[kbcool]

Google are scared.

I don't think they will go as far as withdrawing search (note: it's just search not their 3 million other products) from Australia.

But it does set a scary precedent for them.

To repurpose their analogy in the scare campaigns they are running in Australia:

Currently when you ask about the best coffee shop in the area. Google runs down the road, taking a sample of the coffee from the local shops and fills you up with coffee then tries to sell you a bunch of related stuff.

With this legislation Google will have to pay the coffee shops for the samples.

It's a small step but Google have been profiting from "borrowed" content for the best part of a decade.

They need to pay.

[imperfectcats]

It is not (just) about paying. It is about a condition that demands Google reveal their algorithm. This is a common problem with modern legislation, where the awful, disgusting, dirty politics of the things hidden in legislation gets lost behind the "big ticket" dispute.

Here is the part Google objects to from their propaganda piece https://about.google/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/ under "Why does the revised Code not work for Google?":

> 14 days algorithm notification: It requires us to give news publishers special treatment—14 days’ notice of certain algorithms changes and ‘internal practices’. Even if we could comply, that would delay important updates for our users and give special treatment to news publishers in a way that would disadvantage everyone else.

I would argue it is even worse, as a SUBSET of publishers that the Australian government deems worthy qualify. Basically Rupert Murdoch, for my English speaking cousins in other countries, and their only real local competitor.

If this was ONLY about paying, it would be a negotiation. This is a bizarre law that aims to profit the people who are supposed to hold the government of my country accountable, and give a leg up to specific publishers. None of that bodes well for democracy in my country, and this is government getting in bed with specific businesses, the cynic in me believes to win the government more favourable reporting.

[A12-B]

I believe google should reveal their algorithm.

[londons_explore]

The algorithm used to be very complex and a big trade secret. Now it's just a bunch of big neural networks, and while still secret, doesn't look very different to Bings. The difference is Google has much more data to train theirs, so the results are better.

[username90]

> Now it's just a bunch of big neural networks

This isn't true. Neural networks doesn't have state of the art performance in many areas, there is no way they would use them for everything.

[coldcode]

It was an algorithm originally. Today it's a bunch of big neural networks as you say, which are basically impossible to document, much less explain changes in, or even know if anything changed.

[mrweasel]

That is much more terrifying that Google may not fully understand their search results, compared to not wanting to reveal their search algorithm.

[username90]

When you have hundreds of engineers putting together models to create the result page there will be nobody who understands the entire thing.

[nindalf]

HN is literally an aggregator - should dang and co pay websites for this privilege of linking to other websites? And lest anyone claim HN should be exempted because it’s “free”, this website is ad supported. They run job ads for YCombinator companies. There’s no shortage of revenue at YC, which they should share with publishers, according to your ideas.

Or do we recognise that freely linking to the rest of the web is how the internet become useful to the world?

[georgebarnett]

HN doesn’t provide snippet summaries of linked articles so you don’t have to click through.

[nindalf]

That’s funny, because it feels like every HN thread contains a sizeable portion of people who comment on the headline without reading the article. This is a running joke on Reddit too.

How much revenue did Reuters miss out on because people in this thread just commented without clicking through? Do dang and pg owe money to Reuters now for foregone revenue?

[abdullahkhalids]

This recent essay by Cory Doctorow talks about how owning lots of small author monopolies can be converted into a market monopoly [0], is very similar to the following argument.

The contents of the <url> tag of a page are metadata, and I think we can agree that authors don't have copyright derived monopoly over them. Anyone can share a list of titles without violating any copyright laws, and no revenue is lost because that intellectual property does not really belong to the author.

But if I start sending everyone small but different snippets of the article, as per their search term so they don't have to visit the website, I am no longer within the ambit of fair use of copyright. The intent behind the fair use clause is the same snippet is shown to everyone, so in a vast majority of cases there is no loss of revenue and we can ignore the edge cases. Here google has used the edge cases ignored by the law and turned them into a multi-billion dollar business (with at least some part of it lost by the owners of the copyright).

[0] https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

[danShumway]

> But if I start sending everyone small but different snippets of the article, as per their search term so they don't have to visit the website

That's not what this law is about. Google isn't summarizing titles, and they offered to remove snippets. The Australian government turned them down.

If the only objection here was "Google is showing different snippet summaries to lots of different people", then we wouldn't be having this debate. How has Google abused copyright here?

It feels like part of the argument here is that newspapers should be able to own facts -- that if people can look at a Google search page, see a title, and roughly know whether or not they want to click on the article, that's some kind of violation. But what does that have to do with copyright?

This is an analogy that would make Cory Doctorow sad.

[georgebarnett]

If Reuters lost a click because somebody wasn’t interested enough to follow the link, sucks to be them.

If they lost the click because the article was summarised and you didn’t need to click through to read it then that’s on HN.

This is less obvious for Google news, but substantially more obvious for other search snippets (like say looking up synonyms).

[nindalf]

That's the whole point of aggregators-with-comment-threads like HN. We read the comments for a summary + critique of the article. Often, we skip the article because the summary in the comments is better. HN is absolutely stealing traffic from Reuters in this case.

