This is absolutely ridiculous legislation, because it doesn't give Google the option of just removing all these news sources from search results if their asking price is too high. In effect, there's no choice but to pull the <i>entirety</i> of search out of Australia, or pay whatever arbitrary price the arbitration process comes up with. It's like forcing internationally-owned supermarkets to stock newspapers at a price determined initially by the Murdoch press and in the case of disputes by a protectionist government panel, or leave the country entirely.
Am I the only one who finds it hypocritical that the Liberal government is ok with Murdoch owning pretty much the entire Australian free press; yet they are against monopolisation of search and basic http-based news distribution (ie simple web scraping). The reason people read news online is because Aussie news papers are generally such racist garbage and their web sites are either paywalled or stuffed with ads.<p>Sorry I don’t meant to come across as contrarian, but as a European and now Aussie citizen, the quality of reporting is really horrendous. This type of law doesn’t seem like anything designed to save the future of free, independent journalism, but simply the old boys club of the liberal party handing out free money to their mates in Newscorp.<p>Not that the alternative (surveillance capitalism is much better though, but at least it doesn’t impose contradictory logic onto the basic infrastructure of the Internet (text and http).
It's not just end users who would have to switch to Bing - the advertisers would also have to switch, and Google probably has better return on each advertising dollar spent on its platform.<p>I wonder whether Google might withdraw their service for a day or even just a few hours, to apply pressure on the government.
They won't block google because they are aligned with US. Google will probably remove it's news tab in Australia.<p>No matter which country. news organizations have to eventually find a way to organize and deal with their internet providers to get a fee based on quality and quantity of news they provide.