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).