We'd rather go down in Down Under, says Google: Search biz threatens to quit Australia if forced to pay for news Google threatened to shut down its search service in Australia if the government passes legislation that forces Google and Facebook to pay publishers Down Under for reusing their news content. The News Media Bargaining Code, proposed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission last year, would give publishers the …
I'm quite certain the fact they're gunning so hard for this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that NewsCorp have 60+ percent of the Australian Market. Completely irrelevant I expect. The Liberals would probably have done this for anyone.
The Liberals would probably have done this for anyone.
Whoever holds the seat of power, whether it is Liberal, Labour, Greens or even Clive Palmer or Pauline Hanson, will have to "kowtow" to News Corp. No politician has the cajones to go against Rupert demands.
And Rupert wants Google/Facebook to pay or else his worldwide paper empire will close for good.
The Greens! Hah! If they had their way News Corp would be broken up, and I'm all for it. It's the only major party that isn't cowed by Murdoch and there's nothing The Greens could do to gain his support without abandoning their principles. Quite unlike the other majors, I should note.
Hanson doesn't have to kowtow to them because she's [i]right[/i] up their alley. Palmer, while he was still remotely relevant, was a simple populist who happily flutters whichever way the News Corp wind is blowing if it means some support.
Being politicos they may have less than ideal motives but they're on the side trying to make google actually pay for content leeched from other people and companies.
The fact that Newscorp is the print equivalent of google across Oz isn't a good thing, however, they do employ thousands who vote and contribute a measurable monetary value to the country.
Given that google bends over backwards to keep it's search engine everywhere* It's not particularly believable when they threaten to remove it from 25 million people living in an advanced country and I hope the general response will be in suitably robust Oz vernacular.
* 'Abiding by local laws' when asked about PRC censorship.
"Given that google bends over backwards to keep it's search engine everywhere* It's not particularly believable when they threaten to remove it from 25 million people living in an advanced country and I hope the general response will be in suitably robust Oz vernacular."
Not to mention that in many jurisdictions, Google already has to block some search results and has done for years. They have working and proven tech for this. How hard would it be to simply list all relevant news publishing sites and block just them? Or simply link the headline and not the majority meat of the story as they do now? After all, anyone relying on the snippets displayed by Google is not getting the correct news story anyway. Most news sites use the headline, sub-head and 1st paragraph as clickbait which frequently gives a highly misleading impression to a casual reader.
"Being politicos they may have less than ideal motives but they're on the side trying to make google actually pay for content leeched from other people and companies."
The porblem is that the Murdoch empire are looking at this as an "us vs them" scenario - with Google gone they can dominate Australian media again.
Letting Google off isn't the answer, but neither is purely targetting Google - forcing Internet-based news aggregators such as Google to pay for content addresses the unfair use of content and fairly regulating news organisations in Australia to provide real competition in the market is the second part.
And I doubt whether the status quo, the Australian governments planned changes OR my suggestions will save Australian newspapers from their long term decline.
If the figures quoted on a BBC report are correct I think it is something like 85% of all advertising revenue is going to Google and Facebook. Now if other organisations such as news and broadcasting need advertising revenue they are increasingly stuffed. What makes it worse is that Google is scraping all their work and then publishing it free & taking all the advertising revenue.
Google are simply too arrogant and big for their own good. It does not appear to have crossed the money-grubbing scroats at Google that is they put all the new sources out of business they will no longer have anything to scrape from. I supposed they may start their own news service but that would mean paying for something and having to take responsibility.
Out of interest, who is 5.0.0.0/8?
I see it assigned to RIPE and then sub-allocated to:
- Syrian Telecom
- ER Telecom in Russia
- Hetzner and Telefonica in Germany
- RCS & RDS in Romania
- Cgates in Lithuania
- OmanTel and Qatar Telecom in Oman
- TurkCell in Turkey
- Hot Net in Israel
- Emirates Telecom in UAE
- Telenor in Denmark
- Ono in Spain
- SaudiNet in Saudi Arabia
At which point I stopped - is there some larger meaning in this or is the intention to ban ISP ranges in managed by RIPE?
This seems rather risky for Google. Not because Australia is an especially important market for them, but because a few days after they make good on the threat, there will be millions more people in an advanced economy who know they don't need Google. That kind of thing can spread very quickly and would completely destroy the company. The alternative, caving in, seems just as bad given the path they've chosen.
Seriously, don't let the door hit you on the way out. It's tough to know whom we'd miss less, Google or News Corp, but I'm sure that either way it'll be at most a few days before people learn to type something else into their browsers after which life will go on as always. Few dead/banished corporations are mourned, and nearly all are forgotten almost immediately. No reason to think either will be an exception.
