> Google will not be required to charge Australians for the use of its free services such as Google Search and YouTube, unless it chooses to do so.
> Google will not be required to share any additional user data with Australian news businesses unless it chooses to do so.
I don't think Google actually made either of these claims in their letter.
They didn't mention charging for services at all. They said "the free services you use may be at risk". Given the context, I took that to mean the quality of the service would tank if they had to share their algorithm changes.
The data portion is a little less clear. Google was very weasel wordy - they definitely wanted it to sound like they would have to turn over user data, but if you read carefully they only say they would have to share data about how they collect the user data.
Somehow everyone misses this little gem in the draft bill [0]:
> 52S.(1).(a) ensure that the registered news business corporation is provided with flexible content moderation tools that allow the registered news business corporation to remove or filter comments on the registered news business covered news content that:
> . . (i) are made using the digital platform service;and
> . . (ii) are made on a part of the digital platform service that is set up and able to be edited by the registered news business;
> (b) ensure that the registered news business corporation can disable the making of such comments;
If I'm reading that correctly, if someone posts a news corporation to Facebook, the news corporation gets to delete / edit / moderate any Facebook replies.
I think they (the legislators) have lost the plot.
In another section the draft legislation requires Facebook / Google to notify the news organisation of changes to their page rank / feed algorithm, and also provide advice on how to mitigate the effects of those changes.
Google's claim the bill grants news media business special privileges no other organisation on the planet has is not too far from the truth.
Someone brought that up the last time this came up on HN. In the explanatory materials, they clarified that (ii) is indeed meant to restrict this to posts on their own Facebook page:
> 1.89 In the case of a social media service such as Facebook, this rule deals with the situation where the news business has posted its covered news content on the news business’ own social media page. Comments on the news business’ articles posted by somebody else on another Facebook page are not covered by this law.
That still carves them out a protected niche in what otherwise was an independent service, that in no other case provides that level of autonomy.
If I were in FAANG's place, I'd tell the AU government to get stuffed by turning every response page into a "Tell your government that this bill is ridiculous and we'll be back when it's repealed. So long and thanks for all the fish."
There is no such requirement. But that is the capability they want that they do not currently have. They already have the capability to delete comments, just like you can delete comments on your own posts.
Not sure why you are being voted down. The news media, for all their faults, can be sued for defamation and in fact have been sued. They also have editorial policies and a clear method of publishing articles which have inbuilt checks and balances.
Sure, it’s not perfect but unlike Facebook, Google and Twitter, they do have processes in place to handle misinformation and prevent the worst excesses, and if these break down it is very clear who you can sue. Ergo, they can be held accountable.
I hate to use the argument but how well did appeasement work out historically... that’s right it didn’t. When something is stupid and only happening because they have the power to force it. Sometimes the only way to fight it is to fuck off and say “sorry but no, I don’t wish to participate in this farce”
As opposed the the slippery slope that democracies are sliding down all over the world?
I agree that it is challenging, but frankly, given how much evidence there is of bad actors and misinformation on social media sites it has become clear that these corporations will only make choices that drive revenue or revenue related metrics.
I don't know what the right solution is, but it's not twiddling thumbs while foreign owned corporations continue to accumulate control over communications and media.
> In another section the draft legislation requires Facebook / Google to notify the news organisation of changes to their page rank / feed algorithm, and also provide advice on how to mitigate the effects of those changes.
Interesting.
On the one hand working in software the idea of having communicate changes to an algorithm like this to 3rd parties gives me nightmares, and opens the door to regulation of the algorithms design.
On the other hand, given Facebook and Google's monopoly positions, why not? They're able to make of break businesses overnight by changing the stream of traffic, and there's basically no real competitors. Perhaps a weak analogy but if your local government was building a motorway that would bypass your town high street, effectively wiping out 90%+ of customers to your local shop, they would inform you months or years ahead so you have at least a chance to change your business strategy or close shop.
> They're able to make of break businesses overnight by changing the stream of traffic
Maybe small businesses wake up to the fact that building the core of their livelihood on the foundation of a whimsical megacorp is a Bad Idea.
Google attracts businesses to work with them because they make visibility easy. But if they screw over those same businesses, then maybe the bait isn't worth taking in the first place? Maybe networking and building your customer base without Google, in some venue that you have better control over (or is at least more reliable/transparent) is preferable?
