> Mr Sims said if Google took a similar approach to its actions in Spain when it was asked to pay for news on its Google News tab, it would be irrelevant because the code covered news content in Google's primary function, search.
So it seems like the ultimatum is: pay Australia media companies ~$1b or don't list any news media (including international news) on Google Search for Australian users. Interesting dilemma.
Murdoch is the Australian Bezos - except he has way more political clout in a larger area of the world, and has been running his empire for 30+ years. Bezos is building those relationships with his expansions, and he's obviously got more cash to fund them - but Murdoch's empire shouldn't be underestimated.
His organization also has significant clout in the US and UK where he owns big media corporations. He's long influenced British politics, and through Fox US politics. This bill looks to be sponsored, and crafted by Murdoch.
Weird way of putting it. People in North America who pay attention to politics have known about Murdoch for decades because of Fox News, before they bounced Bezos' name around nearly as freely.
> Media companies including News Corp Australia, a unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (NWSA.O), lobbied hard for the government to force the U.S. companies to the negotiating table amid a long decline in advertising revenue.
> Well, this is easy: remove the news. Also deals with all accusations of bias at the same time.
Not so easy, since if you do that, you've just given an opening to a competitor that people will start using when they want to search for a news article.
Would this payment also apply to a news startup which shows links from other news agencies and shows up on google. Is google obliged to pay this news site under the law? If so I just found my new internet startup and paying client.
> A competitor who would be equally obliged to pay rent for the news. That’s a pretty big regulatory hurdle for a startup to cross.
Maybe, but Google's interest is in maintaining its search monopoly, not creating opportunities for its destruction in fits of pique.
I'm also skeptical about how much of a hurdle this would actually be, since businesses typically have to pay suppliers (e.g. by licensing content). These rules probably only seems like a big thing because SV tech businesses have been weirdly allowed to opt out of paying in situations like this for a long time. It's not like the necessity of paying royalties prevented Netflix from taking off.
"Fits of pique" like being extorted for $1 billion dollars per year? That's something like 4% of their global profit that they're being asked to fork over for the privilege of continuing to provide a just one search functionality in a small and isolated market. They'll just disable news searches in Australia lol.
I don't see any reason why Google itself couldn't simply spin off a competitor. They wouldn't have to own it. They could simply provide know-how, discounts on infrastructure, investment, and/or acquire the company at a later date.
Seems cheaper and more fruitful than simply forking over $1B. Then again, the risk to doing so might be scarier than a billion-dollar fine, especially if you factor in that the move (if discovered) would piss off legislators.
$1 billion / year is a lot of money. They'll just not serve news results for Australian-origin searches. Most searches are not for news, and news searches are not product searches and probably don't draw much ad money. People can use Bing for their news until the government wises up and adds Microsoft to their list of applicable companies (currently just Facebook and Google), at which point I'm sure Microsoft will also disable news search results in Australia.
That's assuming that they won't coming back begging once they realize that they need Google much more than Google needs them. Ad revenue from news sites from Australia is a slice of a slice for Google. For the news company, it's probably 90% of their traffic.
I don't get it - isn't that giving them exactly what they claim to want?
"You say we are unfairly dominating? Fine we'll leave and let competitors take our place." Not competing at all in a market (barring reciprocial cartel territory divisuon) is the exact opposite of anti-competive behavior. They aren't even existing there to harm them!
At worst it would be monosopy and again they provided the remedy, reducing their "buying share" of the market to 0%.
It is essentially the ultimate calling of a bluff by not sticking around to be their scapegoat.
I'm not an expert, but I'm not sure if that applies here. Google isn't in the business of making news, and isn't competing with these news companies directly. If you get 90% of the traffic to your portfolio from my blog, does that make me a monopoly too?
Is it ordinarily the case for competition law in Australia to require someone with monopoly power to do business with someone when their prices increase dramatically?
