There would be no political suicide there. It's so easy to make Google/Facebook look evil in this case if they don't comply. Just say they are not paying taxes and getting our money abroad etc.

But there is 0% chance of Google/Facebook not complying.

> I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship

Not even close.

Don't the French and Spanish examples indicate otherwise? Spain's link tax in 2014 led to the shutting-down of Google News Spain, and France's attempt to charge for Google News snippets led to the removal of those snippets for French sites (followed by a dip in traffic for pubs that hurt them far more than it hurt Google). What makes you think that FB/G don't have the power here?

If you don't want them to index your content and send you free traffic, you can already specify that in your robots.txt; for free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard

There are no ads on Google News.

There is an apparent glut of online news: supply exceeds demand and so the price has fallen.

> There are no ads on Google News.

This is the ironic part of the policy. You're right about the glut, and there was a glut in print 20 years ago, too. Google's definitely hurt businesses, but it's usually though disintermediating them (think Yelp). Google News and search don't really do that for news--snippets and headlines aren't the same as an article. I find it hard to believe that ABC's brand isn't strong enough for them to pull their content from Google and expect people to go to abc.net.au; I just don't think than can sell enough ads to give the content away.

I find that a lot of news articles these days don’t amount to much more than what’s in the headline/subtitle.

By hurt, do you mean competed with by effectively utilizing technology to help people find information about the world from multiple sources.

There are very many news aggregators and most do serve ads next to the headlines they index. I assume that people typically link out from news aggregation sites more than into vertically-integrated services.

Perhaps the content producers / information service providers could develop additional revenue streams in order to subsidize a news aggregation public service. Micropayments (BAT, Web Monetization (ILP)), ads, paywalls, and public and private grants are sources of revenue for content producers.

I think it's disingenuous to blame news aggregation sites for the unprofitability of extremely redundant journalism. What happened to journalism? Internet. Excessive ads. Aren't we all writers these days.

Unfortunately they killed the "most cited" and was it "most in-depth" source analysis functions of Google News; and now we're stuck with regurgitated news wires and press releases and all of these eyewitness mobile phone videos with two-bit banal commentary and also punditry. How the world has changed.

So, as far as scientific experiments are concerned, it might be interesting to see what the impact of de-listing from free time sites X, Y, and Z is.

Do the papers in Australia and France now intend to compensate journal ScholarlyArticle authors whose work they summarize and hopefully at least cite the titles and URLs of, or the journals themselves?

Yup, Australian media companies are just resorting to the high-overhead alternative of passing a law equivalent to specifying the robots.txt of a handful of companies. And for some reason the Aus govt is dumb enough to do it for them.

>What makes you think that FB/G don't have the power here?

They also risk losing that entire market as well. Let's be honest, nobody loves F or G. If a decent competitor stands up people will gladly switch, even more if they market it as "by Australians for Australians".

SV companies are big and great and all that, but to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.

A lot of people have invested a lot of effort in creating the narrative of a techlash, that people are fed up with big tech's abuses and would be glad to see the big companies go. But it's simply not true. Polls of the general public consistently show that Facebook and Google are well-loved.

For example: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/27/16550640/verge-tech-surv...

More recent articles:

https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/amidst-techlash-m...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/opinion/tech-backlash.htm...

I read a similar one in the last 6 months tying it to politics. One was that Trump is ironically more tech-friendly than Sanders or Warren (~Nov 2019), despite tech workers generally not supporting Trump. The other oddity was that polls don't really show that there's a techlash, so why are Democratic frontrunners making it a talking point?

For the same reason that Elizabeth Warren says "Latinx" despite a tiny fraction of Latino citizens identifying with the term: many of them are running for what's been described as "President of Twitter", where Twitter is a metonymy for old-economy institutional elites, lashing out pathetically at the democratizing forces weakening their hold on power. I assume the reason politicians do this is partially drinking the Kool-Aid from their bubble, and partly intentional pandering to journalists who are also in that bubble.

They risk losing the entire Austrian market. But paying this tax also risks emboldening other countries to follow suit. Exiting the market has the short term loss of Austrian revenue, but signals that legislation like this will not work.

Refusing to do business in a country due to regulation isn't acting above the law. These companies have no requirement to conduct business in any given country.

What you're imagining is that if Google shuts down Google News in Australia, the government will threaten to shut down all their other unrelated business ventures, unless they put it back up?

