This has a real “the laws of mathematics don’t apply in this country” vibe - for those who don’t remember that’s what his predecessor said about the laws to allow security agencies to access encrypted content
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I don’t understand this.
It’s like making a newsagent pay for the right to display newspapers rather than the newspaper giving the newsagent a cut of the paper’s price.
It screams of a protection racket for Murdoch and the old media who haven’t adapted.
I can understand implementing a search engine and social media tax for redistribution to the media in a manner proportional to the number of views, but this bargaining concept seems outrageously bureaucratic and onerous on the search and social media companies.
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Yes.
I think the key question is how much of a snippet of information in a search result is enough to mean a substantial proportion of people won’t then click through the link to the origin publisher’s website?
My thinking is original publishers only deserve something if Google, etc. are showing so much of the content that people don’t click-through. But when people do end up at the publishing website, then they are receiving benefit from the search engine, so it’s not all one way either.
The publishers of course know this, and if they truly believed that search engines were just stealing their content and not providing them with traffic they’d configure robots.txt on their websites to tell search engines to not index their content at all, so they’d disappear from those search engines.
I’d dare News Corp, Nine, etc. to do that… or shut up (or at least provide some sort of evidence that they’re losing more to Google, etc. than they gain).
Facebook & Twitter would largely be the same, although I don’t think they provide website owners a way to have their content excluded (blocked from being shared). Perhaps they should and see who (if anyone) takes up that option?
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I have an Android phone and I commonly use the news feed to find articles to read. They contain a small summary of the article much the same as you would see on the SMH’s rss feed. I am probably not the only one who uses the feed and Media outlets get hits out of it. If they can’t monitise the money from these hits that’s the media outlet’s problem. Google is doing them a favour providing the service. They should not have to pay the outlets for doing so. They would not have got the hit from me if the content didn’t appear on my feed.
If I were facebook or Google I’d block all indexing of Australian commercial news content and see how many hits the major sites lose as a result. They will come back to Google wanting them to reinstate the search.
The whole code seems to me that Murdoch has had words with the government to approve it. I remember listening to Hadley and he was saying that Google and Facebook was pinching their content which is totally not true.
I hope Google doesn’t block search completely but just blocks the searching of news content if the government goes ahead with the code.
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Senator Hanson-Young said on ABC News Radio this morning that the internet was no longer free and open, and corporations like Google and Microsoft were exploiting public data for profit.
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Of course companies are in it for profit.
I’m a bit surprised Microsoft are agreeing to this draft code, but let’s not forget the worst offender is Facebook. The amount of hate, conspiracy theories and disinformation on their platforms is shocking, and it’s because they promote whatever gets more reaction (engagement). Google’s YouTube is just as bad for the same reason.
Microsoft does mostly corporate stuff like Office 365 cloud services, so they don’t really have access to consumers private info to abuse.
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Looks like garbage. You have to click on Newstand, and there are only three stories eight to ten hours old from each Showcase title. Maybe it will improve? The remainder of the Google News app is fine.
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The Senate committee report into the News Media code was released this afternoon.
Both Google and Facebook have responded…
It appears that there may be a negotiated compromise between the government, media and Google & Facebook.
Seven West Media is expected to announce a deal with Google News Showcase this week, according to the SMH, with Nine, News Corp, Guardian and Daily Mail still negotiating.
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Google have a weird idea of maternity leave.
Hopefully this isn’t as bad as it sounds, but when someone’s on leave, they shouldn’t have to work.
You are assuming it is Google forcing her. As the lead manager, I would say she would have a preference to be front and centre of critical negotiations which she would have led since the start.
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