Not really. There's never been a lot of search ads on news search terms and news carries with it headaches that Google might be relieved to be rid of. Most likely scenario is that Google just deletes news from Australian searches, and Australians just find another aggregator for their news, which will probably be another large American platform that doesn't pay publishers
> There's never been a lot of search ads on news search terms
The searches don't need to convert themselves in order to be valuable; if they affect user behavior enough, they'll affect it for commercial queries too. Ie, if someone switches to Bing because they never get good results on Google, they'll probably just switch to Bing period, instead of jumping back to Google for their commercial queries.
It's $1 billion / year, and it's just news searches in Australia. Some database queries will figure out whether it's more profitable to pay up or to disable news searching in Australia, and I'd bet it's gonna be disabling news searches.
It's very possible that the math works out to be , but I disagree that the value of "disabling news searches in Australia" is tightly captured in a database. It's going to require some non-trivial modeling of the effect of removing news on the habits of Australian searchers, and how that may affect commercial queries: it's a very non-trivial part of most people's usage of Google.
Some relevant things to consider:
1) The Australian market provides Google about ~$5B/yr in revenue, so a 20% revenue loss would be required
2) The global PR impact of disabling news searches, even in a local market
3) The future costs of setting the precedent of giving in to rent-seeking mafia tactics from a specific government; if they think it's likely to embolden other governments to do the same thing, it may be worth drawing a bright line despite the revenue costs
Actually the law seems to ban Google from “discriminating” based on this mandatory agreement entirely, including banning them from algorithimically burying their results.
Aka: show and pay News Corp or GTFO out of Australia. Sad.
Honestly if Google and Facebook de-listed News Corp that'd probably hurt News Corp more than the tech giants. Their print publications are already circling the drain internationally. I think they should call their bluff.
Well, Murdoch always support the liberals/conservatives but if he doesn’t get what he wants then he starts enthusiastically encouraging a good stabbing/knifing (rolling the prime mister).
Have you seen what Murdoch-owned media publish these days? It's biased clickbait and gossip, there is nothing quality about News Corp content. Look at the front-page of news.com.au and you'll see what alleged News Corp quality news looks like.
There are much better news sources out there not crying about Google (and writing quality investigative journalism) like; crikey.com.au, abc.net.au, theguardian.com.au, theconversation.com/au, independentaustralia.net, michaelwest.com.au.
We weren't discussing the uniqueness of low-quality content or clickbait, nor were we even discussing politics. We are discussing the introduction of changes which will largely benefit News Corp who owns 70% of newspaper circulation, Rupert Murdoch isn't even Australian. It boggles my mind an American media mogul (with clear historically proven cases of political bias) cannot only have plenty of influence in the USA, but also here in Australia.
We talk about Google and Facebook being these influential corporate conglomerates (and they are), how bad monopolies are and all the while, News Corp continues to get favours from the Australian government, if it's not millions in no strings attached money, it's laws like these which should not even exist in their current form. And the kicker here is: News Corp doesn't even pay tax in Australia. Thanks to some clever accounting (which others are also guilty of), they pay no tax on their profits and they are expecting us to feel sorry for them? Shouldn't the fact they don't even pay tax be good enough.
There are a lot of clickbait/low-quality news sites, but the ones not owned by Rupert Murdoch or big media companies aren't complaining to the Australian government about how unfair it is Google is linking to their news and providing free snippets. Things get even crazier when you realise that many news sites in Australia (especially News Corp) are already paywalled, many of the links from Google to the news stories results in a paywall notice asking you to pay. You essentially get a headline and an opening paragraph. Sometimes the headlines are clever, but they're not worth paying for. So, are they asking Facebook and Google to pay for the privilege of being able to link to their own site for free, which they are subsequently monetising through ads and subscriptions? None of this makes sense.
I agree that good quality journalism is worth paying for, which is why I personally have both a Crikey subscription as well as a Guardian subscription. I would never pay for the Courier Mail or Australian, the content is subpar and often republished news from other sources. Even former Fairfix news which Nine Entertainment purchased have gone downhill since the purchase.