The concept of forcing a foreign business to run a business it doesn't want to is a bit bizarre, and I doubt a court would support the concept, let alone the idea of holding the rest of the company hostage.

> Let's be honest, nobody loves F or G

I think this is probably just your HN bubble; lots of the criticism of Google here is tinged with irrational bitterness, along with the classic tech culture distrust centralization and the power structures around control of data. I happen to align fairly strongly with the latter view, but neither of these have much purchase in the wider population, where Google remains wildly more popular than most institutions that you think of as benign or popular.

> to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.

How do you explain the situations as they played out in Spain (in 2014) and France? It seems a lot more delusional to me to ignore precedent and forecast based on wishful thinking about the power dynamic between these companies and states.

> They also risk losing that entire market as well. Let's be honest, nobody loves F or G.

Nobody loves the media either. Across every market I’m aware of trust and respect for the media has been falling for over a decade.

People may not love them but many people still use them. Sad but true.

Like how I promote telegram to my friends but I'm "forced" to use WhatsApp for some "niche majority"

I love both Google, and Facebook. I'm constantly blown away that something like Youtube exists, I love my Oculus Quest and use it daily, I keep in touch with friends on WhatsApp, and use Google Search more than any other website.

I'm not trying to imply they are above jurisdiction, I am quite tired of hearing the "No one likes these guys" narrative though.

> They also risk losing that entire market as well. Let's be honest, nobody loves F or G. If a decent competitor stands up people will gladly switch, even more if they market it as "by Australians for Australians".

Are Australians really so nationalistic? I thought they would mostly choose whatever tool allows them to do what they want as quick as possible.

> SV companies are big and great and all that, but to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.

Google can follow the law by simply not indexing Australians sites anymore, or they don't have to service Australians. If they are told to share revenue, they can choose to simply shut down the revenue source instead, especially if the cost of revenue sharing exceeds the revenue they are generating. FB/G aren't charities.

When GDRP came online, many web sites in the states found that blocking out EU viewers was cheaper than complying. That isn't going against EU law.

Companies are in a sense above the state jurisdictions of everywhere but where they are headquartered. Companies regularly withdraw from markets because the regulatory environment is inhospitable.

In the long term the issue with this is that it pushes Google and Facebook into your politics. If you use political measures to screw with them, then they'll start getting involved in the politics more and more to protect themselves. And these two companies could have a lot of influence in ways that are hard to notice.

The pay-per-click model has already forced news organizations towards producing click-bait content. I’m not sure why regulators would want to deepen that influence by making newspapers more dependent on Google and Facebook.

It sounds threatening and I hope you don't work for them but anyway, Google and Facebook are already pushing hard into politics.

I do not work for them. This is something I noticed over the years: as Google ran into more and more obstacles in the US that are political the more they seem to have started to meddle. Maybe it's because this is easier, but maybe it's to protect themselves.

These companies don't push themselves into politics everywhere (yet), but I'm sure that the more governments squeeze them the more they'll get involved.

It's based on learning from what happened to Microsoft.

I used to work at Google. It wasn't often discussed, but when lobbying came up (including in formal contexts) the general attitude was "you can try to ignore Washington but Washington won't ignore you". The perception was very much that Microsoft had gone through the anti-trust trial not so much because of what they'd done but because for years under the Clinton administration they didn't grease the right wheels, in fact they barely had any presence in Washington, which left them politically exposed. The combination of no powerful friends, extremely vague laws and extremely empowered and political regulators was seen as a very toxic one. And that's especially remarkable because Google was (at that time) a company whose executives really didn't like Microsoft, they feared them and treated them as the biggest threat to their business. A lot had come out of the Linux/open source world, academia, UNIX vendors etc and they were really the last people who would give Gates a break, but nonetheless their conclusion was that lobbying was basically a requirement of doing business in the USA.

I'm going back here - eventually that changed and they came to fear Facebook more. But for instance the Google Toolbar was basically an anti-Microsoft play, as was Chrome.

I cynically thought that was corruption by design, politicians - trying to get them into a 'contribute to both sides so they shut up' with shakedowns. They were trying to cast Google as sexist well before anything else happened to harm their image.

It's a fact of life.

Bill Gates kept politicians at arms length.

If Microsoft had given Washington a little attention, the antitrust lawsuit would never ever have happened.

Google has squelched antitrust investigations in US every single time through lobbying.