Of course a reasonable person would argue that more people clicked through to Reuters thanks to HN, and they'd be right. I was simply playing devil's advocate, using the "logic" of the Australian draft law.

[mavhc]

The real reason news publishers hate Google News is it makes clear that 99% of what they publish is just copied from someone else. They don't want you to view lots of news sites, they want you to go to their home page and read the copy they made.

[rlpb]

Ironically, the reason I often don't read the article is because of the obnoxious "consent" dialogs, Javascript apps and tracking that I have to go through in order to read the articles that HN often links. HN itself is a much more pleasant experience.

[izacus]

> HN doesn’t provide snippet summaries of linked articles so you don’t have to click through.

Australian government doesn't care about snippets - only linking to titles is still a paid action. Not to mention their idea is equivalent to "force HN to publish articles".

[yeahnah22]

Disingenuous. Google News doesn’t provide massive, moderated discussion so that you can figure out the gist of the article without opening it. (I haven’t opened this article, to take one example.)

[sullyj3]

That discussion wasn't written by the employees of the linked website, why on earth would they be entitled to charge for it? It's like saying record companies ought to get royalties from people who write reviews of their music. The work, while related, is very clearly not the intellectual property of those whose work it's about. Very strange to suggest otherwise. The google case is very different, they're directly using excerpts.

Honestly don't understand why google doesn't just say "fine, we'll stop providing excerpts and only provide the link, enjoy the reduced traffic, you really scored an own goal on this one, dumbasses."

[UncleMeat]

> Honestly don't understand why google doesn't just say "fine, we'll stop providing excerpts and only provide the link, enjoy the reduced traffic, you really scored an own goal on this one, dumbasses."

Because it is literally against this law. Google has done this in other cases and it is a fine compromise. But this law requires Google/Facebook to continue to link to news outlets. And simply no longer showing snippets does not address the "problem" claimed here and would not prevent the charges.

[nindalf]

Google can’t do that. The law specifically prohibits them from stopping the display of links to Australian news websites if they’re still indexing other news websites. They must show these links and must pay for the privilege of doing so.

[sullyj3]

I'm not advocating they stop showing the links. I'm advocating they show the links without the content excerpts - the use of which, to my understanding, is the justification for being asked to pay. Since the excerpts are the websites' intellectual property, whereas the links themselves are just links. Surely you couldn't have to pay to link to a website, that would be preposterous. Maybe I'm mistaken though.

They could even have a nice big passive aggressive message "Excerpt redacted due to the XYZ act of 2021. Click here to learn more about how Australian legislation is fucking stupid"

[rstuart4133]

But this isn't about copyright, or those snippets. In fact the hypocrisy stinks.

Newspapers are news scavenging machines. They regularly copy entire stories from each other, with journalist changing just a few words to get around copyright issues. Surely you've noticed? Every newspaper covers the mostly same stories, with the same facts.

The reason it didn't matter is this isn't about copyright, linking, fairness or any other the other smoke stories you hear. The newspapers had a wonderful business model: they sold ads on dead trees. To entice people to buy their ads laden dead trees, they added news as bait. It's common knowledge in the newspaper the amount of "copy" you have to carry is determined purely by the number of ads you sold - you had to dilute the ad / news ration down to a palatable level.

The people they could sell these ads on dead trees to was limited to roughly how far you could transport those dead trees after they came off the press (at midnight or so) so people could read them over breakfast. Maybe 100km at best? If someone started moving on that territory it was open warfare, but if they just copied your stories so they could sell ads to people outside of you territory - who cared? Rampant copying is how they collectively kept costs down.

Now the internet has moved in, and nobody looks at ads printed on dead trees any more. The newspapers business model has gone. That would be true whether Google was the 1000 pound gorilla on the internet or there was no Google like company. Moving the 100's (1000's?) of mastheads that thrived because of the 100km dead tree transport limit was always going to result in a blood bath that would leave just a couple standing. We are nowhere near that yet.

In the end this is about the internet taking their ad revenue. And that's not because of Google - it's because where before it was read the newspaper on the train or nothing, now you've got a while internet to browse, and most people don't choose to look at news sites, so they lost their audience. In particular it's got nothing whatsoever to do with copyright, linking or fairness, which is why apparently the legislation says Google has to hand over their ad revenue to the newspapers whether they link to them or not.

[franciscop]

I certainly think they could withdraw Google Search, at least temporarily. Otherwise it sets a really bad precedent for other countries to do the same and start charging a Google tax. If however they remove search from Australia, other countries would be a lot more conscious before implementing something similar.

Nobody thought they would remove Google News in Spain back in 2014, but they certainly did. Sure it's not the same scale and all, but if my memory serves me right it was kinda unthinkable back then.

"It's a small step but Google have been profiting from "borrowed" content for the best part of a decade."

It's not. Website, cafe owners, etc. literally put their content out there to be discoverable. Otherwise they'd just put a /robots.txt or not make a website at all! What is stopping the new sites to add a blocking `/robots.txt` if they don't want to be listed? The problem is that Google is massively profitable and everyone wants a piece of the cake.

