Facebook removes news in Aus /Google threatens to remove search engine from Australia
 

One presumes that Google blocking its search engine in Australia will have no affect on Google accounts or emails.

Google says it will pull its search engine from Australia if it is forced to pay news publishers to host their content...
Google insisted during a parliamentary inquiry that it would stop making its search engine available in Australia if the Federal Government proceeded with its planned digital media code.

The code would see digital giants such as Google and Facebook pay local media companies for providing their content in search and sharing their content on social media.

Managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand Mel Silva told a parliamentary hearing into the proposed scheme that it was unworkable and "untenable" for them.

"The principle of unrestricted linking between websites is fundamental to search and coupled with the unmanageable financial and operational risk," she said.

Meanwhile in France

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/21/goog...-for-news.html

I’m finding it very hard to have any sympathy for the main publisher of news in Australia, News Corp.

That link seems to contradict the one in the OP:

Per cnbc.com:

And it's one day older than the link in the OP so I"m confused. ((1/21/2021 vs 1/22/2021) ETA: The one in the OP was updated recently to 1/22 and it still contradicts the older one posted by Wudang.)

In the USA, typically all it's possible to drill down to a link but be stopped by a paywall if the website's owner chooses to put one up. Many USA news sites give you 3 free searches per month and then stop additional searches.
The end result is that the website gets free advertising from the search engines and possibly new subscribers if they find that they keep being directed to the same website in their searches. Speaking for myself I decided to subscribe to the New York Times and make a yearly donation to the Guardian. If the Washington Post wasn't owned by Amazon, I'd probably subscribe to that news site as well.

So .... I think the news sites are being shortsighted and greedy. I also think that if this trend widens that search engines may stop being a free service ... well free service with advertising support.

There is no real contradiction.
Google has settled a deal with the French after negotiations.
Google has issues with conditions in the code that the Australian government is attempting to impose - and are still negotiating a settlement.

That's what this is all about, News Corp and Rupert's ability to get politicians to dance to his tune.

I was given this https://about.google/google-in-austr...n-open-letter/

I find their arguments very poor. They talk about a slippery slope. It is also rather negative. Not much space is given to their solution.

Especially when they could prevent Google from displaying their "content" with a simple robots.txt file to ignore it.

These companies don't want their site excluded from Google's results and they don't even want Google to just display the link with no teaser as to what is there. Either of these would reduce the number of people that visit their sites and hurt their business.


If there is a legitimate reason to levy and additional tax a foreign business or citizen then fine but in many cases this happens simply because they are an easy target for local politicians, and I think that's probabaly what's happening here.

What weaknesses do you see in them. Google already provides these media companies a valuable service for free. If they didn't find the service valuable they would just remove their site from Googles results altogether, it's a trivial task for any web hosting service.

And it is. Why should some companies/people get paid for their results to appear in googles results while others don't?

Wouldn't you be negative if your employer not only didn't pay you, but wanted to charge you money for coming in to work?

Solution to what?

Agreed.

The problem is that Google attracts advertisers to its pages. These would normally go to newspapers so google is depriving newspapers of their income. This is something google failed to even mention. The headline in the link says google has a solution but hardly talks about it.

Using the slippery slope argument is a fallacy. And they used it.
Ref: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope

They have good people to write their arguments. If they need to use such fallacies then their arguments are probably weak.

Just disconnect Australia totally. Other than Jimmy Barnes - what do they have to offer the world anyway?

That is one thing Google is threatening to do. Then there will be a market for a new search engine.

Hmm, I think Google's problem with the way Australia's upcoming law is written is that in order to do business in Australia they must adhere to an arbitration court that will settle how much Google has to pay for news content. Instead of: we can't come to an agreement with a specific newspaper therefore their content cannot be seen on Google.com. I could see them coming to the legitimate conclusion that the cost of doing business in Australia will erase profits and therefore why bother.

I don't understand the logic behind this. If I use a search engine to search for a news story who else would any ad revenue go to? Once I click the link then I'm on the newspaper's website and ad revenue goes to them. The search engine got me to the newspaper's website, they provided a service that the newspaper can easily reject if they like. Anyone can of course bypass search engines and go straight to the domain of a news website.