Even Apple would been in hot regulatory soup if they didn't buddy up to politicians.

>In the long term the issue with this is that it pushes Google and Facebook into your politics.

Google is already the largest industry lobbyist stateside

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/09/google-is-techs-top-spender-...

>Just say they are not paying taxes and getting our money abroad etc.

This is said pretty regularly in the media in Australia, and honestly no one cares. Even big mining companies like BHP pay little corporate tax on shore, and after years of it being 'exposed', honestly the general public don't seem to care.

I think it's more accurate to say the public cares somewhat, and consequently politicians do too (they sometimes roll out accusations of "un-Australian" tax minimization to suit their agenda). But politicians don't dare to move against the big companies because they know they'll lose. Both in campaign/party donations and in being targeted at the next election if their policies are going to impact those companies (see what happened with the mining companies and the Carbon tax). This same thing could happen with these "internet" companies who would only need to devote a little of their local advertising to a campaign against the change and against the party proposing it to have any public support cancelled out and politicians quickly reversing their position.

>interesting to see what happens if they start pushing back.

Nothing. Google isn't going to forego the entire Australian market or even an economy as large as the Eurozone. They'd just pay their x% tax and suck it up and consider it cost of doing business.

Google is a company, not a nation state and governments ought to stop kowtowing in front of companies. Reminds me of the story about the elephants and the rope

> entire Australian market

Australia has 25 million people.

That's about half the size of Spain. The GDP of Australia is roughly equal to the GDP of Spain.

GM and Ford had no problem extracting itself from Australia, I see no barriers for Google and FB to do the same.

>GM and Ford had no problem extracting itself from Australia,

The only thing they extracted were their manufacturing operations, GM and Ford still sell vehicles in Australia. They even have the Focus which Ford dropped for the American market! Unless Google and Facebook are going to close their offices but still provide service to Australia, that seems like an entirely different scenario.

GM will effectively end sales once they wind down the Holden brand over the next year.

They killed off Holden but they're still selling some Chevrolet models, and there have been a lot of Cadillac test mules spotted around Australia.

https://www.goauto.com.au/news/cadillac/spied-cadillac-ct5-p...

https://www.goauto.com.au/news/holden/gm-has-lsquo-a-future-...

They can certainly do that. It would mean Australian firms would need to buy ads through a foreign broker or sibling company, but many Australian advertisers would have those sorts of firms in existence already.

car manufacturers leave expensive countries because there's an opportunity cost. If they can move their infrastructure from Australia to Thailand they make more money. Google already is everywhere. When they leave a country they just lose money. The marginal cost of production for large tech companies is close to zero so leaving a market virtually never makes any sense. Which is of course why all of the tech companies would personally grovel in front of the CCP if they let them in regardless under which conditions.

>They'd just pay their x% tax and suck it up and consider it cost of doing business.

And then after that the companies will get involved in politics in those places so that it never happens again. This in turn increases the chance of regulatory capture and corruption.

Also, don't forget that increasing the cost of doing business will discourage others from trying. Oh, and there's also the US government too. They might just end up siding with Google and Facebook.

> And then after that the companies will get involved in politics in those places so that it never happens again. This in turn increases the chance of regulatory capture and corruption.

Sounds like a great reason to change the distribution of wealth and systematically reduce the power and influence of corporations.

That's a nice idea, but it seems to not really lead to better outcomes. Socialism and communism have these same kinds of power struggles. It seems to simply be part of human nature.

> What if Google and Facebook just said “No, thank you.”?

We'll get anti-google/facebook/tech propaganda campaign like in the past. Remember the months/years of neverending anti-google "news"? Remember the months/years of neverending anti-facebook "news"? Followed by congressional hearings/etc. Notice how it all seemed to have stopped when google/youtube/facebook/etc decided to give state-backed "news" companies preferential treatment on their platforms?

> I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship

In purely business/financial terms, sure. But not in the media/political terms. You think these tech companies have more power than state backed news companies?

The Aussie government’s dilemma is to avoid having to build their own services to fill a US tech gap. Politicians have stated they would prefer not to build their own services from the ground up.

I think there’s an element of Australian politics that would push for homegrown stuff over google/fb.

They’re simply not capable of such things. The government fails to grasp technology entirely, passes technically impossible bills and destroys even the good things it creates (ftth is now fttn).

