Google is threatening to withdraw its popular search engine from Australia over a proposed law that would force them to pay for news. BBC. Big tech companies like Google and Facebook have come under pressure under foreign governments to help fund local newspapers. The argument is that local and state journalism outlets are both dependent on and in competition with Google and Facebook and that the big tech companies are getting far more then they deserve in terms of profit. Both companies dominate online advertising as well as search engines. Google has threatened to pull out their search engine if the proposal becomes law in Australia, calling the law unworkable. Facebook too has threatened to prevent users from posting Australian sources. It is unclear if Google's other services, like YouTube, Maps, and Gmail would be affected as well.
My Comment:
As way of disclosure I have to point out that this blog is hosted on Google and relies on Google's AdSense program to fund itself. I also have bought Facebook advertising in the past (but stopped when they changed their requirements). I don't think that would change anything I write here but I thought it was appropriate to point out.
I'm fairly confused by this story. Though I agree that Google and Facebook are acting as monopolies I don't see how you get from there to forcing them to pay for news. I certainly agree that if you don't have a presence on some of these big tech sites then you simply won't be found. Ever since Parler got nuked and Twitter got neutered my views are way down and if I were to be banned from Facebook as well basically nobody would read my blog. I wouldn't be censored but I would have no way to get anyone to read my blog.
But I really don't understand the idea of forcing the tech companies to pay for access to the news. Paying for content seems like interfering with the market as many of these news outlets don't deserve to survive. It just seems like the Australian government is trying to prop up a failed business model.
Plus there are other things they could do instead. They could easily make it illegal to hide search results or blacklist news outlets. Or they could make Google prioritize Australian outlets first over international ones. That would fix much of the problem without the issue of trying to fight with Google over money.
Still, I don't like the idea that Google is so powerful that they can boss entire governments around. All of these tech companies appear to have more power than governments and that is an extremely dangerous situation. There is no reason whatsoever that Twitter has so much power that they could ban the President of the United States on ludicrous grounds, and now Google is saying "play ball or we ban your entire country".
The real fix to this situation would be more competition. There are, of course, other search engines out there but the problem is getting people to use them. Google is the most popular and it is is the default if you use Chrome, so it's hard to avoid. People could use Bing, DuckDuckGo or Yahoo, but they just don't even though those search engines do have advantages over Google.
Online advertising is even worse though as pretty much everyone is reliant on Google or Facebook for running advertisements. Again it's due to how popular those outlets are, if I were to run ads on Bing for example, I doubt it would be worth my money.
I think Australia should call Google's bluff. Doing so would probably force Google and Facebook to make some changes and could even allow their competitors to grow. If that happens much of the problem would disappear and it would be a boon internationally. Even though I think the idea of charging for news is dumb at best it would help foster some competition.
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