Start from the idea that small business owners aren't actually idiots and don't spend their time promoting their business on social media because it's fun.
Cost of customer acquisition isn't comparable without those platforms. Working harder and still not being price-competitive isn't preferable, even if it mitigates some future risk.
This suggestion is interesting in that you seem earnest but you appear to be fundamentally misunderstanding how the internet works:
Ppl use google to search for things, they use chrome to find things, they don’t like typing in addresses, they would much rather google give them the top result whatever that may be.
You are suggesting that the news orgs change human behavior. Good luck with that.
What digital platform is open and neutral? Everything is either controlled by Google, Facebook or Apple, and optimised for engagement and their ability to earn revenue.
Imagine if a company controlled not just the main street in your town, but also in every town in the world. The analogue would be to tell shopkeepers to build their own city and convince people to live their so they can run their shop.
If you don’t use Google to drive traffic and your competitor does, you lose. It doesn’t matter that your competitor gets screwed over by Google a few years down the road. You will already be gone.
This is part of why capitalism is said to have boom/bust cycles. Stable equilibriums are less favourable than unstable ones. Taking advantage of every available opportunity is the only way to compete.
Lowering rank of a sleazy news organization that was previously gaming the ranking... is exactly what they should do if they are keeping the end user in mind.
I buy that AMP is bad and they should share revenue.
It is not entirely Google’s fault that their survival requires click-bait articles instead of having original content
Does Google really steal revenue with AMP? Honest question, since I've read otherwise blog.amp.dev/2018/08/28/are-you-leaving-revenue-on-the-table-with-amp/
You must be unfamiliar with NewsCorp. This is the cesspool that spawned Fox News, Sky News, and The Sun. That hacked the phones of journalists, celebrities, and royalty just to get a scoop. That routinely and as a core function of business interferes in democratic process. That effectively pioneered fake news, and has singlehandedly destroyed the credibility of the entire media industry.
Why not? Hopefully because you give a single fuck about the rule of law.
I'm well aware of NewsCorp, having grown up in the UK and seen them basically decide every election since perhaps Thatcher.
Despite that, this particular point in the draft legislation in an interesting idea, at least to discuss. "Why Not?" was short for "Why not require Google and Facebook to inform affected businesses when they're making changes to their ranking algorithms?" ... that's a discussion that can be had independently from NewsCorp
Because the ranking algorithms are likely changed regularly, in opaque ways. Because many of the changes will be things like "reran the training algorithm on a new data set". Because it's a foot in the door to making them justify such changes. Because the purpose of a good search algorithm is to serve the people searching and not the people writing sites. Because it's an inherently adversarial process between search engines and bad "SEO". Because no good can possibly come from sites having more insight into how to affect their ranking, other than "make content people want". And those are just the reasons off the top of my head.
These have are all fundamental assumptions anyone working on the web makes and we’re established as fundamental at the point Google beat out its competitors, in the early 2000’s
At that time Google was a different company and didn’t have a monopoly, and the web was a different place. Now Google does have a monopoly and users browsing habits have narrowed to a few sites like Facebook and Reddit where they get “everything” content wise
So perhaps it’s time to question those assumptions and ask if they’re really still true in today’s context, or whether other things matter more now?
This whole comment is a red herring that turns into a straw man. No one was talking about News Corp, and most of what you said about them is false besides.
And then you try to divert attention away from the real discussion by making it seem like the argument is about “the rule of law” which really comes out of left field, but is a great boogeyman to pull up if you wanna quiet dissent.
This whole thing is about NewsCorp, if you don’t see that, read more. If you think what I had to say is false, please refute it, if I’m wrong I want to know it.
And evidently my ploy to quiet dissent didn’t work, as here you are.
NewsCorp does genuinely violate the rule of law, a different set of standards apply to them and their conduct.
To me that sounds like it's intended to cover comments made on posts on the news business's own Facebook page, rather than comments made on other pages or personal profiles, etc.
1. Yes we haven't heard yet whether they will appeal, but the law as it currently stands creates a legal context where you can understand publishers wanting more information about Facebook users who comment on their posts. There are some perverse shakedown incentives created by the current situation.
2. Thanks - poor wording on my part. I meant to communicate that Facebook avoids liability in their terms, and of course the court determined the actual liability falls on publishers posting content.