While there’s some precedents with piracy website DNS entries removed from ISP dns, I doubt the gov would want to pick a fight with a multi billion (trillion?) dollar company who would actually fight back.

>They’re simply not capable of such things.

Google and Facebook are not cutting edge technologies. They are in the position of IBM in the 80s and Microsoft in the 90s, a legacy technology with huge market share being able to charge monopoly prices. A home grown alternative to google search is not beyond any university with a 100m budget.

What if I told you the government hasn’t been capable of moving away from IBM, SAP, Oracle, SAP or Microsoft yet ;)

What if I told you that North Korea has their own OS?

Id say that Australia isn’t. A dictatorship

> piracy website DNS entries removed

I admit I hardly visit pirate sites, but I didn't even notice that happen. I just checked and the Pirate Bay is still available so I don't know what they're even blocking.

e.g. 1337x.to, limetorrents.cc and torrentking.eu bring up an "access blocked" page. "Access to this site has been blocked by an order of the Federal Court of Australia" etc.

https://thepiratebay.org is working fine for me today, although I'm sure that address hadn't worked for a while until very recently, and it wasn't the same sort of blocking as those above.

I have a new computer. On my old one I changed to Google DNS when a lot of torrent sites were being blocked a few years ago, and suddenly they all worked again. Kind of silly saying access is blocked when changing one number on the computer unblocks them all.

Those 3 all work for me (well the 3rd one gives a Cloudflare error at https://torrentrex.com/, not a DNS black hole). I am based in Sydney with my ISP's own DNS (Aussie BB).

I think I read somewhere that smaller ISPs aren’t required to implement the restrictions, Presumably they might choose to not manage their own dns servers thus significant overhead. but I could be wrong.

Tpb is definitely blocked, I didn’t notice for ages but turns out I was always overriding my ISP DNS and using google dns which for some reason doesn’t block it, I’ve since moved to cloudflare who are in the same boat.

It doesn’t need to replace fb or google, only the functions it uses and provide an extensible set of tech for locals to develop solutions as needed. Still a massive undertaking but more reasonable.

No one HAS to build those services. The services Google and FB provide are 100% nonessential to successful society.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but alternatives already exist for both.

China has home-grown tech for both certainly, but I don't know if the fact that everyone uses a flavor of search engine and social media proves that they're nonessential.

I guess you could say search engines are nonessential like music and entertainment are nonessential. Somehow people end up wanting both anyways.

most Australian news outlets are 100% non essential click bait trash, too.

I'd say all of them, particularly the state media which have journalistic policies that allow them to skirt the issuing of retractions for months (ABC) or not at all (SBS). At least the private sector media will retract and correct in a reasonable period of time, in my experience both Fairfax and News Corp, although they're also generally rags at this point.

Interesting point, do you have any examples? I’m generally left swinging but find the general style used by sbs and abc are generally less click baity and manipulative but are at times pretty left swinging themselves.

Context: left = progressive, right = conservative. I think those terms switch in some countries so figured id mention.

After requesting a retraction for some false news on SBS' website, I was informed after a very lengthy delay that they did not issue retractions to articles unless there is a complaint received within an arbitrary period of time. There's that, then there's the fact ACMA has zero oversight over SBS' online operations because they can only regulate their television content.

For the ABC, on two separate occasions I reported some pretty egregious incorrect reporting and both times retractions occurred over a month later.

Contrast this to the retractions I've gotten from the private sector. A reporter on a News Corp website replied to my email in under 10 minutes (!!) and issued a retraction. A reported for Fairfax similarly retracted a point in an article the following day after a complaint.

So, the contrast is stark and revealing. ABC and SBS will lie to you with impunity and zero oversight, while the private sector at least has the decency to correct themselves in a reasonable period of time.

Is it truly the only thing they could do? They could force phones to use different defaults. They could ban preinstallation of their apps. They could force preinstallation of competing apps. They could throttle them so their services get slow. They could force providers to show a large banner in addition to the site when showing it. They could I suppose add an additional tax on android phones to hurt Google, or even through the providers tax Facebook and Google usage until compliance. They could ban their apps and app stores. They could freeze bank accounts. They could send the army to destroy their hq. Banning their websites is merely the most sensible action in this situation.

It would be crazy for G/FB to play that kind of hardball. For Google, it would be an existential and permanent loss of business.

Imagine if you woke up and G was not available in your country?

You switch to an alternative: Bing, DDG etc..

