[throwaway483284]

There would be no political suicide there. It's so easy to make Google/Facebook look evil in this case if they don't comply. Just say they are not paying taxes and getting our money abroad etc.

But there is 0% chance of Google/Facebook not complying.

> I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship

Not even close.

[wutbrodo]

Don't the French and Spanish examples indicate otherwise? Spain's link tax in 2014 led to the shutting-down of Google News Spain, and France's attempt to charge for Google News snippets led to the removal of those snippets for French sites (followed by a dip in traffic for pubs that hurt them far more than it hurt Google). What makes you think that FB/G don't have the power here?

[westurner]

If you don't want them to index your content and send you free traffic, you can already specify that in your robots.txt; for free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard

There are no ads on Google News.

There is an apparent glut of online news: supply exceeds demand and so the price has fallen.

[dehrmann]

> There are no ads on Google News.

This is the ironic part of the policy. You're right about the glut, and there was a glut in print 20 years ago, too. Google's definitely hurt businesses, but it's usually though disintermediating them (think Yelp). Google News and search don't really do that for news--snippets and headlines aren't the same as an article. I find it hard to believe that ABC's brand isn't strong enough for them to pull their content from Google and expect people to go to abc.net.au; I just don't think than can sell enough ads to give the content away.

[chillfox]

I find that a lot of news articles these days don’t amount to much more than what’s in the headline/subtitle.

[westurner]

By hurt, do you mean competed with by effectively utilizing technology to help people find information about the world from multiple sources.

There are very many news aggregators and most do serve ads next to the headlines they index. I assume that people typically link out from news aggregation sites more than into vertically-integrated services.

Perhaps the content producers / information service providers could develop additional revenue streams in order to subsidize a news aggregation public service. Micropayments (BAT, Web Monetization (ILP)), ads, paywalls, and public and private grants are sources of revenue for content producers.

I think it's disingenuous to blame news aggregation sites for the unprofitability of extremely redundant journalism. What happened to journalism? Internet. Excessive ads. Aren't we all writers these days.

Unfortunately they killed the "most cited" and was it "most in-depth" source analysis functions of Google News; and now we're stuck with regurgitated news wires and press releases and all of these eyewitness mobile phone videos with two-bit banal commentary and also punditry. How the world has changed.

So, as far as scientific experiments are concerned, it might be interesting to see what the impact of de-listing from free time sites X, Y, and Z is.

Do the papers in Australia and France now intend to compensate journal ScholarlyArticle authors whose work they summarize and hopefully at least cite the titles and URLs of, or the journals themselves?

[wutbrodo]

Yup, Australian media companies are just resorting to the high-overhead alternative of passing a law equivalent to specifying the robots.txt of a handful of companies. And for some reason the Aus govt is dumb enough to do it for them.

[moralestapia]

>What makes you think that FB/G don't have the power here?

They also risk losing that entire market as well. Let's be honest, nobody loves F or G. If a decent competitor stands up people will gladly switch, even more if they market it as "by Australians for Australians".

SV companies are big and great and all that, but to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.

[SpicyLemonZest]

A lot of people have invested a lot of effort in creating the narrative of a techlash, that people are fed up with big tech's abuses and would be glad to see the big companies go. But it's simply not true. Polls of the general public consistently show that Facebook and Google are well-loved.

For example: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/27/16550640/verge-tech-surv...

[dehrmann]

More recent articles:

https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/amidst-techlash-m...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/opinion/tech-backlash.htm...

I read a similar one in the last 6 months tying it to politics. One was that Trump is ironically more tech-friendly than Sanders or Warren (~Nov 2019), despite tech workers generally not supporting Trump. The other oddity was that polls don't really show that there's a techlash, so why are Democratic frontrunners making it a talking point?

[wutbrodo]

For the same reason that Elizabeth Warren says "Latinx" despite a tiny fraction of Latino citizens identifying with the term: many of them are running for what's been described as "President of Twitter", where Twitter is a metonymy for old-economy institutional elites, lashing out pathetically at the democratizing forces weakening their hold on power. I assume the reason politicians do this is partially drinking the Kool-Aid from their bubble, and partly intentional pandering to journalists who are also in that bubble.

[manfredo]

They risk losing the entire Austrian market. But paying this tax also risks emboldening other countries to follow suit. Exiting the market has the short term loss of Austrian revenue, but signals that legislation like this will not work.

Refusing to do business in a country due to regulation isn't acting above the law. These companies have no requirement to conduct business in any given country.

[nitwit005]

What you're imagining is that if Google shuts down Google News in Australia, the government will threaten to shut down all their other unrelated business ventures, unless they put it back up?

The concept of forcing a foreign business to run a business it doesn't want to is a bit bizarre, and I doubt a court would support the concept, let alone the idea of holding the rest of the company hostage.

[wutbrodo]

> Let's be honest, nobody loves F or G

I think this is probably just your HN bubble; lots of the criticism of Google here is tinged with irrational bitterness, along with the classic tech culture distrust centralization and the power structures around control of data. I happen to align fairly strongly with the latter view, but neither of these have much purchase in the wider population, where Google remains wildly more popular than most institutions that you think of as benign or popular.

