We see this in Germany, too.
On the one hand, "old media" is eager to take any traffic that Google et al. send to them, but on the other hand they don't like aggregration and ask Google et al. to pay for text snippets.
This has already led to bizzare laws, driven by old media and conversative politicians.
Not that I completely understand why exactly they don't want to show up on google.
This ‘debate’ in Australia is not actually about that - most people supporting the bill haven’t been able to make an argument with enough complexity to distinguish between the sentence or so summary and displaying the whole article, and they generally try to make it sound like the latter is happening!
https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_t...
Just before, I saw one reporter try to claim that social media sites allow users to bypass paywalls, but they never have! Facebook never showed actual article content here, just link, title and maybe a thumbnail...
Luckily we have two fairly good public broadcasters (ABC and SBS), but the Murdoch media hate them and the conservative party in power are white-anting them away (budget freezes and things all the time which after inflation effectively mean cuts every year), and the quality has dropped considerably over the last few years with editorial interference (technically they’re independent, but reporters there who break big stories of Government corruption, or showing big problems in Government policy just happen to be hounded out, even though the stories were true).
No, on the political side it's not driven by conservative politics. It has bipartisan support. In fact is has the the support of Australian's left most party too: the Greens. As far as I can tell, it has every politicians support.
It may be true the conservative's are supporting it to get favourable publicity from Murdock - sounds plausible. That could be Labor's reason too, but it may be the journalists union is putting a fair amount of pressure on them. A lot of journalists are going to lose their jobs. The world doesn't need 100 people re-writing the same story. Sadly for them will lose their hobs regardless of what Labor champions politically.
It's harder to understand the Greens position as they don't count Murdock among their friends. At best they are don't actually understand what's driving all this and how inevitable it all is (oh, how I pine for Scott Ludlam). At worst they are following their "all giant overseas corporates are bad" instincts. Whether that's true or not, it nothing to do with what's happening to the newspapers. Their fate was sealed when the internet became a thing, and anybody could publish a news story. Extending the dinosaurs death throes with forced cross subsidies helps no-one
Don't underestimate the weakness of the tech giants political position here, or the fight they have ahead of them. If they come out of this with their bank accounts mostly intact, it will be ample demonstration of the truth of how much "hard" power they actually wield. They will have squashed the entire Australian political establishment.
That's because what it really is is a fairly unnuanced shake-down by the government on behalf of Murdoch media[1][2].
[1] https://youtu.be/2BPLBIgKjN8
[2] https://buzzmachine.com/2021/02/18/murdochs-law-and-the-net/
Back in the day when I was only hearing of this thing called the Internet, people mentioned how they can read the New York Times online or another famous paper. Coming from a small town in Eastern Europe that was amazing.
But I also wondered why they were able to read it for free. I wonder what made the newspapers post their content online for free - probably because the internet was a fringe curiosity and they only realized it's becoming important when it was too late.
News that no one pays for doesn't help them. But also, news no one knows they have first is also news no one will pay for - or tell any of their friends to go to them for!
They're in a catch 22 re: their business model - they need visibility, they need people to be able to see them and know they have something insightful to add or they're dead in the water. Now that means the search engines and aggregators, as that is where most people are looking.
Most people also won't pay for random links sent by friends, or even an insightful article if they can get it somewhere else (even at a lower quality).
It's an even more brutal version of what the music and movie industry deal with around streaming (and will again in movies due to the proliferation of half baked streaming services).
So they see that Google and Facebook have a lot of money, no have lobbied hard to get these laws made. Unfortunately the ACCC (competition watchdog) seems to be complicit, having done a big research study into anticompetitive behaviour in ad tech etc., which is used to justify the law even though the law doesn’t actually go any way towards actually solving any of the problems with any of that, and only serves to try and funnel money from Google and Facebook to a few big media companies.
It’s pretty frustrating, because the waters are being muddied and reporters writing a lot of falsehoods about Facebook and Google apparently using or ‘stealing’ content, but they don’t - we’re literally talking about just links here!
I understand that old media is complaining that tech is making money with their content while the authors get nothing.
To me that is the equivalent of complaining that someone else is using your house because you left the door open.
So what is the problem with locks, pay-walls, creating accounts or blocking links?
Could it possible be the case that the old media actually wants the burglars inside?