When a search is done advertisements are displayed. This is money that goes to Google, not the newspapers. Here is an example. The first four results are all ads. In the past, Google did not exist or was less powerful and so this money would go to the newspapers. Now they do not have enough money, so might go out of business.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com...4e22470559.png

One odd thing I tried the same thing with news stories and there were no ads.

In what way is "credit cards" a news story?

Anyways, I'm still not following your logic. In the past, Google did not exist. That is true. Other search engines pre-dated them, other search engines still exist. None of them display search results out of the goodness of their hearts, they display ads to make money. In what way would news websites be more profitable if there were no search engines? Once someone is browsing their website, they control any ad revenue or any revenue from being behind a paywall. You do understand that they can opt out of searches from any search engine, including Google, that they wish to at any time.

And something, I'm not 100% what, is making Google threaten to take their business and leave Australia, while with something similar in France they've decided to negotiate.

There is only some much $ organisations spend on advertising. In the past it went to newspapers. Now it is shared between newspapers and Google. It does not matter what searches attract advertisers. It is just money going to Google instead of newspapers.

Yes, in France Google has agreed to give some of that money to newspapers. Now Australia wants to do the same. Shows that Google does not have a case.

Google is not refusing to pay.
It just doesn’t like the deal being offered and the conditions of the proposed Australian code that controls the deals.

Obviously the French deal was OK with Google.
The Australian one is not.

I don't get this. If I have a business and part of it is selling apples, and then you come by and also sell apples, then I can't demand some of your profits because fewer people are buying apples from me.

Consumers have the right to purchase the products they want, from the supplier they want, no business has a right to own a specific form of revenue.

But, Google is not selling apples: They're providing a list of all apple suppliers in your area, complete with a small taste-sampler of each supplier's wares that Google didn't pay for. It's that sample (the teaser text) that causes problems. It's created by the news agencies, and often contains a great deal of info about the subject being reported (as it's the first sentences and they want to 'hook' the reader). Additionally, Google doesn't just report the first 100 characters of the page, it parses the webpage to find the first 'relevant' info (and not just the first <body> text). They're taking the produced work of the news agency and selectively using part of it to sell eyeballs to Google's advertisers.

Back when news agencies actually paid people to do actual research, that work was pretty valuable. But now, when so many agencies are just copying each other without any actual research, that line of reasoning falls a bit flat.

You did leave out that any news agency can opt out of their content being available to Google at any time. And, that some new agencies have negotiated with Google on their own to get a percentage.

As I recall in the French case the press argued that being left out of google search results would be a massive disadvantage as google so dominates the search engine space (yes I know nad use duckduckgo and ecosia) so they needed to be in but also needed to be paid. I suspect google is playing hardball to get the price down.

I do not understand competition/monopoly laws.

This could be the beginning of the end for Google. Bing and other search engines are ready to replace Google in Australia.

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...-minister-says

If Bing is willing to make an agreement with the media companies about payments then there would be nothing fundamentally wrong with the Australian legislation.

The only downside is that this will be one monopoly (Microsoft) replacing another (Google). I only hope this has no impact on my Gmail address. But I should be safe.

So, it's OK for Google to sell bites of my apples without my consent, because they allow me to ask them not to? Even if Google never informs me that they're doing it? Do I have the right to drive around in your car until you politely ask me to stop, even if I take it in the middle of the night while you're asleep? Can I live in your house without permission until you ask me to leave, even when I hide in the attic, only coming out at night to snack on your fridge leftovers (because you never told me I couldn't)?

"Opt-out" is a "cop-out". Had Google instead said "Place a line 'allow google.com .*\.html' in your robots.txt file to allow google to search your website and add it to out search index", that would have been fine. But Google knows that wouldn't work for them, as too many people wouldn't bother and their searches would be like Bing's first year. So, instead, they trot out a legally novel "Well, you never told me I couldn't" argument.

For your average model train club website, this is great, as you don't need to do anything extra to gain a huge boost in visibility without ever leaving your mom's basement. But for a site who sells the contents of the webpage directly(or advertisements therein), Google just ate their bread and butter.

