[mikemotherwell]

That implies Google will change what Australians see vs other countries. No more. No less.

Some possibile outcomes:

Imagine a page with only foreign results. Plenty of news entities cover Australian news, and a result like this: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=victoria+australia+covid could very easily nix the news box, and any and all Australian news results and content.

Google could take the attitude that all Australian news sites that require payment have a robots.txt with:

Disallow: /

I can't imagine any law that both demands Google crawl sites AND demands payment for it will survive being contested in the courts. You can't both compel and enforce - it is one or tother, and if it costs Google to crawl your site, why should Google crawl your site?

I can see a news site, like The Guardian, agreeing to give Google their news for free, and getting all the SERP links as a consequence. I can imagine Google doing deals with all manner of sites for nothing, where the value of 100% of News traffic from Google is likely millions.

I have no idea what the proposal of the ACCC is (and I'm Australian) but this seems a really weird case, where the unintended consequences could be almost anything, and the likely outcome is more likely to be bad for Australian sites than beneficial.

[docdeek]

My first thought was that Google would do as per Spain and just stop linking Australian news outlets. However, I was under the impression that the Australian proposition does not allow Google to treat foreign sites differently. Hence, if they carry foreign news they must carry Australian sites - and pay. Or else carry nothing at all.

[visarga]

> I was under the impression that the Australian proposition does not allow Google to treat foreign sites differently. Hence, if they carry foreign news they must carry Australian sites

Why, if they want to carry news from other countries, should they also have to carry Australian news?

Maybe they should just string match all their news results to Australian news so nothing gets through, even if they appear on third party sites (duplicate detection, they had it for years on regular search).

[dodobirdlord]

> Why, if they want to carry news from other countries, should they also have to carry Australian news?

Because the law says so, because the law is very deliberately crafted as a mechanism to force Google to give money to Australian news companies.

[bryanrasmussen]

>That implies Google will change what Australians see vs other countries. No more. No less.

The letter is a threat, and it makes its threat by implication. The benefit of implying a threat is that it allows you to make any number of veiled threats without committing to any. If they wanted to say no more, no less, they would make a specific threat, but they want people to worry about things, so they make a vague threat.

So any possible threat that a reasonable person might suppose is meant by the letter achieves what Google wants with its letter. Australia has decided to take one of these potential threats and answer it, to make Google look bad, but it might also force Google to say that is not what we mean, the implied threat made more precise looses its power to frighten.

Of course none of this jockeying for position changes the fact that Australia is trying to pass a very bad law.