News corp, headed Rupert Murdoch, owns a lot of media in Australia. Most of this media is abjectly shithouse but heavily consumed by people aged 60+. Murdoch wields undue political power because of this, which induces elected politicians to fawn over him. They gave him the order of Australia the other week for example, which seems nonsensical to many actual Australian citizens, to whom he appears to be a rich prick sabotaging the national conversation.

The frankly embarrassing attempt to siphon money from Google into Murdoch’s pockets is simply the current conservative government ensuring they get excellent media coverage at the next election.

If I have to use a VPN to get decent search results because of this nonsense I will NOT be pleased.

'If I have to use a VPN to get decent search results because of this nonsense I will NOT be pleased.'

Good news then because you can use Duck Duck Go and get reasonable results without being stalked around the internet or run the risk of your parents clicking a scam ad because 'it has 5 gold stars beneath it'.

Have tried DDG before but wasn't that impressed. Will give it another look.

Duck Duck Go uses Bing (and Yahoo, lol) to complete all searches so he's really right back where he started (albeit Microsoft isn't tracking him).

Murdoch is 90yo this year. I find it hard to believe that he wants to line his pockets. He has more money than he can ever spend.

Google is a worldwide monopoly. No one has any chance of negotiating with them. Even a country as it turns out without them threatening complete pull out.

I see this as strong leadership standing up to monopolies.

I would prefer the free market to sort it out honestly but what chance does anyone have against them.