Anyone that does not want Google to display their site, or parts of it, they can easily get that done. So your argument does not make sense. Any techo should know how to do this.

Yeah... umm no. So first off, they can only crawl through the publicly accessible part of websites, the same that people can see on their browser. So your analogy is wrong. Your car is private, and your house is private to use or go inside. This is like de facto allowing everyone to look at your car, or to look at a big sign in front of your house, but not others?? Honestly I'm struggling with making a real world analogy here. So, what about copyright? Well taking a snippet of an article is going to fall under "fair use"... in the USA anyways, I don't claim to know that for sure for the entire world. Its the same reason that someone can post a snippet of a movie on youtube, or vimeo, or that someone on a forum, ie like right here, can quote a news article. I'm not even 100% sure that Google, or any search engine, legally has to honor a robots.txt. But they do.

Second off, that robots.txt thing applies to everyone, and it has since the early days of the web. I learned about it in high school in the mid 1990s for crying out loud. If your webmaster doesn't know about it then he needs to be out of a frickin job. Its not some big secret. The idea that a big news service is loosing ad revenue because they didn't know they could just block themselves from a search engine is bordering on the absurd. Besides which HOW HAVE THEY LOST ANY REVENUE?! If they block google then NO ONE SEARCHING FOR AN ARTICLE ON GOOGLE WILL BE DIRECTED TO THEIR WEBSITE. IF A PERSON WENT STRAIGHT TO https://www.abc.net.au/news/ DIRECTLY THEN IT DOES NOT MATTER IF GOOGLE EVEN EXISTED OR NOT. For the most part no one blocks crawlers from going through their websites main page, not the big ones anyway. They may from certain sub pages to make it easier to find their content. Unless you just don't want your website to be findable.

Sorry for "shouting" but I feel like I'm struggling to make that concept that seems obvious to me, clear to anyone else.

ETA: you do realize that Bing is the same with respect to robots.txt as Google right? And that Google wasn't instantly popular. It took them some time to surpass Yahoo and AltaVista among others. For some reason people decided they liked it better whereas most people have not decided that with Bing.

But every other area of law works exactly the opposite: You have the rights by default, and others need to get permission to use your stuff. Why is it suddenly reversed just because it's on the internet?

It's easy to lock your doors at night. You don't even need to be 'techno' to know how do this. If you don't, does that mean I have your not-yet-opted-out implicit permission to enter? Do I need to put up a sign saying "Private Property", or is it automatically considered private? Why is the internet different?

You’re arguing based on property rights. I think you need to argue based on intellectual property or publishing where it’s long established that you can publish extracts. None are perfect analogies for the current case. Technology races ahead of law.
A parallel case is sexual acts. You can’t have a book with sex in it. Ok Lady Chatterleys Lover. But you can’t have it on radio, ok you can but not in the movies, ok you can but not tv etc etc.

Well, let's talk apples then. If a grocer sells apples, and places some bins outside it's doors on the public sidewalk, is it ok for Google to sell passersby tastes of those apples? It's just using the public sections, right? Does the grocer need to post a "no tasting" sign? Why is this concept different on the internet?

Be careful when invoking the cure-all form of "Fair Use". To call this a complicated topic would be failing to encompass it's enormity. I suggest a primer (for USA):

https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/

So, was Google's copying transformative or critical? If neither, then Fair Use requires a lot more examination.

So, "it's been this way forever", and "you didn't ask me not to". Why should I have to do something extra to exercise my rights over my work? Why is the default not "the person trying to use it needs to ask permission"? Is it just because Google's business model would collapse?

But why do people go to Google at all? Because Google had taken the other people's work and put it all in one place for easy access. If Google puts enough of that content on their own page, people never need to to to ABC. If some people don't go to ABC because Google told them everything from ABC's site, that sounds like Google taking something from ABC (content) Google getting paid for it (advertisers) and ABC not getting paid (advertisers) because Google took the content.

I often find that I'm most likely to be wrong when I thing something is "So dead simple and obvious", but can't articulate why. In my experience, that's an indication that I've made an emotional decision, rather than a rational one.

My Bing reference was to the fact that Google caught Bing using Google searches and repackaging them as their own. Google sued them to stop using Google content in Bing searches, because "it devalued Google's work". Google won.