Alternatives that many Aussies may not have really been aware of.

And now, 100% of G's user base is being 'conditioned' on competitors' products - their default behavior, the icons they click, the default search engine for browsers changing over.

And for most people - DDG/Bing is probably just as good as Google.

A month later, G comes back to Australia, how many people bother to switch back? How many people have come to 'be fine' with something else? How many people resent G?

Does the Aussie Gov, which will realize that 'search' is an essential aspect of operating ability, will even allow government workers to use a service from someone who will drop it instantly, and sign a service contract with Bing? Corporations who see it as an existential flaw and require everyone to have 3 search solutions 'at the ready'.

For FB obviously it's a different story, however, a smart politician would paint FB as a 'foreign enemy' and turn the tide of populism against them as well. Because Aussie didn't 'ban' them, FB/G pulled out themselves, denying people their service, most people would 'blame them'.

FB has some seemingly essential aspects in terms of communication, but I think that people would soon discover that it's not essential at all.

It would be a disaster for both of them.

The other risk is that this disaster becomes contagious.

If G 'shuts down' in Australia - what does the UK government do? The EU gov? If they are smart they react with legislation forcing more 'choice' in search on every level.

"Playing hardball" does not require Google to abandon Australian customers, it just requires Google to have special treatment for Australian media sites - not providing any snippets from these sites, prioritizing all other sites when possible (so Australian sites only show up in searches for local news, and not on e.g. lifestyle articles) and of course they can simply not show any ads on the (very small portion) of the searches linking to Australian news sites, so that they get a percentage of $0.

I think the media conglomerates overestimate their importance to Australian customers - for countries like France there's a language barrier, but the vast, vast majority of searches by Australians can be served well without needing any content from the Australian news companies. If linking to your content is expensive, and linking to other content is cheap, then it's perfectly reasonable and generally legal to prefer cheap sources whenever possible.

This has the assumption that Bing/DDG won't be forced out due to the same law. Would you mind clarifying why that would be true?

This doesn't seem implausible to me, based on the different competitive positions that Google and Bing hold. I can imagine a scenario in which Google doesn't want to pay this tax to avoid a ripple effect across their business in other countries, while Bing opportunistically decides that paying protection money is worth establishing a foothold as the primary search engine in a developed, Anglophone country.

There is zero chance that Google 'pulls out' to avoid a 'ripple effect' - because this would cause a much more existential 'ripple effect' in other ways.

Google pulling out of any regular nation would be existentially damaging.

MS/Bing would weaponize this to the nth degree - they already have service contracts with businesses and corporations around the world and they'd be in a global push to 'drop Google' for the inherent risk of pullout they just witnesses.

This would be the #1 talking point for their massive global salesforce.

> There is zero chance that Google 'pulls out' to avoid a 'ripple effect'

Why are you quoting the words "pulls out" next to an actual quote from my comment? I didn't use it in my comment, and neither did anyone else in the comment thread. Google refusing to play ball here could take any number of forms, from the extreme hardball of simply refusing and tying it up in the courts (and getting fined and perhaps blocked), to just blacklisting links to the companies that the government is extorting them on behalf of. The latter wouldn't even be "hardball"; companies that are explicitly disagreeing with Google's terms for inclusion aren't included in their results, in the same way that robots.txt allows for.

> Google pulling out of any regular nation would be existentially damaging.

There's plenty of precedent for this level of targeted reduction in service as a response to gov't demands. They shut down Google News in Spain, removed French news links under very-similar demands, etc etc. None of this has had the ripple effect you're describing, and is evidence in favor of the fact that Google is concerned about a broader ripple effect: Why else would they give up all the revenue from referral to these sites instead of paying a portion of the revenue in protection money?

+ If they don't want to pay the tax, they would have to leave ... I didn't mean to imply that's what you implied although I see how one could read it that way.

+ " They shut down Google News in Spain, removed French news links under very-similar demands, etc etc. None of this has had the ripple effect you're describing"

The 'ripple effect' is happening right now in Australia.

These laws are being brought in due to the news aggregation, not due to the search engine. If the search engine forwarded you on to the news site, and didn't clutter up their UI with all the extra information, it wouldn't be as legally exposed. Which was, you know, Google's original business model.

First - if G doesn't want to be in Aussie due to some tax, it's their 'choice' they're not forced out.

