Can someone explain why on Earth news media worldwide is so adement on wanting commission for traffic to their sites? I mean, were I a search engine provider faced with this demand I would just say "Well I'm terribly sorry you feel that way, we will no longer feature you in search results" and let their viewership plummet. Same with social media, if someone demands commission on traffic towards their site I would just make it impossible to share links towards them. It's their loss, not one of Google or Facebook. It is however unfortunate how desperate publishers have gotten for revenue and I sympathise with them, but they're picking the wrong fights here. Journalism is important, both general and investigatory, and they have a massive job of figuring out monetization going forward to keep the lights on.

> "Well I'm terribly sorry you feel that way, we will no longer feature you in search results"

The publishers also lobby for laws that make dropping them from search illegal.

Both of the laws asking to be always included in search results and the laws requiring search engines to pay to link to content fundamental a break how a search engine works. Both laws are absolutely ridiculous.

News media makes a profit by controlling voters and politicians. Selling papers is a loss making activity, an expense they pay to keep political influence. Actual investigative journalism is all but dead. News media knows Google has money. News media will make politicians make Google give them that money.

It's a racket. It's just not called that by the news media because its THEIR racket.

There is two parts to it, right? One is the link from Google to the news site, the other is pulling out enough content from the article so that the reader doesn't visit the new site.

If google's traffic (in readers) doesn't get to your website anyways, what do you have to lose?

Unfortunately, I think google has all the leverage here. I don't other industries will stand with the news orgs, and will pressure the govt. if they start losing revenue because google/fb isn't servicing australia.

I don’t think i’d say “unfortunately”, the bill seems like it was written by someone who has never used the internet

This bill is completely insane (regardless of its intent), so it's hard to fault Google here.

That would be an interesting experiment to determine if DDG, Bing, and the like could be viable enough alternative. If not, it would be an waking call to think about it.

Using monopolistic power to influence legislative agendas.

It's time for big tech to be broken up.

Are they monopolistic in this case? It would be one thing if they influenced what you see, for example by removing some commercial newspapers. If they actually completely pull out with search business, we can use any other competitor. Pulling out business due to rules you don't like is the most opposite of monopolistic I can think of in this case.

Let's see if your legislature feels the same way.

Google is attempting to use it's weight to intimidate your government. I guess we will find out who has more pull, google or news corp.

it is more like big media needs to be broken up there...

Why not both?