Google looks at pulling all or part of its search engine from Australia

Let&#x27;s be clear: despite the implication of the headline, this isn&#x27;t google planning to stop indexing free resources nor planning to stop offering free searches.<p>This solely refers to published news which, not surprisingly, many journalists consider the important part of the web.<p>A common economic aphorism is &quot;if you want less of something, tax it.&quot; Google is responding to regulatory+market signals as intended. Other countries have tried the same thing (e.g. Spain) and found that they haven&#x27;t liked the results.<p>Separately, the news sites trying to restrict people from forwarding articles in their own feeds is nuts.

Will be interesting to see how this plays out.<p>Australia is tiny in the grand scheme of things but the average revenue per user is huge, there&#x27;s still a lot of money on the table here, along with the domino effect.<p>The government will face huge amount of pressure and be forced to backflip within days if they actually go through with it, but perhaps that is what they want, to set up this narrative that these entities have far more power than any democratically elected government, which for the most part I think is entirely correct, these companies can make or break many governments on Earth.<p>And while I support them in what they are doing, in the back of my mind all I can think is that Rupert Murdoch probably pulled some strings to make this happen for his own benefit and it&#x27;s corrupt all the way down.

&gt; if the code goes ahead, it will stop Australians posting news in their News Feed<p>Everything is fine, citizens, nothing to see here! Can we direct the usual &quot;censorship&quot; outrage onto <i>censoring all the news</i>?<p>Unfortunately this is a fight between two or more parties both of which have dirt on their hands. The &quot;news&quot; in question in Australia is mostly Murdoch propaganda. It&#x27;s not great for FB&#x2F;Google to profit off embedding other people&#x27;s intellectual property <i>but</i> &quot;information wants to be free&quot; <i>and</i> we don&#x27;t want precedents set for how and whether you can link to websites.<p>Edit: I agree with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crikey.com.au&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;28&#x2F;google-facebook-accc-changes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crikey.com.au&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;28&#x2F;google-facebook-accc-ch...</a> &quot;For the avoidance of doubt, it couldn’t happen to two nicer companies. There are sound policy reasons to loathe Google and Facebook — for their relentless accumulation and abuse of personal data, for their anti-competitive acquisitions of smaller rivals, for their tax dodging, for their complicity in the spread of highly damaging, often literally lethal misinformation and propaganda.<p>But their alleged theft of news content isn’t one.&quot;

I think Google is overestimating its value. If Australia no longer has access to Google, they&#x27;ll just find alternatives, and then discover that they never needed Google after all.

I can&#x27;t understand the support for this scheme among readers here.<p>As I understand it (correct me if I&#x27;m wrong) The AUS government passed a law aimed at a making a specific search engine pay other private entities for including links to them among its results. Seems nuts!<p>Of course Google has to decide to either comply or pull out of the market, that&#x27;s always their right.

Australia really should not have done this. This didn&#x27;t work in Spain. It won&#x27;t work in Australia.

It will be interesting to see how this whole thing will play out. Google and Facebook are major players and easy targets. But will the government and companies go after every single search engine like DDG?<p>Will there be &quot;pirate&quot; news search engines? Like for torrents.<p>I don&#x27;t believe that every single news website in Australia agrees with this law. Some would want to be listed in the search results without getting money. Will there be an opt-in?

Does Google want out entirely of Australia, or just for Google News?<p>This article seems to confuse the two, as if the user never used Google. (What&#x27;s that bit about &quot;yellow pages for internet&quot;? Does he describe catalogues from the 90s? What?)

The move by Murdoch to force Google to pay for linking to news articles, which are paywalled anyway, was always audacious and unlikely to succeed on first principles, because Google&#x27;s indexing is not copyright violation. It is a service to help Murdoch&#x27;s readers find Murdoch&#x27;s articles. When customers click through, they end up on Murdoch web properties.<p>The fact that Murdoch&#x27;s scheme got this far just shows how much power he has over the Liberal Party in Australia.

I think it&#x27;s more like, Australia cancelling google

Seems like a good thing for everyone. People can still find the news sites and consume the news. The news sites can start to disentangle from the attention economy and clickbaity headlines in favor of more in-depth analysis that give actual value to users. News on facebook and google search highlight, is just bad news.

Crikey is sensationalist link-bait crap, just as this article&#x27;s headline and the article itself.