> 52S.(1).(a) ensure that the registered news business corporation is provided with flexible content moderation tools that allow the registered news business corporation to remove or filter comments on the registered news business covered news content that:
> . . (i) are made using the digital platform service;and
> . . (ii) are made on a part of the digital platform service that is set up and able to be edited by the registered news business;
> (b) ensure that the registered news business corporation can disable the making of such comments;
If I'm reading that correctly, if someone posts a news corporation to Facebook, the news corporation gets to delete / edit / moderate any Facebook replies.
I think they (the legislators) have lost the plot.
In another section the draft legislation requires Facebook / Google to notify the news organisation of changes to their page rank / feed algorithm, and also provide advice on how to mitigate the effects of those changes.
Google's claim the bill grants news media business special privileges no other organisation on the planet has is not too far from the truth.
[0] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill...
If the proxy vote here is between Larry & Sergey v. Murdochs, guess who I'm voting for.
> 1.89 In the case of a social media service such as Facebook, this rule deals with the situation where the news business has posted its covered news content on the news business’ own social media page. Comments on the news business’ articles posted by somebody else on another Facebook page are not covered by this law.
https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20EM%2...
If I were in FAANG's place, I'd tell the AU government to get stuffed by turning every response page into a "Tell your government that this bill is ridiculous and we'll be back when it's repealed. So long and thanks for all the fish."
I, like all FB users, can delete comments to my own FB posts.
Sure, it’s not perfect but unlike Facebook, Google and Twitter, they do have processes in place to handle misinformation and prevent the worst excesses, and if these break down it is very clear who you can sue. Ergo, they can be held accountable.
I agree that it is challenging, but frankly, given how much evidence there is of bad actors and misinformation on social media sites it has become clear that these corporations will only make choices that drive revenue or revenue related metrics.
I don't know what the right solution is, but it's not twiddling thumbs while foreign owned corporations continue to accumulate control over communications and media.
Interesting.
On the one hand working in software the idea of having communicate changes to an algorithm like this to 3rd parties gives me nightmares, and opens the door to regulation of the algorithms design.
On the other hand, given Facebook and Google's monopoly positions, why not? They're able to make of break businesses overnight by changing the stream of traffic, and there's basically no real competitors. Perhaps a weak analogy but if your local government was building a motorway that would bypass your town high street, effectively wiping out 90%+ of customers to your local shop, they would inform you months or years ahead so you have at least a chance to change your business strategy or close shop.
Maybe small businesses wake up to the fact that building the core of their livelihood on the foundation of a whimsical megacorp is a Bad Idea.
Google attracts businesses to work with them because they make visibility easy. But if they screw over those same businesses, then maybe the bait isn't worth taking in the first place? Maybe networking and building your customer base without Google, in some venue that you have better control over (or is at least more reliable/transparent) is preferable?
Cost of customer acquisition isn't comparable without those platforms. Working harder and still not being price-competitive isn't preferable, even if it mitigates some future risk.
Ppl use google to search for things, they use chrome to find things, they don’t like typing in addresses, they would much rather google give them the top result whatever that may be.
You are suggesting that the news orgs change human behavior. Good luck with that.
Imagine if a company controlled not just the main street in your town, but also in every town in the world. The analogue would be to tell shopkeepers to build their own city and convince people to live their so they can run their shop.
This is part of why capitalism is said to have boom/bust cycles. Stable equilibriums are less favourable than unstable ones. Taking advantage of every available opportunity is the only way to compete.
I buy that AMP is bad and they should share revenue.
It is not entirely Google’s fault that their survival requires click-bait articles instead of having original content
You must be unfamiliar with NewsCorp. This is the cesspool that spawned Fox News, Sky News, and The Sun. That hacked the phones of journalists, celebrities, and royalty just to get a scoop. That routinely and as a core function of business interferes in democratic process. That effectively pioneered fake news, and has singlehandedly destroyed the credibility of the entire media industry.
Why not? Hopefully because you give a single fuck about the rule of law.
Despite that, this particular point in the draft legislation in an interesting idea, at least to discuss. "Why Not?" was short for "Why not require Google and Facebook to inform affected businesses when they're making changes to their ranking algorithms?" ... that's a discussion that can be had independently from NewsCorp
These have are all fundamental assumptions anyone working on the web makes and we’re established as fundamental at the point Google beat out its competitors, in the early 2000’s
At that time Google was a different company and didn’t have a monopoly, and the web was a different place. Now Google does have a monopoly and users browsing habits have narrowed to a few sites like Facebook and Reddit where they get “everything” content wise
So perhaps it’s time to question those assumptions and ask if they’re really still true in today’s context, or whether other things matter more now?
And then you try to divert attention away from the real discussion by making it seem like the argument is about “the rule of law” which really comes out of left field, but is a great boogeyman to pull up if you wanna quiet dissent.
And evidently my ploy to quiet dissent didn’t work, as here you are.
NewsCorp does genuinely violate the rule of law, a different set of standards apply to them and their conduct.