Second - it doesn't matter that much where the tit-for-tat is - it would be existentially disastrous for Google or FB in either sense.

If a corporation was 'out' of a major, regular western nation for any reason I think the CEO's job would be in serious trouble, even Zuck.

> You switch to an alternative: Bing, DDG etc..

What makes you think Bing or DDG wants to pay news companies to share their link and drive traffic to these companies? If anything, forcing revenue sharing would cause a small search engine like DDG out of business as it tries to scale up. If you wanted to start up a search engine today, imagine what these extra costs would do?

> If they are smart they react with legislation forcing more 'choice' in search on every level.

In your anti-google crusade, you are missing the point. It makes no sense for search engines to pay news or any company to drive traffic to those companies. If anything, the news companies/etc should be paying search engines if you really think about it. It isn't a Goolge vs Bing/DDG/etc issue. It's a Google/Bing/DDG/etc vs news/media companies issue.

If these news websites don't want to be part of google search, then they can easily exclude themselves via robots.txt.

Google isn't doing anything particularly special. I think banning them would be silly, but it isn't like they offer an irreplaceable or even particularly complicated set of services.

>> I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship, which might say something about the tech giants.

IMO decisions like that require power to be concentrated in limited hands.

Forget which country it is, but there's already another that's pushing this on Google (for their News aggregator).

France?

correct, It was France. Last week

Its going to be the new norm and megacorporations have to share some of there wealth. Slowly countries and laws are catching up.

there's already a way for megacorps to have to share some of their wealth - it's called taxes and subsidies, and it's a well-established system.

what australia, france, spain, and anybody else who is trying to enforce revenue transfers from facebook and google to their local media companies is trying to do is called a state-funded media, but that's apparently a bad look. so instead of collecting taxes and then distributing that tax revenue to the companies they want to subsidize, they're trying to pretend this is still some sort of free-market, independently funded media. a newspaper that's staying afloat because of government-mandated payments from big tech companies isn't any more independent than one being funded directly by the state.

You might as well say "what any government who is trying to enforce revenue transfers from spotify and youtube to their local musicians is trying to do is called a state-funded music". "What anybody who is trying to enforce revenue transfers from cinemas to local movie studios is trying to do is called a state funded film industry". "What any government who is trying to enforce revenue transfers from carbon emitting power generators to renewable generators in the form of a carbon credit is trying to do is called a state funded clean energy system."

Oftentimes governments seek to redress one party whose work is being taken advantage of by another party whether that's from a principle of fairness, a desire to maintain the health of both parties, more mercenary reasons, etc. Doing this outside of the narrow regime of taxes and subsidies is not only not uncommon. It's entirely normal.

Also, it's worth mentioning that the most trusted media organisation in Australia is state funded so it can't be that much of a bad look.

> The only possible thing the Aussies could do is block the websites, and that sounds like political suicide to me.

The first thing they could do is fine them. Google and FB might say "ha! but we don't have bank accounts in Australia!" and the government will simply collect from companies in Australia that have outstanding bills from Google for e.g. Adwords or Google Cloud.

Google can still run their websites to be reachable from Australia, but they wouldn't be able to do business in Australia. And what's the point of running an ad tech empire if you can't make money off of it?

Couldn't Google just remove sites demanding special treatment from their search results? It would be right in line with their current behavior, ethically and mechanically; a media company whining to the Australian government for protectionism is just a high-overhead way of disallowing all crawler traffic in robots.txt.

Less pithily: Google crawls the web, offering a standard set of terms on which it does so. No website is compelled to accept these terms and have their links displayed on google.com, even if they're public-facing. The mechanism by which you can opt out, fully or partially, is a robots.txt file specifying to the crawler what it can and can't crawl and display. Australian media companies are saying that they don't accept Google's linking terms; they proposed counter-terms of licensing fees for linking, and Google can refuse them. As the two sides have failed to agree to terms on which the media sites can be linked to by Google, they fall neatly into the category of a website blocking robots.txt

Fine them for what though? they don't seem to be breaking any regulations, they just have a lot of money and the local media companies want some of it.

that's not a fine.

> they don't seem to be breaking any regulations, they just have a lot of money and the local media companies want some of it.

That's a great way to get a law passed ;)

I'm not saying that I believe the Australian government has a legitimate case or anything, just that between "Google can do whatever it likes" and "all of Google's websites are blocked at ISP levels", there are a few levels of escalation that they can pick.

