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.