companies as relevant search results. The law also makes it illegal to simply not list those media companies as relevant results. This strikes me as utterly ludicrous.
"Although the Treasurer, in making the determination, must consider whether there is ‘a significant bargaining imbalance between Australian news providers and the group comprised of the corporation and all of its related bodies corporate’ the determination is not invalid for failure to consider this (s 52C(3))."
So there is only one factor they're required to consider for that portion, but they can choose to ignore it without apparent consequences. You can tell this was written specifically as a blatant money grab, something more legitimate would have factors beyond "because we say so" even if only to provide cover.
Let's be real Web search isn't that new or special anymore.
Before you cry that Google has the best results, the results are actually fed by data mining users. If we all jumped onto Bing tomorrow, after enough usage, it will have the same results as Google.
Amp and Chrome dominating the market is reason enough to ditch Google before it continues to abuse its monopoly like this.
If the proposal was to treat Amp, or excessive embedding of content on social media feeds etc., as effectively piracy and prosecuting on that basis then I'd be open to it. But I just can't get behind what is being proposed in any way because it is so absurd and arbitrary.
As a supporter of a free and open Internet, I can't see how the logical conclusion of requiring websites to reimburse the other end of a hyperlink for the privilege of linking to them could possibly be a good thing.
As a user of the Internet in Australia, I am concerned about what the obvious sovereign risk of the Treasurer having this power to arbitrarily punish web companies does to the availibility of services to Australian users.
As a software developer in Australia (albeit one who hasn't worked directly in web tech to date), I am concerned about the damage this does to the tech industry, and subsequently my employability and income, in this country.
And most of all as a political citizen of Australia, I am deeply troubled by the idea of giving politicians the power of deciding which media organisations do/don't have the power to arbitrarily extort money out of FAANG as a significant revenue stream.
As someone else from Australia, I am not, not is anyone else I have spoken to.
Yea, Google needs to be reigned in, but not like this, not with corrupt legislation handing free money to old established news organisations in an attempt to keep them afloat.
You do realise other search engines will likely have to comply (or leave the country) too, right?
Now I want this law to happen for the sole purpose of seeing if Google actually flinches. It seems like a silly threat given that there's now a fairly large amount of small search engine providers who would probably thankfully step into that market
I don't think Google opposes the law itself in good faith, because it basically just demands that Google negotiate with media entities for a price-sharing agreement when it comes to showing their content. The Australian search market is obviously still a billion dollar business, the law is not literally 'unworkable' and Google probably knows this. What else is Content ID on Youtube? Third party revenue sharing agreements for content already exist on Google's own platforms.
What Google is afraid of is the precedent it sets for other countries to do the same and eat into their search revenue because it would dispel the myth that tech companies cannot be regulated, that's the real danger here.
> it basically just demands that Google negotiate with media entities for a price-sharing agreement
This is not an accurate summary of the law's effects. Yes, that's part of what it says. But if they can't come to an agreement, Australia gets to set the price sharing amount. And declining to link to news content isn't allowed, so if it costs Google more than the news is worth, well then it's effectively just a tax that applies to only a single company.
This is like if I, the mayor, said, you must negotiate with this man to rent some rooms of your house. If he doesn't like the price you give, I'll decide what it is. No, you can't choose not to rent rooms to him.
Maybe I was looking at an older version of the law. The version posted at the top only requires non-differentiation -- that Google cannot decline to index a business because it requires payment. So Google would have to stop indexing news in Australia altogether, but then could avoid payment. That being said, I have seen reporting before that suggests that delisting news, even all news, would not be sufficient to avoid paying under the law.
"But iterated games sometimes require a strategy that deviates from apparent first-level rationality, where you let yourself consider lose-lose options in order to influence an opponent's behavior."
"Or, in layman's terms, sometimes you have to be a crazy bastard so people won't walk all over you."
If the Australian government wants to try and force Google to make payments that exceed the revenue they get in Australia and is effectively preventing simply de-listing news sites (this is in the code).
This seems like a reasonable approach to me.
I don't agree generally with a lot of Googles business practices but I feel like this is just a desperate attempt to increase profits by the Murdoch media in Australia.
As has been said elsewhere, if news sites don't want their content to be indexed/smart-carded by Google they can set that in their page headers and robots.txt
The problem is they want to have their cake and eat it too, they want all the traffic passed through Google but they also want to effectively be paid for the users that never visit their site (Whether or not they ever would have).
The way the bill is written is disappointing because it conflates two different things together:
For the purposes of this Part, a service makes content available if: (a)the content is reproduced on the service, or is otherwise placed on the service; or (b)a link to the content is provided on the service; or (c)an extract of the content is provided on the service.
I think most of us would agree that a search engine being charged for providing links (b) is pretty dumb.
But with the rise of content embeds and republishing (a/c), it's a completely different scenario when Facebook is sucking up your content for the benefit of their users.
So while I feel this is a raw deal for search engines, it is about time that social media platforms paid their dues.
Are they going to withdraw from Saudi, from Turkey, any other place that imposes their own laws?
If they do, I’d love to see Bing and the Duck go in and earn their keep.
Honestly, seeing Twitter, Amazon and now Google do things because it makes them “mad” to me shows they have too much power. I hope the EU puts their foot down and reigns them in.
On the other hand, news orgs can’t have it both ways. Google does not owe them money to index them.
Why can’t Google just not index news sites but provide other services?
Why can’t Google just not index news sites but provide other services?