True, but the escalation goes in both directions. Google and Facebook are American companies, Australia and the US have existing free-trade agreements. Imposing fines on foreign businesses to force them to roll over for the benefit of local businesses is exactly the sort of thing that free-trade agreements forbid in no unclear terms. There are a lot of factors at play. Trump dislikes Google because the conservative hive mind has turned against it, but favors Facebook because it's supposedly essential to his campaign operations. Plus he's got a protectionist bent and loves trade sanctions.

I doubt that anything will happen, really. It's a negotiation, the Australian government says "give us all your money", Google says "you're not getting one cent" and in the end Google will favor traditional media companies' sites a bit more ("fighting fake news with real information"), donate to a few journalism programs and possibly start creator-ad-share on news.

feel like we discussed this here before and it was a different country (france?)

so the issues is using content in google news or in snippets shown in google search results. i commented before that i seldom leave news or the main search anymore because of these snippets.

why isn't it fair that the ads revenue is shared with these news publishers if their content is taken?

1. The news sites make the snippets available

2. Google could just stop showing them. See Spain where this killed the newspapers.

This is entirely a case of publishers wanting their cake and Google's too.

it is fair that the revenue gets shared.

i don't believe that publicly funded journalism is a bad thing, or that taxes are a bad thing. i just think a sneaky end-run around the normal systems of taxation and subsidy are a bad thing. Google and Facebook should be subject to heavy taxation, and local journalism should be supported through public funding. What these countries are trying to do is good, in spirit.

i just think the government should not be in the business of deciding how much one independent private company pays another independent private company, and i don't think governments should be passing laws just for the purpose of being able to issue fines. if the government wants to redistribute wealth, they should do it through taxation, and they should be honest about what they're doing.

plus, it'll be easier for them to obfuscate the data somehow and share some specific piece of information that's technically correct but is useless.

They can also just drag this out in court for a long time until everyone forgets, they restructure how their money works, and then they'll share the useless info freely.

Just my take on the situation.

Google has office space and server farms in Australia. Also Australia has treaties with the us that allow the Australian government to fine US corporations.

Could Australian ISPs be instructed to just blacklist Google's and Facebook's Ad servers nationally?

There are currently several sites banned in Australia, and the blacklisting took the form of ISPs hijacking the DNS lookup. Which means it is totally ineffective. Our government is not well known for mandating the right tool for the right job, when it comes to tech.

Sure but custom DNS is not something everyone can or will do, and businesses certainly won't allow it.

Sure, but there are a few caveats to that:

+ Firefox doesn't use the system DNS by default anymore (Defaults to the DoH provider, usually Cloudflare)

+ Chrome doesn't use the system DNS by default anymore (Defaults to Google's)

+ Businesses often set the default DNS to use Google's, not their ISPs.

Perhaps the Australian government would prohibit Australian companies from advertising with FB/Google?

China has the technology.

Funny how this suggestion comes up every time Google or Facebook are subject of some minor regulation outside the US.

Yet suggest they should give up their participation in military or US border security, two areas that are unlikely to be larger than their business in Australia (or, other times, the EU), and there’s no shortage of people explaining what a stupid trade-off that would be.

I guess the tech crowds’ priorities are clear: drone targeting? So what? This is strictly business!

A bit of taxation to maybe rescue the journalism a democracy depends on? To the barricades! We will gladly give up 100% of earnings to take a stand against the injustice that is...taking 5% of earnings.

"democracy", broadly defined, does not "depend" on journalism. This narrative seems to have been invented recently as traditional outlets lost the trust of their viewers after getting things continually and fantastically wrong for at least 2 decades while a new medium (the internet) exposed how little they actually know.

I'm slightly more bullish on journalism and its importance than you are, but I broadly agree. It's been embarrassing watching the death throes (or transition period) of journalism, seeing people used to being treated as high-status pathetically lash out at every possible entity involved in exposing their inadequacy.

I do think that journalism plays a role in a healthy democracy. I assume that at some point, journalism will settle into a new equilibrium and play the role that it's always played, without the messianic complex that journalism as a whole is currently afflicted with (and so dramatically fails to live up to).

Voting without information is like air conditioning without a thermometer, or self-driving cars without LIDAR, or regular cars with a blind driver: It just doesn't work. Because the information flow needs to be circular to allow the actuator (voter) to react to the results of previous actions.