"Robots.txt" and the opt-out culture that spawned it are a plague that should have been stamped out before it could see the light of day. This is the same mindset as "To be removed from our call list, please press 1 to be connected to an operator that will eventually remove you, maybe" that spam callers use. Or the phone company deciding "If nobody tells us to not bump them up to the next level of service, we can do it for their own benefit". Or the bank saying "Oh, it looks like you don't have enough in your account to cover that charge. Instead of declining it, we'll just automatically give you a loan to cover the balance. And we'll charge you a fee for that loan. And that loan will only cover that one charge, so the next one will generate a new fee. And we'll reorder your daily charges so the big, important ones come first. The fact that this creates more fees for the myriad of small charges is an *unfortunate* side-effect. And we won't call it a fee, we'll call it a 'Complimentary Service', so we can advertise 'No Fees'"

But, if web crarlers had tried to ask people to opt-in, we all know that enough people would have been lazy to have made the searches pretty worthless for the critical first few years.

Oh, wait: they were. I remember Archie, Veronica and Jughead. Filenames, titles, and keywords that had to be manually entered.

I'd love it if there could be a worldwide experiment tommorow. Robots.txt is now a whitelist instead of a blacklist. Enforced by law in every country. And then we could see how quickly everyone adds the major search engines.

You are acting as if Google is doing something wrong by directing eyeballs to websites that want eyeballs directed to them. They still want that, they just also want a cut, and with bargaining power increased by statute.

No, I'm acting as if Google did something wrong by copying enough content from the original sources that users no longer need to follow the links to the source sites, as they have already read Google's copy of the content. The news agencies do all the work, but the eyeballs see only Google's adverts. Advertising agencies then stop paying the news agencies creating content and pay Google for copying content instead.

A parallel argument could be made that Google's service would be rendered valueless to it's own advertisers if it weren't continually copying other people's work. The only reason eyeballs go to Google is because of the content created by "not-Google". No content, no Google. No eyeballs on news agency sites, no payment to news agencies. No payment to news agencies, no news content for Google to copy.

The News agencies are saying "This is not a stable situation, and something has to change". Google is saying "Screw you guys, I'm going home".

It could be, in some alternate universe fantasy such as those so-beloved of Trumpettes, but it won't be.

Bollocks. :rolleyes:

I don't see them doing that. I was literally just on news.google.com. Saw a story "Formula 1 Race Given Bizzare Name for 2021". Google knows what I'm interested in so it put that little snippet there. Intrigued, I clicked the link and was brought to https://beyondtheflag.com/2021/02/02...e-2021-season/ A website I'm not sure I've ever even visited before. This website just got a new unique visitor and a tiny bit of ad revenue because of Google.

Another is "Biden wants a $15 minimum wage, here is what people say that would do to the economy". Thats from the WSJ. I already know Biden wants a $15 minimum wage. Google has not stolen some part of the WSJ's ability to sell ad revenue by letting me in on that "revelation". If I wanted to know more I can click and see.

None of the stories I see on news.google.com are more than a tiny teaser. If a large news agency thinks, gee we're so big we don't want to share our ad revenue with Google, they can opt out very easily. Or they can negotiate with Google. Or they can lobby their representatives to force Google to come to terms set by a court in their home country. Which is what has happened in Australia.

Breaking news is that Scotty from Marketing is meeting with the global CEO of Google at 0930, which is right now.

This is a double dipping fiasco. The media companies are not satisfied with the advertising revenue they get from visitors to their web sites. They also want advertising revenue from the search engines as well - even though in many cases the viewers only clicked onto their web site thanks to the search engine.

This is not unlike the radio fiasco. If a shop plays a radio for the benefit of their customers then they are expected to pay royalties to the copyright holders of any musical tunes played even though the radio station would have paid royalties already.

Strikes me that, in every other medium of communication, the news site would be paying to have its information listed in some sort of directory. Yellow pages, you know? Businesses putting an ad in the phone book pay for the privilege. News programs pay to have their information published in magazines or other media. Yet because Google is successful, they suddenly have to reverse the traditional direction of payments? That's utterly nonsensical.

Microsoft is happy to step up with Bing.