A recent case established that Australian news organisations are legally liable and may sued for defamatory comments posted against their stories on social media platforms
No, it’s to address “oh well we CAN’T moderate our platform we didn’t build those tools and we couldn’t find any engineers so I guess we’re just stuck then eh??”
The google letter makes non-existent claims that aren't part of the proposed law. Like that youtube and google will somehow magically offer worse results. They can offer the exact same results they do now - they might just have to pay for it.
"If we had to pay more for news content, we would probably just cut it out because we don't want to pay - thus leading to worse results" doesn't quite have the same ring, does it :-)
As such the ACCC response is also full of bullshit. This is how politics go, and the sad part is that most people seem to simply read one side of the argument and go ranting off angrily based on the bullshit claims, rather than investigating the truth behind both sides
> they might just have to pay for it. "If we had to pay more for news content, we would probably just cut it out because we don't want to pay - thus leading to worse results" doesn't quite have the same ring, does it :-)
The amount they'd have to pay for it seems to be dramatically more than what they make for it, so "if this law passes, we will stop serving these results" seems to be a reasonable reaction.
Being required to inform news media about changes to result ranking algorithms in advance and advise them on how to avoid being impacted also gives news media a unique ability to game search results and takes away Google’s ability to prevent them from gaming results. I would certainly expect this to also seriously degrade the quality of search results. Not only will results become a pile of worthless SEO spam by news companies, Google will also have to use a much more simple ranking algorithm free of both ML techniques that can’t be explained to news companies and advanced algorithm techniques that are valuable trade secrets that news companies would obviously leak with their many employees, poor security, and adversarial motives.
The "worse results" probably stem from the part of the law about changes in pagerank algorithms: If search engines are required to notify about changes in algorithm and provide mitigations for those changes, the easiest way to provide this would be: Keep the algorithm as it is, never change it again (for Australia) and accept the degradation that will result from that.
Also, what does this section even mean in the context of ML models? How do you communicate that you trained an interest-estimation model on more data and will now be using the upgraded version? I’m sure Google uses many such models for producing personalized results, and probably several are updated in production every day. Does Google have to share the inner workings of their search stack with these news companies? Do they have to share the models? Does Google have to explain to these news companies how the newly trained model might treat their content differently than the previous iteration? Any of these things I expect would cause Google to throw up their hands and abandon the country. Exposing a live feed of all their trade secrets to the employees of random news companies is obviously not going to happen, and explaining why ML models do what they do is an active research area.
Not only that, it would allow SEO companies to sign up as "news organizations" and then use the knowledge gained about the ranking algorithm to fill everyone's search results with SEO spam even more than it already is.
Isn't that a basic tactic in political communications: when asked a question provide the answer you want to give not the answer to the question you were asked?
> Under this law, Google has to tell news media businesses “how they can gain access” to data about your use of our products. There’s no way of knowing if any data handed over would be protected, or how it might be used by news media businesses.
That seems to pretty clearly suggest Google will be forced to hand over personal data.
Google Open Letter is too high-level. After reading it you can't claim/prove much based on it. There are no details. Just high-level: "search is at risk", "data may be at risk", etc. For me, this is just a bone thrown to spark a political debate...
Weaselly words or otherwise, there is a big power imbalance here. The ACCC can ultimately make Google do what it wants and is backed by a government on this matter. Google has no control over the ACCC.
The ACCC is being irresponsible not dealing with - in precise terms - what Google actually said. Anything less verges on bullying. This isn't a public shouting match between equals.
I think very little of Google; I'd like to see them leave Australia. Australians, of which I am one, are fools to be supporting that sort of centralised data collection. Tear it up, burn it down and throw it out in my humble opinion. I'd rather have incompetents than Google.
"[W]ell they can leave" is true - but the idea that that is something they would 'choose' to do is in my view a philosophical canard. Google is going to make the best economic decision and in that sense they don't really have a choice to make. The ACCC/government is the one with a range of options where they can pick one. And they should be held to a higher standard than bullying companies.
Based on the last time this was up on HN I recall the news company lobby estimated that Google would be required to pay something like $1B/year, which is certainly far more money than they make off of news-related searches originating in Australia. The law has some prohibitions on Google substituting Australian news with news from sources in other countries, but I think it doesn’t go so far as to say that Google has to continue to serve news searches. Abandoning the country entirely might be a stretch, given how many other products would be impacted, but disabling news results entirely or declining searches that seem to be looking for news would not be surprising. The law is clearly deliberately vague to give both the government and the news companies the upper hand against Google in any sort of legal dispute, but I think Google would be within its rights to take this to court and demand an enumerated list of all of the news companies in Australia (since the law says the government is planning to make a list) and a list of all of the international sources of news that Google is prohibited from substituting, then stop serving results from either in Australia.