Perhaps their lawyers have a problem with the principle or some ambiguity around it, maybe concerned that search engines could end up retrospectively being found to owe significant money to sites they didn't anticipate, perhaps very many sites they didn't anticipate?
I'm hardly a fan of the way big tech firms, Google included, sometimes act, and I do think freeloading based on others' content is a real problem that needs addressing. However, from the legal wording I've seen quoted so far this potential law appears to require a site like Google to pay up merely for linking to content hosted elsewhere, the most basic element of the WWW. If a news site doesn't want people linking to it, maybe the WWW isn't the medium it should use to publish its material?
I think I’m on the same page. The law is ridiculous for requiring remuneration for providing a link but Google and other tech giants wield too much unchecked power and they need to be regulated, maybe broken up.
Maybe I'm missing something, but search engines make money by selling (some) links. Now all of a sudden, governments are expecting them to pay for links?
And when the search engine says "Sorry, that's not a good business case for us, we won't be operating in your country", that is considered a "threat"?
Look, companies want to make money. If you don't allow them to make money, they won't operate. Is it that hard to understand?
I think they're going to exit the market until Australian legislation changes,
Google will fight it on principle, since the law is essentially adding "link rent" to web searches(and uncertainty to legality of linking itself). However, whats more interesting who will replace them:
Yandex(used by DDG) and similar engines(Baidu?) will not be strongarmed by Australian government to pay for links, giving them a competitive advantage..
Respectfully, that is not the same thing. The news article from the OP (and why there's so many today), is because Google just confirmed (/threatened) that it will. That other article from a week ago is just speculation.
It's possible I missed a nuance but I'm not seeing the difference between 'speculation' and 'threat' as significant enough to support a substantively different discussion, which is the criterion we use in such cases:
This is counterproductive in an English speaking country. There is a few similarly good alternative like Bing for example. In non-English speaking countries though this strategy might work.
This is called a "capital strike" and it is an attack on national sovereignty. A mere dictatorially run company can tell an entire democracy what to do?
A mere dictatorially run company can tell an entire democracy what to do?
To be fair, Big Media have been doing something not unlike that for generations, as have big businesses in numerous other industries through various forms of lobbying, regulatory capture and revolving door politics. It's not as if Big Tech getting in on the act is a unique or original move. Not that this necessarily makes it any better, of course.
One interesting potential difference this time is that in a very direct way, Google are only strong enough to make this strategy work if they have a lot of popular support for their services continuing to operate, which is another way of saying that their services are providing a significant public benefit and possibly they have a point. If their services aren't all that and competitors can readily step in to provide a similar value to society, as various comments here have already suggested, then this strategy by Google is doomed to fail and will also leave them in a considerably weaker position when it comes to playing poker over other regulation in the future.
So just because a country is a democracy, Google has to do business there, and if they choose not to, that's dictatorial and an attack on the country's sovereignty? That's a strange argument. What other companies would you apply this standard to? Because there are lots that offer their digital services only in specific markets.
One interesting possibility here would be if Google closed down all Australia-based operations -- no more offices, no legal presence, no employees -- and offered its services to Australians purely over the Internet from somewhere else. At that point, Google wouldn't necessarily be within Australia's jurisdiction any more, and all Australia could really do would be either attempt to block access to Google services that was desired by its citizens (and look like China Lite) or attempt to exert some form of leverage on the host nation(s) from which Google was then offering its services (and since that list would presumably start with the US and possibly be followed by lots of places that want to do business with the US, good luck with that one).
But Google won't be in their jurisdiction any more, right? So everything is working as it should? Not a capital strike on democracy. Simply Google and Australia deciding to go their separate ways.
I think that's called slavery. I'm not talking about having rules. I'm talking about forcing them to work and continue to provide services when they don't want to.
I think you either misunderstand the comment or the concept of sovereignty. If you live or do business in a country's sovereign territory, you fall under the jurisdiction and authority of their laws. If you don't live or work there, then you don't.
What? Google just says it won't do business under those circumstances. How is that telling a democracy what to do? They just tell what they will do under those circumstances.
I would like to see this happen - Getting reasonable placement on Google search has become about giving them money for Ads, or focusing on SEO over content.
Why would you want to build an alternative that is subjected to those same laws?
If google can make money, they will. If they can't, they won't. If they pull out of that market, maybe it's a good indicator of the potential benefit of starting such a company.
Doubt it ever will, as DDG/<insert any other search engine here> would be forced to pay up and comply with this ridiculous legislation. Easier to just not bother with a country as small as Australia.
I think that clearly something needs to be done though I don't know what. Something has to give.
Search engines are absolutely a parasitic business, for the mere fact that they could not exist without the content they scrape, index, and serve to users. It would be permissible if Google didn't make a profit by doing these things, but they do. So--something needs to be rebalanced. Either search needs to be a public service, non-profit, or there needs to be a profit sharing or some new licensing scheme or law that the content owners are subject to.
At best it is symbiotic. But the imbalance in power makes it parasitic as Google will absolutely leverage its power to make sure they receive the most out of the arrangement. I think parasite fits better since the content creator can exist without google, but google cannot exist without the content creator.
> Australia is introducing a landmark law to make Google, Facebook and potentially other tech companies pay media outlets for their news content.
No, Australia is trying to get Google to pay any time they link to a news website.
The bill text is here: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.....
> (1) For the purposes of this Part, a service makes content available if: 19 (a) the content is reproduced on the service, or is otherwise 20 placed on the service; or 21 (b) a link to the content is provided on the service; or 22 (c) an extract of the content is provided on the service.
I wonder what will happen to the Google Australia offices.