Pretty much this. Although Rupert Murdoch is a worldwide media mafioso, his home territory is Australia and he owns the vast majority of print media here - this proposed action is in his favour and his only. It even by design excludes public broadcasters like ABC and SBS.
News corp, headed Rupert Murdoch, owns a lot of media in Australia. Most of this media is abjectly shithouse but heavily consumed by people aged 60+. Murdoch wields undue political power because of this, which induces elected politicians to fawn over him. They gave him the order of Australia the other week for example, which seems nonsensical to many actual Australian citizens, to whom he appears to be a rich prick sabotaging the national conversation.
The frankly embarrassing attempt to siphon money from Google into Murdoch’s pockets is simply the current conservative government ensuring they get excellent media coverage at the next election.
If I have to use a VPN to get decent search results because of this nonsense I will NOT be pleased.
'If I have to use a VPN to get decent search results because of this nonsense I will NOT be pleased.'
Good news then because you can use Duck Duck Go and get reasonable results without being stalked around the internet or run the risk of your parents clicking a scam ad because 'it has 5 gold stars beneath it'.
Murdoch is 90yo this year. I find it hard to believe that he wants to line his pockets. He has more money than he can ever spend.
Google is a worldwide monopoly. No one has any chance of negotiating with them. Even a country as it turns out without them threatening complete pull out.
I see this as strong leadership standing up to monopolies.
I would prefer the free market to sort it out honestly but what chance does anyone have against them.
As somebody who dislikes both the established old media firms of Murdoch & Co, but despises the parasitic Tech surveillance capitalism even more, I welcome this (regressive) attitude. Europeans are fighting for similar reasons which is loss of control of their own media and a takeover by US propaganda and norms by companies who have failed to pay their taxes again and again.
imo it doesn't matter that many of these local outlets are backward, racist and populist rags (never criticizing the Australian concentration camps, or failure of capturing the idiocy of the AAbill, or whatever justifies being outraged about etc), the big guys (FB/Google) are expert in doing the same thing but at scale and with better PR (+ they can do so without paying their taxes).
As long as it hurts BigTech it's the right move no matter what "appears" right or wrong. These firms and their management are parasites and they need to be treated as such until they a) pay their taxes and b) respect local laws.
Re: takeover by US firms, note that while Murdoch was born Australian he gave up Australian in favor of US citizenship... precisely because it would have been illegal to own such a stake in US media firms as a non- or dual-citizen.
We would also like the Murdoch media and/or tech giants to pay tax in Australia, yes, but neither do at the moment.
> Europeans are fighting for similar reasons [...] by companies who have failed to pay their taxes again and again.
I get that it's trendy right now for elected non-technical bureaucrats to whine against tech giants. But if they are really avoiding taxes why not simply... charge them for that? Hint: They can't because all the taxation schemes used by these companies are legal. EU bureaucrats could simply write a tax code that makes them illegal but they won't!
All the whining also distracts peoples from asking themselves why European policies failed to grow a healthy growing tech ecosystem like in the US.
The fact they threaten to pull out because they are going to make a small decrease in profits speaks volumes of their bullying tactics. It’s clearly a case of: we don’t want to set a precedent in other countries.
This is absolutely ridiculous legislation, because it doesn't give Google the option of just removing all these news sources from search results if their asking price is too high. In effect, there's no choice but to pull the entirety of search out of Australia, or pay whatever arbitrary price the arbitration process comes up with. It's like forcing internationally-owned supermarkets to stock newspapers at a price determined initially by the Murdoch press and in the case of disputes by a protectionist government panel, or leave the country entirely.
Forcing the provider of a service to carry all local newspapers? Sounds a bit like net neutrality to me. If we see google news as a common carrier of sorts, forcing it to carry everything at fixed prices seems appropriate. Whether the price is too high, or whether one body or another should set the price, is something that can be negotiated.
Google already carry all local newspapers at a fixed rate. The Australian government just decided to increase the rate to a level Google argue they can't operate under and therefore would have to exit.
So let them exit then. It's not like Google has the right to set prices for themselves.