He may not be Aussie any more, but he was born here to a father involved in news media so it's not really a surprise to me that Australia is one of the places he has an iron fist over media. I mean, he ran media here from the 60s to the 80s before renouncing AU citizenship for US in order to make inroads there.
The state of news media in Australia is utterly dire and I cannot wait for Newscorp to collapse.
His Australian media properties have been losing money for years, long before the recent collapse of advertising revenues. He only runs them as a vanity project, because he enjoys the political power it gives him in his former homeland.
I'm in the same boat, I pay for the guardian, a couple of smaller newspapers and the Australia institute just trying to even out the balance a little bit since Murdoch and what I would now call the extreme right have over 90% of newspaper of newspaper circulation Australia. A really sad state of affairs, the Australian at least used to have some decent conservative articles with a considered opinion but now it's just rabid and unreadable trash.
Reporter A spends 50 hours researching and writing about a topic. She publishes it on her own blog.
Now I scrape this text (as summary) and display it on my own "Latest news" blog and the original author does often not even get a click-through. I do not think that is fair towards the original author.
If the reporter lives from ads on her blog then she needs traffic, because more traffic is more income.
So bringig traffic to the blog is a big value, so she should pay for this service. But she doesn't, because search engines are free.
News sites can block google and other bots any time on their sites with robots.txt, but they don't because they want the traffic for free, while they even demand money from those who bring the traffic.
>News sites can block google and other bots any time on their sites with robots.txt, but they don't because they want the traffic for free, while they even demand money from those who bring the traffic.
I was feeling different about this topic until you brought this up. I think this is a really good argument. Yes, google scrapes and gets value from what they scrape without paying, however you can block this as a publisher if you don't want this.
The problem these attempts try to adress is that it's not a real choice: doing that would likely end your business, while boycotting would have little effect on google/Facebook. So it's a power struggle where one side doesn't really have a choice, because the other side has all the power.
> So it's a power struggle where one side doesn't really have a choice, because the other side has all the power.
You do have a choice though. You can choose not to use google ads and stop performing SEO and drive business in alternative ways. Further, there are more search engines than just google. If your business model depends on google it may be time to rethink that strategy. Any competent marketing strategy would rely on diversified channels anyway.
The search engines also receive value in being an index or directory that people can use to lookup articles. The situation here is somewhat unique because Google is in a position to reap all of the benefit from this relationship by just scraping the content and displaying it directly to the user.
A comparable scenario would be something like the phone book or yelp where these directories have value to users but they simply refer users to the businesses advertising in the directory.
Isn't that pretty much all news works? After all, investigations are a rarity, and most stories in media outlets are basically sourced/paraphrased from elsewhere. If one site/network/paper finds something interesting like this, you bet anything that every other outlet will have their own story on the subject online in the next few minutes.
To some degree it's also how aggregator sites like Reddit and Hacker News work. Maybe even with anti paywall methods, archivers, etc getting the story in plain text format.
I can't even downvote on this site, but I think it is because your post seems to say Google News copies news without a link to the source, which is not the case.
Mr Sims here is ACCC chairman Rod Sims. The same who rammed through so many terrible decisions around the NBN, just as one example, including the POI decision which in one fell swoop eradicated all bits of ISP competition that had arisen in the ADSL2+ space. Funny thing for a "Competition and Consumer Commission" to do, yet here we are. Internode's blood is on his hands.
Well I agree re the PoI, but internode did pretty well, they got a $100M exit; lots of other ISPs and suppliers hit the wall. It was a nightmare decision to go from what, 7 POIs to over 200? Made no sense at all. Mind you the entire NBN from soup to nuts has been and remains a disaster.
Sent from my faulty HFC NBN (gone down 4 times in the last 2 days)
I'm just imagining, similarly to how some search results in the US have a "some search results removed for copyright infringement" footer, many search results in Australia having a "some search results removed for news content" footer. The interesting thing is that since this _explicitly_ only applies to Facebook and Google, any company repackaging Google or Bing search won't have this restriction, at least until they get big enough to be worth rewriting the law for.