There used to be this fantasy that hobbyist bloggers would fill in where professional journalism fails. Here's a map "news deserts" where the latter has happened: https://www.usnewsdeserts.com. There is no map of the former, because bloggers tend to get up too late to attend boring 9am meetings of the residential refuse working group.

You might be under the impression that relevant news will somehow "diffuse" to get to you. That's a common idea among what's called "low-information voters", who tend to never read any news themselves and extrapolate from there.

It's wrong because they miss that the information that gets to them is simply second-hand journalism: It's full of holes and sometimes has (brown) stains. But the parts of it that are accurate almost invariably originate from professional news sources.

So voting "didn't work" until very very recently? The idea that there was this golden age where people all knew what they were talking about, and the citizens of a democracy dutifully read their newspaper and carefully considered their options, went to the polls etc, is a fantasy. The map of "news deserts" is really a map of "population density" - it tells me nothing about information consumption (or retention) in those areas.

>You might be under the impression that relevant news will somehow "diffuse" to get to you.

I am under no such impression. I am challenging the idea that "journalism" is "critical" for a democracy to function. It only seems critical to me insofar as "function" is defined as "people vote in the way journalists expect them to".

> So voting "didn't work" until very very recently?

The time from about 1740 to 1800 was for newspapers what the 2000s was for the internet.

1787: US Constitution (first democracy)

1789: French Revolution (2nd)

1832 (to 192x): British Reform Act (expanding right to vote)

> I am under no such impression.

Then how does information about, say, laws being passed, or viruses going around, or wars being lost or won get to you? And if it doesn't get to you, how do you decide whom to vote for?

> It only seems critical to me insofar as "function" is defined as "people vote in the way journalists expect them to".

This is just superficial, cynical, contrarian ignorance. Power in the US has been flipping between the parties quite freely, so the press either changes their opinion just as often as the electorate, or their influence is rather limited.

Unless you watch C-SPAN all day and read every law yourself, you'll neither not be informed, or you'll get your information from people who do some of that reading for you (and, if you're lucky, also ask questions, send & litigate FOIA requests, call experts, speak foreign languages etc). Professional journalism is the closest you can get to the source of information unless you do it all yourself. Your 4chan pals or that YouTube bro yelling at his webcam can't and won't do that legwork, either. So what you like about them isn't that they are better informed––they add one step of transmission and can therefore only decrease information content, never increase. What you like is their capability to pre-digest the news, remove anything that might challenge you, and regurgitate the rest in a form that doesn't conflict with your conspiratorial mindset.

I'm not sure what those three events have to do with my question, which is related to how critical journalism is to the functioning of a democracy. Is your belief that "the news" was widely read and, perhaps more importantly, accurate during those periods? This requires a certain suspension of disbelief I'm not willing to grant the professional journalist class, because it implies that only recently have they been bad at what they do and this period is, somehow, unique.

>This is just superficial, cynical, contrarian ignorance. Power in the US has been flipping between the parties quite freely, so the press either changes their opinion just as often as the electorate, or their influence is rather limited.

No, I'm merely pointing out that when one party wins professional journalism recoils into a state of utter confusion. Recall the famous quote from a writer for The New Yorker about knowing only one person who voted for Richard Nixon in 1972.

>What you like is their capability to pre-digest the news, remove anything that might challenge you, and regurgitate the rest in a form that doesn't conflict with your conspiratorial mindset.

I actually very much dislike the journalist who tries to tell me what to think about a certain topic or event, though I see that you're attempting to attribute this behavior only to the "4chan youtube bro", which is a little strange since most journalists today - especially, it seems, mainstream ones - have explicit online personae that reflect a certain worldview and work for news orgs who attempt to "explain" the news to you. This isn't reporting - it's advocacy and opinion journalism where they attempt to inoculate "opinion" by claiming they're just "explaining".

Democracy definitely depends on citizens being informed enough to collectively make intelligent choices, but whether infotainment is serving that right now is debatable.

In real life that happens through peer networks as much as the news.

the new york times intentionally mislead people in order to get them to support war in iraq

It wasn't intentionally, and it happened two decades ago.

I'm pretty sure, for example, that the Times gets criticised for this at least ten times as often as the Republican Party does, even though the latter was not only the origin of the lie the NYT fell for, but the actual group of people making the decision to go to war.

Only Google shutting down Reader has a worse <magnitude of mistake>/<longevity of criticism> ratio.