[nwienert]

Do you think Google has any strong competition?

I think a lot of what’s not being discussed in this thread is that in a competitive market consumers could vote with feet, and the resulting competitive pressure would naturally drive better behaviors, but because that’s lacking governments are now poorly attempting to “fight back”.

In a sense, with enough kludgy regulation, eventually there may be enough daylight for a competitor to pop up, and until then people will argue passionately past each other, one libertarian side worried about libertarian things, and the other populist side worried about populist things, etc.

[tomjen3]

Enough competition in what? Search generally? No, but that is because every other site sucks, not because google is being bad.

In finding news? yeah, I actually do. You can find the current news by going to any newspaper of your choice, and read them there: you don't need to search at all (archives are another matter, but then I suspect that that is a very small amount of their traffic).

I actually think Facebook is a harsher competitor: people will share interesting articles (or those that make their side look good) there, and that traffic is harder to replace.

[danShumway]

> Do you think Google has any strong competition?

I think that link taxes are not a good substitute for antitrust law.

My take on this thread is that a lot of people want to break up Google, and they're picking one of the worst possible ways to do it. Australia is codifying into law an idea that will fundamentally change the way it looks at how the Internet works. Other countries have figured out ways to target Google without breaking the Internet.

I'm also (mostly because of the general wild arguments I've seen under the main article about what is and isn't fair about links) mildly skeptical about what people actually mean when they say that they want to "drive better behaviors."

Indexing information is a better behavior. People having the freedom to build and share indexes of information without anybody else's permission, including news organizations, is a better behavior. There are criticisms I have Google, including of Google's algorithms. I would like to see antitrust brought up. But I'm not honestly sure the criticisms I have of Google are the same ones that Australia has. I'm seeing people argue that summarizing an article is stealing. It's not, that's not what copyright is.

> In a sense, with enough kludgy regulation, eventually there may be enough daylight for a competitor to pop up

This is the worst possible way to make a competitor pop up. Why doesn't Australia just pass a law banning Google search if that's what it wants to do? I'm completely serious, a law banning Google would have less harmful effects on the Internet than the rules they're proposing.

My very cynical take on this that I am tempted to slip into is that for a lot people proposing this kind of legislation, it's not about banning Google or increasing competition, it's about "Google has money and what if established media sources had some of it." I'm pulling back from that take and assuming that most of the people on this thread actually believe this will increase competition. But even with that more charitable viewpoint, this is such a pointlessly clumsy, harmful way to accomplish that goal. If you want Google to pull out of Australia, just be honest about it. Don't this song and dance about how repressing fair use is somehow good for small businesses and the general public.

This is a law that says that Google has to pay to do something it's required to do. There's no consistent thread of logic running through the legislation. It's stealing for Google to link to websites, but it's abuse for them not to link to websites. Snippets provide no value to websites, but removing snippets is playing unfair. Facts aren't copyrightable unless you have a bunch of them from a bunch of different sources in one place. It's just a nonsensically bad law. And the alternative isn't "let Google own the entire world"; there are other pieces of legislation that Australia could pass that wouldn't be so toxic.

[nwienert]

Agree it’s not the best response but not sure I don’t agree that indexes should be held to tighter standards of copyright control.

Google has effectively slowly turned the lever on a mass amount of industries, year by year shifting their money slightly more from their pockets into Googles, by inching forwards evermore with inlining their content. You can see entire industries being starved out basically, and in a way because they are so big it’s just hard to stop them.

I guess in the end I’m not an idealist and if a single company is suffocating many others, and if you have some levers you can pull to increase their competition, I think it’s totally fine to pull those levers. Like, I think the precedent of “we shouldn’t let any one company get too big” is the sort of Ur-Principle and it overrides any sub-principles like “free market” or whatever.

Again, this specific one seems like it’s a bit weirdly structured, I agree, but I also have about 0 sympathy for Google and even if the news media is rent seeking here and the politicians are daft, it’s a much smaller issue than “stop fucking Google now” so I’m not too worried with various countries experimenting with different kludgy rules, any help in curtailing one of the (somewhat unintentionally but still) worst actors in the market is not the worst thing, certainly won’t keep me up at night.