1.30 The Government has announced that the code will apply to Facebook and Google. Accordingly, the Treasurer is expected to make an instrument specifying Facebook Inc. and Google LLC as designated digital platform corporations.
Called out by name as the only two companies the law applies to.
That's what I wondered too. From the article, it seems like they're only targeting Facebook and Google for now. To apply the law equally, it seems like it should affect all websites that link to or copy the meta description tag of a news site.
“Discrimination in this context will be considered to occur if the news content of a registered news business is disadvantaged in comparison to other news content in terms of the crawling, indexing, ranking, display, presentation or other process undertaken by the digital platform on any service provided by the digital platform, on the basis of the registered news business' participation in the code.” https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20EM%2...
There's a lot of countries moving this direction. The problem is, Google is more powerful than most countries these days. Google can afford to cut a country off and let them suffer until they relent.
All of these countries need to unify on this requirement at the same time. Google can cut Australia off, but can they cut off Australia, France, and Spain off? What about Australia and the entire European Union?
I think the media companies are in the wrong. Google is providing a beneficial arrangement, and the media companies are demanding that google pays them.
Google has been bleeding the media dry. One of the graphs shown yesterday during the antitrust hearing was about how Google has shifted it's original business model of showing ads on third party sites (where they have to give most of the revenue to those sites, funding those sites) to a business model of showing ads predominantly on it's own sites, where it keeps all of the ad revenue.
Every single year, Google's ad business shifts more revenue from the "shares with third party sites" segment over to the "keeps all of it" segment. So while Google Search used to heavily fund news, every year, Google's cut gets bigger, and news orgs' cut gets smaller.
The second graph here is what was shown in the hearing, and shows the numbers pulled from Alphabet's reports: https://medium.com/beyond-devices/googles-increasing-relianc... "Google Network Members" effectively refers to website owners like news publishers which display ads.
I don't think that's a fair characterization. Would you say that Ford bled blacksmiths and carriage makers dry? Technology moves on. Newspapers are dying because their business model blows in the current infoscape. People spend most of their attention on things other than news, and news is the ultimate information commodity.
> Every single year, Google's ad business shifts more revenue from the "shares with third party sites" segment over to the "keeps all of it" segment.
The linked article shows that the "keeps all of it" portion has been growing faster than the "shares with third party sites" portion. I don't think it's fair to say that they shift revenue from one to the other.
> So while Google Search used to heavily fund news, every year, Google's cut gets bigger, and news orgs' cut gets smaller.
This is not shown by the data in the linked article. Clicks and CPC are slightly down for "shares with third party sites" but that does not say anything about news sites in particular.
> One of the graphs shown yesterday during the antitrust hearing was about how Google has shifted it's original business model of showing ads on third party sites (where they have to give most of the revenue to those sites, funding those sites) to a business model of showing ads predominantly on it's own sites, where it keeps all of the ad revenue.
Do you have a link to the graph? My understanding was that Google's original business model was "provide a search engine, and show ads on it", and showing ads on third-party sites is newer?
(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)
The graph is in the link above. The revenue shift is constantly moving away from sites where Google shares revenue with other sites, such as news publishers, and increasing on Google's own properties, which do not get shared with news publishers.
This explains why journalism is running out of money while Google is worth over a trillion. By lifting their content and keeping users (and ad views) directly on Google, Google profits at content producers' expense.
Re: "originally", I was probably wrong there. DoubleClick in 2008 was where Google absorbed this side of the ad business, I believe. But it was the side that was fundamental to journalism.
There was a time when Google could argue it's ad platforms was sponsoring the free web and all, but that's increasingly no longer the case.
"journalism" is running out of money because there is no journalism anymore, it is activism, and propaganda disguised as "journalism"
They are losing money not because of Google, but because they are in a Twitter echo chamber feeding off each other and aliening large parts of their audience
So... if all countries at once said "Pay us for listing news.com" at the same time... and google said "go stuff yourself" and de-listed news.com globally...