It's similar to Germany where, i.e. book prices are fixed, and every store must sell for the same price, whether they like it or not. Of course, they have a choice not to sell.
I'm fine with using your arbitrary power to regulate companies in an effective way, but when you leave them no recourse but to agree to your demands or pull their most useful product out of your country, you don't get to turn around and act like they're leaving out of spite.
They can go along with it and then report the impact of it on their 5bn yearly profit and then they can leave not out of spite.
I suspect it’s a tiny impact on their profits ans this is just an attempt to build support from public. Problem is everybody hates them now. I’d gladly use other products if they didn’t have a monopoly.
Why should we act to funnel Google's profits to nobody except large media outlets over a certain revenue threshold, the largest group of which are owned by Rupert Murdoch?
Why can't we allow all Australian businesses and individuals to receive payments from Google's money hose if they want to?
Why can't we standardise some API for doing so? robots.txt or .well-known/summary-fees.json or something of that sort would work fine.
Why can't Google hide results that cost too much to show? Surely choosing your suppliers is a foundational principle of any market.
I don't have an ideological problem with charging them for showing a link summary or regulating what price negotiation should look like, I have an strategic problem with this oddly specific and coercive way of doing so.
No law less than this would work, because Google is too powerful and adept at pressuring any other party it has to deal with to get its way. You can see this when a law similar to what you suggest was passed in Spain and Google shut down just Google News. Or when Germany passed a similar law, without a requirement to participate, and Google just made it clear if publishers didn't give Google a license for free they'd be booted off search.
Google is like the mob, in that you literally have to build a whole new law around dealing with it (RICO) that lets you come at the edge and use that to come at the head of the snake.
Am I the only one who finds it hypocritical that the Liberal government is ok with Murdoch owning pretty much the entire Australian free press; yet they are against monopolisation of search and basic http-based news distribution (ie simple web scraping). The reason people read news online is because Aussie news papers are generally such racist garbage and their web sites are either paywalled or stuffed with ads.
Sorry I don’t meant to come across as contrarian, but as a European and now Aussie citizen, the quality of reporting is really horrendous. This type of law doesn’t seem like anything designed to save the future of free, independent journalism, but simply the old boys club of the liberal party handing out free money to their mates in Newscorp.
Not that the alternative (surveillance capitalism is much better though, but at least it doesn’t impose contradictory logic onto the basic infrastructure of the Internet (text and http).
Have you checked your families google app/news feed or whatever they are calling that thing these days. Its like Meghan Markle is the most important person in the world.
I mean initially it was fun to rib my Dad about why he is getting so many Meghan Markle updates. But now I am just scared to even look at phones in the family, given the amount of addictive garbage that is being pumped into them non stop.
My family valued education and I thought it was true for everyone. I didn’t think people read the cheap magazines about celebrities in the checkout aisle in supermarkets. I thought everyone read Dostoyevsky. Haha. Since such interest in garbage seems to exist in so many cultures, do you think there is a evolutionary benefit that comes from it?
Yeah I'm not a fan of the law either. Google's response was also irritating: plastering ads for their video (against the new law) on every search made from Australia.
No. I would like to have a) a free press that doesn’t sell papers almost solely by denying climate science (google Craig Kelly please - pun intended) and b) increased competition in search.
It's not just end users who would have to switch to Bing - the advertisers would also have to switch, and Google probably has better return on each advertising dollar spent on its platform.
I wonder whether Google might withdraw their service for a day or even just a few hours, to apply pressure on the government.
They won't block google because they are aligned with US. Google will probably remove it's news tab in Australia.
No matter which country. news organizations have to eventually find a way to organize and deal with their internet providers to get a fee based on quality and quantity of news they provide.
After he is gone, I don't think that his kids will stick around as long as he did but other entities will jockey up for the field and that process will continue if there are consumers of it .
News and editorials have to be separated. Editorials and blogs should not be paid for via such funding in my opinion.
ISP funding of various type of blogs, media, arts, etc should become elective via bundles that people select otherwise.