This is because Facebook requires page owners to assume all liability for comments.
This has resulted in publishers losing defamation cases based on third-party comments made on their posts [1].
* (regardless of whether you feel, as I do, that the proposed legislation is a politically-motivated protection racket for a favoured media mogul)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/01/australian-med...
2. Facebook didn't require publishers to be liable. The court did.
2. Thanks - poor wording on my part. I meant to communicate that Facebook avoids liability in their terms, and of course the court determined the actual liability falls on publishers posting content.
Agreed. And because this ACCC response doesn't link to the letter, I think these rebuttals to non-existent claims are deceptively misleading
As such the ACCC response is also full of bullshit. This is how politics go, and the sad part is that most people seem to simply read one side of the argument and go ranting off angrily based on the bullshit claims, rather than investigating the truth behind both sides
The amount they'd have to pay for it seems to be dramatically more than what they make for it, so "if this law passes, we will stop serving these results" seems to be a reasonable reaction.
If that's Google's reaction then they should say so outright, not this weasel wordy letter.
I guess this is something taught in paid classes to business leaders and politicians, so they want a positively sounding name.
Also, except for when the person has evil / corrupted intentions, then, is this technique neutral or sometimes even good
Can at least save time via fever of topic discussions
> Under this law, Google has to tell news media businesses “how they can gain access” to data about your use of our products. There’s no way of knowing if any data handed over would be protected, or how it might be used by news media businesses.
That seems to pretty clearly suggest Google will be forced to hand over personal data.
The ACCC is being irresponsible not dealing with - in precise terms - what Google actually said. Anything less verges on bullying. This isn't a public shouting match between equals.
Not really. Google could just exit Australia. And who you think that would hurt more, Australia or Google?
"[W]ell they can leave" is true - but the idea that that is something they would 'choose' to do is in my view a philosophical canard. Google is going to make the best economic decision and in that sense they don't really have a choice to make. The ACCC/government is the one with a range of options where they can pick one. And they should be held to a higher standard than bullying companies.
This sounds more like a threat. "If you don't give us whatever data we want, for free, then we will cut you off from some of our online services as punishment.
> Given the context, I took that to mean the quality of the service would tank if they had to share their algorithm changes.
I see this argument from them all the time and honestly, I see very little evidence of it. I use DDG exclusively now but I used Google and DDG side by side for a while as I was transitioning over, and during that time I didn't see much variation in the quality of results. If anything, being in a filter bubble made it harder to find new information.
Or start charging for things that used to be free, like news results.
This is quite ambiguous if it is just a collection policy or the data itself. I can see Google being fired up about that but should be something that can be clarified ( there is public consultation going on ) not whined about.
> Hurting the free services you use ... demands that would put our free services at risk.
Some possibile outcomes:
Imagine a page with only foreign results. Plenty of news entities cover Australian news, and a result like this: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=victoria+australia+covid could very easily nix the news box, and any and all Australian news results and content.
Google could take the attitude that all Australian news sites that require payment have a robots.txt with:
Disallow: /
I can't imagine any law that both demands Google crawl sites AND demands payment for it will survive being contested in the courts. You can't both compel and enforce - it is one or tother, and if it costs Google to crawl your site, why should Google crawl your site?
I can see a news site, like The Guardian, agreeing to give Google their news for free, and getting all the SERP links as a consequence. I can imagine Google doing deals with all manner of sites for nothing, where the value of 100% of News traffic from Google is likely millions.
I have no idea what the proposal of the ACCC is (and I'm Australian) but this seems a really weird case, where the unintended consequences could be almost anything, and the likely outcome is more likely to be bad for Australian sites than beneficial.
Why, if they want to carry news from other countries, should they also have to carry Australian news?
Maybe they should just string match all their news results to Australian news so nothing gets through, even if they appear on third party sites (duplicate detection, they had it for years on regular search).
Because the law says so, because the law is very deliberately crafted as a mechanism to force Google to give money to Australian news companies.
The letter is a threat, and it makes its threat by implication. The benefit of implying a threat is that it allows you to make any number of veiled threats without committing to any. If they wanted to say no more, no less, they would make a specific threat, but they want people to worry about things, so they make a vague threat.
So any possible threat that a reasonable person might suppose is meant by the letter achieves what Google wants with its letter. Australia has decided to take one of these potential threats and answer it, to make Google look bad, but it might also force Google to say that is not what we mean, the implied threat made more precise looses its power to frighten.
Of course none of this jockeying for position changes the fact that Australia is trying to pass a very bad law.
> Google will not be required to share any additional user data with Australian news businesses unless it chooses to do so.
I don't think Google actually made either of these claims in their letter.
They didn't mention charging for services at all. They said "the free services you use may be at risk". Given the context, I took that to mean the quality of the service would tank if they had to share their algorithm changes.
The data portion is a little less clear. Google was very weasel wordy - they definitely wanted it to sound like they would have to turn over user data, but if you read carefully they only say they would have to share data about how they collect the user data.