I don't see how this follows: this regulation isn't precipitated by "unfair treatment" of news media, nor are the gov't and media pretending it is. Quite the opposite: this is a plea for giving news media an unfair advantage.
Because then people would game it.
Playing devil's advocate, gaming search engines used to be about keywords then it became more about links. SEOs nowadays talk about "EAT", expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. It's still possible for marketers to mimic quality signals but it's less easy.
It would be much easier if the author of webpages were to declare themselves, sort of a Pagerank but applied on a person/topic level. It could/can be done with structured data. This of course has privacy implications but it keeps the publishers as transparent to the search engine as possible. Verification of sorts would be needed so other people don't use your authorship details on their own site. It's the kind of social fabric/data Google could've perhaps used Google+ for.
Slightly more on topic, marketers used to be able to do accurate keyword research with Google, and also see the keywords that people searched for when landing on their site, which is quite useful for figuring out their intent. Google keeps all that data to themselves now.
I find their "concerns" about "use of private data" a bit laughable, considering they used your personal search history to try and target you on sites you visit across the web via ads. They don't mind retaining data about users, they just don't like having to share it with anyone.
This was actually done back when Google+ first was launched — people could attach their authorship and it would be displayed on the search page, and you would also see a list of “experts” for particular categories on the right hand side when you searched for things like “python” or “poker”.
I believe it disappeared with the rest of Google+, because no one actually cared.
...with slightly more effectiveness allowing better competition with google itself.
You can do search. You can provide content. Doing both became rent seeking. And damn does google do rent-seeking very effectively.
The only difference would be that you don't need to do industrial espionage on google to see what works first, so the cost of the seo would drop.
perhaps because they have inside knowledge that the legislation is a dead duck and the government doesn't intend to follow through but perhaps the government is simply doing this for whatever reasons maybe political points with the population.
I have no doubt that the Australian government and Google play a delicate dance with each other while they both cooperate and see that they both get the outcomes they both want. so the gloss that this is all about consumers, spouted by both sides, I think is false.
anyway, interesting to watch where this goes.
I think Facebook sails very close to the wind here, but my impression is that Google's management is a lot more professional about protecting their business long term. So I'd be suprised if they tried any dirty tricks.
However, their efforts won't be limited to open letters. There will be some very high-powered lobbying going on, and I bet this letter is mostly to frame that debate to counter the lobbying from Murdoch's empire. All in all, a great time to be an Aussie politician - a lot of very expensive trips, lunches and other inducements coming there way.
Yes Google is a big org, their business is problematic, and they do crap at times. But I think their mentality is much more less Machiavellian than Facebook.
I believe the "do no evil" as a compass, they might not always adhere to that as you or me may perceive it (after all, it is rather subjective), but it does seem to somewhat guide their actions.
They care. I'm currently situated in Australia and did a random google search and a giant popup jumped up saying "The way Aussies use Google is at risk". No way they are doing that on their main search page if they do not care.
remember news Corp is not just an Australian company. this could be part of a bigger game between Google and newscorp, and between newscorp and the aus gov.
I love how companies can say complying with legislation would be overly burdensome. and how governments can make laws that have no technical reality. the interface between tech and law is pretty leaky and inefficient.
(That doesn't mean that all people in parliament need to be competent. Most laws are written by specialists, not MPs.)
I'm not sure how Google wins this one because it seems like an easy comeback is "well why don't you just be transparent and tell everybody that information". Ultimately, as long as they have anything resembling "secret sauce" they will be in the cross hairs of regulators for unfair treatment (even if just alleged, not proven), and the minute they don't they will lose their competitive advantage.
Perhaps the worst thing seems to me that it prospectively constrains what kinds of algorithms they can actually apply to things they can tell people about. So all kinds of approaches with poor explainability (say, deep learning) will get put aside for things that are empirically worse (more biased, unfair, less equitable, etc.) but compliant with the law because Google can "explain them" to people.