> to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.

How do you explain the situations as they played out in Spain (in 2014) and France? It seems a lot more delusional to me to ignore precedent and forecast based on wishful thinking about the power dynamic between these companies and states.

[barry-cotter]

> They also risk losing that entire market as well. Let's be honest, nobody loves F or G.

Nobody loves the media either. Across every market I’m aware of trust and respect for the media has been falling for over a decade.

[aabbcc1241]

People may not love them but many people still use them. Sad but true.

Like how I promote telegram to my friends but I'm "forced" to use WhatsApp for some "niche majority"

[Zyst]

I love both Google, and Facebook. I'm constantly blown away that something like Youtube exists, I love my Oculus Quest and use it daily, I keep in touch with friends on WhatsApp, and use Google Search more than any other website.

I'm not trying to imply they are above jurisdiction, I am quite tired of hearing the "No one likes these guys" narrative though.

[seanmcdirmid]

> They also risk losing that entire market as well. Let's be honest, nobody loves F or G. If a decent competitor stands up people will gladly switch, even more if they market it as "by Australians for Australians".

Are Australians really so nationalistic? I thought they would mostly choose whatever tool allows them to do what they want as quick as possible.

> SV companies are big and great and all that, but to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.

Google can follow the law by simply not indexing Australians sites anymore, or they don't have to service Australians. If they are told to share revenue, they can choose to simply shut down the revenue source instead, especially if the cost of revenue sharing exceeds the revenue they are generating. FB/G aren't charities.

When GDRP came online, many web sites in the states found that blocking out EU viewers was cheaper than complying. That isn't going against EU law.

[dodobirdlord]

Companies are in a sense above the state jurisdictions of everywhere but where they are headquartered. Companies regularly withdraw from markets because the regulatory environment is inhospitable.

[Mirioron]

In the long term the issue with this is that it pushes Google and Facebook into your politics. If you use political measures to screw with them, then they'll start getting involved in the politics more and more to protect themselves. And these two companies could have a lot of influence in ways that are hard to notice.

[slv77]

The pay-per-click model has already forced news organizations towards producing click-bait content. I’m not sure why regulators would want to deepen that influence by making newspapers more dependent on Google and Facebook.

[speedgoose]

It sounds threatening and I hope you don't work for them but anyway, Google and Facebook are already pushing hard into politics.

[Mirioron]

I do not work for them. This is something I noticed over the years: as Google ran into more and more obstacles in the US that are political the more they seem to have started to meddle. Maybe it's because this is easier, but maybe it's to protect themselves.

These companies don't push themselves into politics everywhere (yet), but I'm sure that the more governments squeeze them the more they'll get involved.

[thu2111]

It's based on learning from what happened to Microsoft.

I used to work at Google. It wasn't often discussed, but when lobbying came up (including in formal contexts) the general attitude was "you can try to ignore Washington but Washington won't ignore you". The perception was very much that Microsoft had gone through the anti-trust trial not so much because of what they'd done but because for years under the Clinton administration they didn't grease the right wheels, in fact they barely had any presence in Washington, which left them politically exposed. The combination of no powerful friends, extremely vague laws and extremely empowered and political regulators was seen as a very toxic one. And that's especially remarkable because Google was (at that time) a company whose executives really didn't like Microsoft, they feared them and treated them as the biggest threat to their business. A lot had come out of the Linux/open source world, academia, UNIX vendors etc and they were really the last people who would give Gates a break, but nonetheless their conclusion was that lobbying was basically a requirement of doing business in the USA.

I'm going back here - eventually that changed and they came to fear Facebook more. But for instance the Google Toolbar was basically an anti-Microsoft play, as was Chrome.

[Nasrudith]

I cynically thought that was corruption by design, politicians - trying to get them into a 'contribute to both sides so they shut up' with shakedowns. They were trying to cast Google as sexist well before anything else happened to harm their image.

[vezycash]

It's a fact of life.

Bill Gates kept politicians at arms length.

If Microsoft had given Washington a little attention, the antitrust lawsuit would never ever have happened.

Google has squelched antitrust investigations in US every single time through lobbying.

Even Apple would been in hot regulatory soup if they didn't buddy up to politicians.

[propogandist]

>In the long term the issue with this is that it pushes Google and Facebook into your politics.

Google is already the largest industry lobbyist stateside

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/09/google-is-techs-top-spender-...

[ojame]

>Just say they are not paying taxes and getting our money abroad etc.

This is said pretty regularly in the media in Australia, and honestly no one cares. Even big mining companies like BHP pay little corporate tax on shore, and after years of it being 'exposed', honestly the general public don't seem to care.

[Smoosh]

I think it's more accurate to say the public cares somewhat, and consequently politicians do too (they sometimes roll out accusations of "un-Australian" tax minimization to suit their agenda). But politicians don't dare to move against the big companies because they know they'll lose. Both in campaign/party donations and in being targeted at the next election if their policies are going to impact those companies (see what happened with the mining companies and the Carbon tax). This same thing could happen with these "internet" companies who would only need to devote a little of their local advertising to a campaign against the change and against the party proposing it to have any public support cancelled out and politicians quickly reversing their position.