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by extropy 1954 days ago
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.

2 comments

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.