How would that be different than 1 country at a time?
If Google refused to list news that they had to pay to list... across the board... Seems like it's simply making the process easier for Google as it'll be a one time fight.
Google will outlast the EU. Tensions have been high for years and Brexit seems to have less repercussions than initially thought. On top of that you have Germany strong arming France into giving weak nations billions. Its shaky from the weakest to the strongest countries.
You think Germany is the one strong arming France into this? Germany has always been one of the countries most against fiscal transfers.
Brexit seems to have less repercussions than initially thought because it hasn't happened yet! The UK is still in the single market and the customs union till end end of the year.
> Brexit seems to have less repercussions than initially thought
There are still agreements. Let's see in 2021. The question if the UK requires quarantine of its tourists coming back from Spain will be overshadowed by the question if the tourists get there in the first place.
> you have Germany strong arming France into giving weak nations billions
Yes and I hope they do. It's a bad law. If you have your news open and accessible on the internet without users having to authorize themselves then it's public information at that point.
Block it by a paywall. But they wouldn't do that because they would stop showing up in search engines. Google is providing a free service by directing traffic to these companies.
Reminds me of the LinkedIn case about bots crawling their website.
They don't even need a paywall. If they don't want to be listed on Google they can always use robots.txt.
We've been through this in Germany. Publishers demanded to be paid for Google usage of results and news snippets. Google thankfully didn't give in to such a ridiculous demand and gave publishers the option to de-index them or keep listing them for free. Obviously all of them opted for the latter.
Australia is not the first country to pass a law like this. Spain and France have both done some version of this as well. There's going to be a point where enough countries stand up to them that they can't just withdraw without substantially hurting their own business long-term.
I think the EU and Australia massively over estimate the amount of money their "news" links bring to google.
For google this will be a pure economics game, and when they passed the other laws Google looked at the numbers and noped out.
The same will be true for Australia.
I do not see the UK, US, or any of the emerging economies pulling this, so the EU and Australia will alone in this battle and the amount of money being demanded it seems to me most likely exceeds google profit, so they will just end the service to the nations, and blacklist the sites from search
Search will be fine because 3rd party sites will be indexed so it will be a 2 hope, and given the incestuous nature of "news" today where every story is written more or less than same on 100+ sites all over the globe I am sure people will find the news they are looking for just fine with out those sites in the index
The Eu and Australia are massively overplaying their hand
I haven't noticed any affect from Spain and France doing this. Recent earning shave been great. As long as they have the US they'll fine. And I don't see Asian ex-China and Eastern Europe pulling this any time soon
And who would be daft enough to take a niche which involves paying to advertise for others?
They can unite and tantrum all they want but it won't change the underlying reality any more than fervent demands for a "good people only" backdoor encryption won't exist.
They could any time they wanted to, googlebot respects robots.txt prohibitions. They want google to direct traffic to their websites and they want google to pay for the privilege...
I feel like this is the weakest take on the argument.
They want google to pay for re-hosting /lifting any content (previews, headlines, etc.). Linking is just caught in the crossfire, if it's even mentioned.
If we are being honest, the majority of people read headlines and don't bother with more than the first paragraph or summary of the article. This is all displayed on Google properties where users don't even leave the Google infrastructure.
Is Google providing a service? Definitely. Does online news depend on Google? Definitely. Is Google's relationship with them abusive? Definitely.
I feel like this is going to backfire. What if Google just dualists Australian media from search results because they don't want to pay royalties? What if they start charging the media companies to be included in search results in order to cover the cost?
> Mr Sims said if Google took a similar approach to its actions in Spain when it was asked to pay for news on its Google News tab, it would be irrelevant because the code covered news content in Google's primary function, search.
So it seems like the ultimatum is: pay Australia media companies ~$1b or don't list any news media (including international news) on Google Search for Australian users. Interesting dilemma.