Technically you're right, of course - but at the same time, you're kinda wrong.
With all its datacenters and the time it has had, Google has indexed practically all the Web (except the few who tell it not to, of which there are zero honest businesses). Whatever you think of Google's practices (and I don't look kindly on the ad business in general), that amount of knowledge has become priceless, so, in a sense, Google is the Internet.
That is also demonstrated in the fact that, when you ask Joe User what browser he's using, there is a significant chance that he will answer "Google".
> Google has indexed practically all the Web (except the few who tell it not to, of which there are zero honest businesses)
The surface web is estimated at only 4%-10% of the web (depending on who you ask). I'll accept of course that Google has indexed almost the entirety of the surface web. But even duckduckgo or Bing have indexed enough of the surface web to meet the needs of most people.
Frankly I can think of at least 3 Google services other than search that would be more important to Google for figuring out how to sell you to advertisers.
The thing is though Google could escalate rapidly. They could block any reference to Australia and Australians from search results anywhere in the world. GoogleMaps could just blank out Australia as Terra Incognita. They could erase all of Australia's cultural triumphs such as ... well, such as they were.
@Danny - they could - but the US is also looking at whether the big internet companies have too much power and should be broken up. If Google chucked a strop and wielded its power as you suggest then it would give the US, and other countries, all the evidence they need that Google has got too big for its boots.
I wis joking, just to wind up blokes like The Crutoniser below. The fact that Google have caved in France shows they are fronting it in Australia, and haven't a global strategy.
There are some corporations that are more powerful than nation states, but so far none that are more powerful than all nation states. Maybe one day, not yet.
But actually they didn't "cave in France". They created a new product that engages the French publishers. The publishers see a (potential) improved market/channel, and Google retains it's "traffic steering" position.
The problem with the Australian approach is that it's absolute: if Google puts a publisher's article in a search result, they'd have to pay. If someone links an article to their Facebook page, Facebook would have to pay (because FB puts a "preview" of that link in-line).
Leaving aside the specific merits of Google/Facebook's past behavior, I have concerns about this sort of behavior by publishers; where does one draw the line about indexing/cross-referencing.
For example, a citation to a news article in an academic paper is functionally not unlike a search-result cross-reference, and I don't think any reasonable person would think charging for that would be good public policy... but I do know that some publishers would like to have veto power over such citations (e.g. a paper discussing News Corp's egregious behavior, with cites, would likely be unpopular with the Murdochs).
So let's look at a few possible (not necessarily probable) situations: if a publisher gets to charge negotiated fees, how long before negotiations become content-sensitive? Articles critical of a certain political group might be more expensive than those complimentary of them. A publisher in a competitive market could offer free of cheap access to their articles in order to marginalize their competition (and revoke that access once the competitor is suitably diminished). Is this functionally any different from pay-for-ranking schemes, only inverted? Who qualifies as a publisher: if Bruce Dinkum writes a definitive article on how to grill shrimp, does he get to go to Google and demand fees and/or delisting? How about if Bruce instead writes a piece expressing his view that all the brown people should go back to where they came from (unless they came from somewhere he wants to live, in which case they should go back to where they were forcibly removed to)?
As we've seen with the MPAA and RIAA, publishers are hugely prone to try to get legislation that not only protects their walled gardens, but also legalizes guard towers, razor wire and searchlights on the walls. So on balance, even with all their imperfections, I tend to lean towards the Googles/Facebooks/etc when pitted against publishers, not because I think the former are "right", but because I think the public interest is rarely served when the latter control access.
Barbies, Kylie, dunny, lappies, sickies?
There was those three Nobel Literature Prizes - nope, sorry that was New Zealand. There was that one Nobel Literature Prize.
Didn't a Dane build an opera house there? Reminiscent of 'Fitzcarraldo' building one in the Amazonian jungle.
"It's not like there aren't alternatives."
Certainly there are, but will the politicians see them? They, as a class, don't know much about technology. They have people to deal with that. I expect that many of them have staff that print out their emails and make notes by hand for a staff member to type in and send in response.
As I understand Google's "business" model it doesn't depend on search, it depends on advertising. If they ditch search in Oz, they will presumably end up ditching all their ad revenue in Oz too. Ain't gonna happen. This is a try-on and they will end up with a deal like they just agreed to in France.
If Google is just linking to a news site with the headline of an article and a bit of the leading text, that's a good thing for the news source. If they are delivering the whole article or a significant chunk, there is no reason for people to follow the link and get bombarded by the advertising on the news site in addition to the news site being able to harvest their info. I see that as theft of content and Google/FB using somebody else's content to make money.
