The legislation explicitly prevents platforms from deindexing/downranking news sites that participate in the code in favour of other sites that do not.

Which places Google in a more difficult position, because if a user searches for some news, Google is essentially forced to return results from a participating news organisation, or not show any relevant news results at all.

While Facebook can just prevent users from sharing any news links, Google can't exactly stop users from searching for news.

Google absolutely can stop users from searching for News, by removing all News tabs, News boxes, and News News-specific metadata uses (such as current events timeliness) in search results at Google.com.au. They can then legitimately claim that they are no longer indexing news, only websites in general, and if site operators don’t wish to be indexed they can follow the standard practices for exclusion.

Whether they (Google) will do so or not is a timely question to consider.

I'd think Google could easily get around this by limiting the frequency with which their GoogleBot visits News Corp web sites to, say, once a month. Effectively makes being indexed worthless for News Corp.

Google will likely do the same, as they did in some European countries.

Google is a monopoly. Facebook is not. If google pushes their weight around they get targeted for anti competitive behavior.

They can avoid such issues by simply leaving the Australian market; a non-participant in a market clearly isn't monopolizing it. It just isn't that much money they would be giving up, and if the government tries to force them to operate at a loss it is no money at all.

They're not going to pull out of Australia. The market share of English speaking countries is more important. And the loss of revenue from Australia is higher than the cost of paying up.

Why do you think they're behaving in the way they are?

If they could drop them they would.

Google is a monopoly for what service? I don't use Google (directly) for search. I use Google for some email accounts and other providers for other email accounts. I use Firefox instead of Chrome. I use Android, mainly because it's far more open than ios, and it's possible to use a de-Googled Android (although the useful-ness is reduced). None of the above is related to news, however, which is what this particular discussion is centred around. I don't go anywhere near Google for news. I know Australia's media websites, and I use them directly, and attempt to focus on the more independent ones because they're less likely to be unduly influenced.

If you think Google is a monopoly, then how is Facebook not? Either in direct relation to this discussion of News or in relation to the greater internet?

You're not serious? Antitrust is about optics, google is clearly monopolistic. Facebook is likely also but it's not perceived that way, Facebook has a lot of real alternatives, people use more than one social platform, whereas people only use one google, oops sorry, I mean search engine.

https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/au...

So "Search" is your answer to my question. Fair enough.