[agloeregrets]

This isn't about the money.

France is doing the same thing and Google is fine with it.

It's about the detail that Google is required to share all algorithm changes with news co's four weeks in advance of them. This massively ties their hands and would require the AU news to effectively use an entirely different stack of logic and rules to display news articles...which are worth basically nothing to google because they have to pay handsomely for it. Also very little of the money goes to smaller orgs and there are incredibly nonsensical rules around what content qualifies you for payment.

Oh and be aware of a dark detail here: The reporting on this is biased in nature because it directly aligns with the ability for increased money for the reporter reporting. This is why they are ignoring the reason why Google is actually leaving. Kinda like the McDonalds hot coffee thing, it's a whitewash over the truth. (Not that google is the good guy either, part of their game here is based on scaring other governments to not do this.)

[mcv]

> France is doing the same thing and Google is fine with it.

Is it? Several countries have proposed laws that they hoped would force Google to pay for links to news sites, and every time, Google's response has been to not list those news site. And if the law didn't allow that, they just left that market entirely.

The simple fact is that most sites in the Web like being found through search engines. If news sites want to be paid money to be listed, then the only obvious result of that will be that search engines won't list them.

I keep getting surprised by countries trying the same thing over and over again. In the end, you can't force a company to do business. It has to be attractive for the company to do business.

I don't like Google's dominance in search and advertising any more than anyone else, but these bizarre laws trying to extract money from them seem very ill-advised. But if Google is forced to abandon a country, there will still be other search engines available.

[agloeregrets]

Maybe not quite the same thing, notably the AU law requires a certain percentage of articles too. But pretty much, these news companies will regret this pretty badly eventually. Like 'Congrats, you de-indexed your entire business'

[candiodari]

There's a second effect too. Let's say governments get their wish and Google/FB cave. Now Google and Facebook have a direct financial incentive to destroy news organisations, or perhaps create their own (Twitter, FB and perhaps Youtube would make incredible platforms to create a crowdsourced news agency or publication, I would love to see how far they'd get)

When the News industry is already dying, this would change the dynamic from competing for eyeballs to social media companies actively trying to destroy news media, preventing their articles from having anything newsworthy or interesting at all.

You'd think the News industry would try to avoid picking this particular fight when they're already struggling to stay alive ... But I guess you'd be wrong.

[mcv]

Also, if getting listed as news is enough to get money, then that's not necessarily an incentive that encourages investigative journalism. We've already seen that making up lies and calling it news is cheaper than thorough investigative journalism. If governments want to protect investigative journalism, they should probably just subsidise it directly, instead of forcing other parties to subsidise various news articles.

[lokedhs]

In France's case, they did agree on that: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/21/google-inks-agreement-in-f...

So it's clearly not a matter of principle for them. As far as I understand, Google sending traffic to the news organisations will count as payment, which is probably why it's acceptable. If they don't want to pay any money for the text they copy from the articles, they can just increase the number of links to that organisation to compensate so they don't have to pay.