I see that as theft of content and Google/FB using somebody else's content to make money.
It's not just you seeing that, that is simply the fact. That's also why Google and FB are fighting like maniacs to hold on to this model, as it's basically free money (aka pure profit) for them.
Same for me all I see is the headline and 10 to 20 words of text after with Google search no different to bing.
Maybe it is different if you are signed into google, I would not know don't have a google account.
I thought the problem with google was it was displaying news in its news section page what ever it is and that opens a lot of an article without going to the news site the article is on.
"If Google is just linking to a news site with the headline of an article and a bit of the leading text, that's a good thing for the news source. If they are delivering the whole article or a significant chunk"
The problem comes down to the difference between quality and quantity. Copying the headline and a bit of the leading text might only be a small fraction of the total article, but it's a very large portion of the useful content. That's the whole point of headlines and leading text, after all. Getting as much information as possible in a few lines is a big part of news publishing, because it's been well known for a long time that most people don't actually bother reading much more than that anyway. The concept of burying the lede - where the meat of an article is unusually pushed further down instead of appearing in the header and opening paragraph - has been around for a lot longer than the internet.
So the whole issue is that copying only the headline and a bit of leading text isn't actually good for the news source, because that's enough of the useful content that most people won't bother clicking on the link afterwards. But the reason it's a problem is that traditional copyright rules don't really care about the quality of the content, and just say that you've only quoted a couple of lines so it's probably fine. And that was never an issue with printed media because there wasn't any sensible way for someone to buy your paper, copy the headlines, then rush off to their own printing press to crank out copies. Whereas now, Google can copy every article published anywhere, and show it to users in a way that means Google makes money but hardly anyone will visit the site that actually produced the content.
If we cannot rip off off Fairfax and News corp content in order to sell ads that have moved from them to use then we cannot operate in your country. I have never supported rupert, by for all I care google can just fuck on off back to the states and serve it state side shite downunder.
It is. But it sounds like Google are escalating the threats to remove the whole of "search" and possibly other unrelated services.
I do wonder just how people actually use Google as their primary news source anyway. I rarely search for news. I have a number of "competing" news sites I use and just go straight there to see what's happening in the world. I don't need an algorithm curated search engine to show me what it "thinks" I want to see.
A lot of non-techies don't know what the address bar is in their browser or understand URLs. So every time they go to a website they type the name of that website into Google and then click the first link. Even sites they visit every day. It is hard to fathom the total cluelessness of users some times.
Because the way the browser searches directly from the address bar has become standard. It is important not to forget that 99.99999% of people will then just click on the first link regardless of whether it is what they wanted or not.
Advertising pays many times over in very different ways. Search for an item and most of the first page will be Amazon or generated links to sites that do not have what you want. The fact that all the Amazon links are for items long dead is irrelevant, you are now in Amazon so the next step will be to search there. At that point everyone has achieved what they set out to do:
Google has the ad revenue to get the links high in the list
Amazon has the business
The generated clickbait links produce real advertising clicks and make money.
The only losers are the people doing the search.
This brings me to the other big issue, as a resource for information the Internet is increasingly full of total shite. Whether it be IT, your car or a push bike, whatever you search for most of the results are from total twats saying things like:
Oh, I had that problem too
Have you re-installed Windows
Oh, I had that problem and fixed it....... (nothing more)
Have you tried changing the coding on your car EMU
Add more tokens to the suspension fork
Just buy a new one
Australians should be *really* scared. I mean "search" "youtube" and "maps" that stalk you are such an essential public utility, right up there with the the water mains that enters your house. If google left the population would be so, so unbelievably severely affected. Not. The only thing that would be affected would be Alfuckbets balance sheet.
Yeah right. I reckon despot Dan could have Baidu up and running in a week. And in return, they would probably censor the fox (sky) news corp bastards that call him Dictator Dan.
So the Chinese would be paying Murdoch to criticise the Chinese government? Umm..... Have you taken your pills today?
And tell me that if Gladys had been running the show per Rupert's instructions in July and August, that the whole of Australia would not be in the same pile of cacky most of the other English-speaking nations find themselves in now. Victoria's last community transmission (not hitch-hiking from NSW) was three months ago. It doesn't take a dictator to do that. But you do have to listen to the science.
I am sorry what pills are you talking about here? Are you qualified in anyway to offer medical advice? Anyhow, I shall give you the benefit of the doubt.
Didn't Rupert's henchmen start calling The Hon Danien Andrews Despot/Dictator Dan? And who was it that signed up for China's yellow brick road (or whatever it is called). If you have difficulty understanding something, or unaware of the context because you are just a cockroache a living in Mexico, then by all means ask.