(I'm talking about normal Google or Maps search, the snippet/previews where they cannibalize the website's content is a different topic and I'd agree with you there)

[twelvechairs]

Yes Google has to do a ban now otherwise they look like paper tigers. That said it won't last as Australia's still a profitable market and Google certainly doesn't want to encourage others to challenge their monopoly anywhere.

[username90]

I don't think that Australia is more than 2% of Googles revenue, USA tend to be over represented in revenue. I don't think 2% is worth giving in for, I mean they even refused to enter China which is a much bigger market.

[rstuart4133]

> I certainly think they could withdraw Google Search

Why would they go that far? At worst, shut down google.com.au or redirect to google.com (ie, a Non-Australian site).

It's hardly their fault if people persist in using Google even when they don't operate in the country any more, surely? If the Australia government wants to create a great firewall of Australia to ban Google, surely they should do it at their expense, not Googles?

[yeahnah22]

No.

The Age doesn’t pay the State Parliament to talk about politics. It doesn’t pay restaurants to talk about their restaurants (besides paying for their meal when it’s a review, of course.) It doesn’t pay the AFL to talk about footy. Nor do they pay the families of murder victims whose deaths they monetise.

These news organisations are asking Google to pay for something; forgetting that their entire business is based on monetising news events which they do not pay for.

To expect Google to pay them for the privilege of sending traffic which they can’t figure out how to monetise is ridiculous.

Especially so when all traffic to the Herald Sun, for example, runs directly into a pay wall.

It’s on THEM to figure out their business model. Google is literally teeing up thousands of possible customers for them on a daily basis. What more do they have any right to ask for?

[extropy]

This is a tricky balance.

No google are not profiting from borrowed content. You can always deindex yourself by robots.txt or otherwise.

It's just google is providing a huge value to the market and content creators have gotten lazy and now waking up to that all other options of publishing are going away or are way more expensive.

Google is in damage control mode. And will rather deindex all news sites, not pull search entirely.

[aneemzic]

> And will rather deindex all news sites, not pull search entirely.

That's the hilarious part. They modified the law to explicitly disallow Google from doing that.

[PurpleFoxy]

This is not the first time. The government previously tried to ban companies from not investing in coal companies.

This is just the next iteration of the Australian government trying to prop up the failing business models of their mates businesses

[BLKNSLVR]

They love to defer to their free market ideology roots, no matter how far diverged their words and actions become.

The last decade they've been picking winners like nobody's business and yet the opposition party is, for reasons that I can't determine, impotent in pointing this out for political advantage.

The current Australian Government will do whatever it takes to secure competitive advantage for it's donors.

[marcus_holmes]

The endless funding to the car industry trying to prevent the inevitable was a classic example. It didn't alter things one bit.

The Greens are the closest thing to an effective opposition. Both the main parties have effectively the same policies, the same supporters (now the unions are rooted) and the same voter base.

[madsbuch]

There is a difference in providing a list of links to pages _only_ using the title and providing excerpts from a page that satisfies the user.

And no, the content creators are not lazy, this is an example of the content creators doing something. It is a part of the commercial practice: The marketplace does not accommodate its participants. Adjusting the marketplace is a valid reaction. Just like leaving or any other action.

P.S. I do not have enough context on the matter to know whether this is fair or not.

[Aerroon]

If a news organization links to a Twitter thread, should they have to pay Twitter money? If they simply report on what's on Twitter, do they have to pay?

If ABC News decides to write an article about what you said, should they have to pay you?

[stavrus]

Your repurposed analogy isn't quite right. Google is providing a service by running around and grabbing those samples. Value is provided not only to you, the searcher, by receiving an answer to a question you posed, but to the coffee shops as well by providing them with a potential customer. Is Google not allowed to profit off of providing this value for the work they're doing?

A coffee-shop owner could argue that Google is providing enough coffee that it's disincentivizing someone like you from making a purchase, but the issue here is that Google provides tools to the coffee-shop owners to opt-out of giving those samples to potential customers. Instead of using them, the owners want to force by law that Google pays them for the samples because they still want Google to do all that leg-work of finding new customers for them. This could make it cost-prohibitive to run the service, especially as the legislation can be interpreted broadly (e.g. Google says that as written it'd be difficult for an algorithm to distinguish between news and non-news content).

I think a better analogy would be around restaurant delivery drivers. Pretend for this analogy that restaurants have a captive supply of delivery drivers that can't go off and get another job, because all the drivers know is how to drive restaurant deliveries for a living. Restaurant owners are incentivized to use the delivery drivers because it allows them to get more customers. What if the owners started asking for a law to be passed that made delivery drivers have to pay them for providing delivery service. The drivers can still make money in the end after the tips they get anyway, right?

[bsenftner]

Complete bullshit; Google and Facebook simply need better financial support for their lobbyists in Australia. This is Australian politicians observing other democratic nations and their politicians being showered with lobbyists financial support (legal bribes) and they want theirs. That is all. Seriously. That is what is really driving this, and little more beyond publicity.