Couldn't they just use robot.txt to prevent Google from listing them?

Not that I completely understand why exactly they don't want to show up on google.

They do want to show up on google, they just don't want the small page summary, as in a lot of cases, most people are happy with the title and a 2 line summary, never actually visiting the article.

That’s possible for a site to do, as far as I’m aware (in webmaster tools?) - I’ve seen results with a title and link and “this website doesn’t allow us to show a preview before).

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!

It's done with meta tags in the HTML:

https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_t...

That’s a point I’ve been making in Australia too. And now the media orgs are freaking out about losing the referrals from Facebook, but still trying to go on the false narrative that Google and Facebook make huge amounts of money “stealing news content”.

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...

The laws might be bizarre or poorly thought-out but the concern isn't. A news landscape controlled by American tech companies doesn't sound like a rosy future.

Nothing is stopping them from building their own aggregation sites and disallowing Google/Facebook to index their sites. They are literally giving their content to Google and then demand they get paid. (Technically Google is taking the content via indexing, but I'm sure they can figure out a way to stop that)

I am aware. Why do these news corporations not just write an appropriate robots.txt so Google can't take their content? Is it maybe because they want their cake AND eat it too?

On one hand, it's true that they are making odd demands and are linked to Murdoch. On the other, it's disturbing that you pretty much have to play ball with Google and Facebook to survive as a media institution. Yeah, they could create their own competing service I suppose but in practice that sounds more like a non-sequitur than a workable suggestion.

In Australia, 70% of our commercial media is owned by a foreign multinational (News Corp) and most of the rest is one other company (Nine/Fairfax).

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).

In the case of Australia, FB and Twitter are actually injecting a lot of competition and diversity of thought into the market, since their news ecosystem is incredibly oligopolistic.

That's a good point but FAANGs are oligopolistic on a global scale. It's come to the point where anything that could possibly weaken them or get the ball rolling towards their fragmentation sounds like a good idea, even if it's half-baked and negative in its own local context.

To be clear, I’d like to see some of the FAANG companies broken up. But worrying about their global oligopoly when the alternative in this situation is News Corp, another global oligopoly, seems misguided to me.

You gotta start somewhere. It's far from an ideal situation, but simply the prospect of it creating a spark elsewhere is worth taking.

> This has already led to bizzare laws, driven by old media and conversative politicians.

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.