This post has been deleted by its author
> Isn't DuckDuckGo more secure?
Definitely, but it won't help because it's not a search engine, just a front-end: they forward the enquiry to other search engines.
They'l have to fall back on ... er, Alta Vista? Yahoo? Bing? No, not Bing, since they've already been caught searching Google for information themselves...
Hell, yes, we do. They write real quality investigative stuff as well, like exposés on war crimes, political corruption and institutional sexual abuse. Many a royal commission or ICAC investigation has been triggered by stories broken in the press. Some award-winning examples here: https://www.walkleys.com/awards/walkley-winners-archive/
Sure we have the stupid tabloids and gossip rags, but that's not the quality journalism at risk from the flight of advertising revenue from news outlets to search engines and social media sites. It's not just reports being reprinted, either; photographers are getting a raw deal when their images get scooped up by the Internet and there's no click-through once the user sees the picture.
Robots.txt is a bit primitive but it needs far more metadata like:
Summary: 140 words
Crawler: Googlebot
Contract: 279ac2b68259630132ad9f133b92f475 /
Contract: 587597866e25dd2cbe40e4159d1f6845 /hot-news/*
Crawler: *
License_provider: theregister.com
Rate: USD .0002 /
Rate: USD .03 /hot-news/*
OMG. The holy trinity of evil. A group of politicains, Google and News Corp.
If the politicians do something, anything, they will inevitably piss off one group. There is almost no possible good outcome. I only hope that the honorable members mange to show their usual competence and make it worse for everyone. Us, the great unwashed, will of course come off worst, but that's a small price to pay for an annoyed Google or an annoyed Murdoch.
The whole Aussie fiasco sounds to me (a non Aussie) like 2 toddlers throwing tantrums if they do not get their way. Depending on the details, the media companies might have a slightly better case. The threat to leave if the bill passes largely as is appears to be rather idiotic and arrogant. Leaving would reinforce the complaints of many of the excessive power of the tech giants; not good optics when the complainers can point to Australia as an example.
Wouldn't they just cut off the News portion? Or would Australia's rules apply to anything found by Google's crawlers, even with a regular web search?
Requiring payment is one thing, but requiring Google has to tell them how its algorithm work and notify them in advance of any changes is probably the thing that's really driving this ultimatum. On the one hand you make it easy for the competition to copy you, on the other hand you make it easy for news sites to game the system. Seems like a terrible idea from all angles, not just Google's.
would Australia's rules apply to anything found by Google's crawlers, even with a regular web search?
From what I understand, yes. Not only Google would have to pay for showing news sites in regular web search, but they would be forced to show results from news sites (that is, they would not be allowed to discriminate against sites it needs to pay in search results).
I'm not sure what qualifies as a news site. Sounds like you could get a lot of money from Google with a few scripts automatically searching for your website.
Seriously let google go
There are home grown web search engines use those, probably give better results than the paid for first 10 pages
Google sell their soul in China and yet in a western democracy they scream foul play
Hope Oz force this one through then the rest of the world will realise you don’t have to bend over for these American comoanies
I've noticed, just in the last few weeks, that my searches now have the top 5 or 6 results as ads. Before there were none, maybe one or two now and then.
Coincidence? Or dicking us around? Maybe they are trying to make as much money from us (hah!) before they pull out.
No great loss, there are plenty more.
"Considering more than 90 per cent of the world uses Google Search, that would be quite a blow to Oz's netizens, who would have to turn to other search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo."
I'm puzzled. In what way is using a different search engine a problem? I use a mix of google and duckduckgo on different systems. both seem to provide good search results. But google hides really annoying adverts in its results in a really annoying way. If Australia does have the courage of its convictions maybe we'd all realise that google is far from irreplaceable. End result : the world is a better place ?
I personally doubt Google will pull out of Australia completely, but they may kill the news app and specific news feed for Aussies and make google.com.au only show the headline with no snippet to avoid having to pay as a publisher. I guess the main issue for Google is the requirement to tell the news site when they change their algorithms. I suspect that is the red line for them.
But even Google did pull out of Australia, its not like the Aussie government are going to block people visiting google.com, youtube, gmail etc. As I that would be political suicide for the government as there would be millions of Aussie who use these daily, some of them for their businesses.
Given that most of the Murdoch press is hidden behind paywalls, and all I am seeing on Google news is news headlines, I can't see that this should be a thing.
Actually as a newspaper, I would be more worried that we would lose revenue as we would not have Google pushing people to our websites.
Tried explaining this to the wife last night and got told that "Google is making a bucket load of money by showing other people's work". I obviously explained to her that the news press make money by showing ads on their site, which is where most of the headlines point to anyway.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