> They said "the free services you use may be at risk".
This sounds more like a threat. "If you don't give us whatever data we want, for free, then we will cut you off from some of our online services as punishment.
> Given the context, I took that to mean the quality of the service would tank if they had to share their algorithm changes.
I see this argument from them all the time and honestly, I see very little evidence of it. I use DDG exclusively now but I used Google and DDG side by side for a while as I was transitioning over, and during that time I didn't see much variation in the quality of results. If anything, being in a filter bubble made it harder to find new information.
> This sounds more like a threat. "If you don't give us whatever data we want, for free, then we will cut you off from some of our online services as punishment.
Or start charging for things that used to be free, like news results.
The bill says Google needs to make available "a list and explanation of the data the digital platform service collects".
This is quite ambiguous if it is just a collection policy or the data itself.
I can see Google being fired up about that but should be something that can be clarified ( there is public consultation going on ) not whined about.
That implies Google will change what Australians see vs other countries. No more. No less.
Some possibile outcomes:
Imagine a page with only foreign results. Plenty of news entities cover Australian news, and a result like this: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=victoria+australia+covid could very easily nix the news box, and any and all Australian news results and content.
Google could take the attitude that all Australian news sites that require payment have a robots.txt with:
Disallow: /
I can't imagine any law that both demands Google crawl sites AND demands payment for it will survive being contested in the courts. You can't both compel and enforce - it is one or tother, and if it costs Google to crawl your site, why should Google crawl your site?
I can see a news site, like The Guardian, agreeing to give Google their news for free, and getting all the SERP links as a consequence. I can imagine Google doing deals with all manner of sites for nothing, where the value of 100% of News traffic from Google is likely millions.
I have no idea what the proposal of the ACCC is (and I'm Australian) but this seems a really weird case, where the unintended consequences could be almost anything, and the likely outcome is more likely to be bad for Australian sites than beneficial.
My first thought was that Google would do as per Spain and just stop linking Australian news outlets. However, I was under the impression that the Australian proposition does not allow Google to treat foreign sites differently. Hence, if they carry foreign news they must carry Australian sites - and pay. Or else carry nothing at all.
> I was under the impression that the Australian proposition does not allow Google to treat foreign sites differently. Hence, if they carry foreign news they must carry Australian sites
Why, if they want to carry news from other countries, should they also have to carry Australian news?
Maybe they should just string match all their news results to Australian news so nothing gets through, even if they appear on third party sites (duplicate detection, they had it for years on regular search).
>That implies Google will change what Australians see vs other countries. No more. No less.
The letter is a threat, and it makes its threat by implication. The benefit of implying a threat is that it allows you to make any number of veiled threats without committing to any. If they wanted to say no more, no less, they would make a specific threat, but they want people to worry about things, so they make a vague threat.
So any possible threat that a reasonable person might suppose is meant by the letter achieves what Google wants with its letter. Australia has decided to take one of these potential threats and answer it, to make Google look bad, but it might also force Google to say that is not what we mean, the implied threat made more precise looses its power to frighten.
Of course none of this jockeying for position changes the fact that Australia is trying to pass a very bad law.
Yup, the actual wording of the bill uses the awkward term "registered news business corporation" specifically for this reason, since ABC/SBS are not "business corporations".
First Murdoch stopped most of Australia from receiving the fast fibre to the home that had just begun rollout.
Instead we got lumped with using his rotting Foxtel coax cables for slow expensive unreliable broadband. Plus we spent $10 Billion extra for the current copper mashup, compared with the original fibre to the home rollout he blocked using Abbott the onion muncher.
Now he pushes his parliamentary puppets to grant another tranche of protectionist profits for his media empire.
Australia ranks third in the world for corruption... when measuring percentage of billionaires who made their fortune through political favours and giveaways.
To be eligible for the scheme, the proposed bill requires annual revenues of at least[0] $150,000 (amongst other things), so I imagine it would exclude most independent-journalist-running-a-blog situations
Wow, that's vile. So clearly about incumbent media power rather than promoting diversity.
I wonder if eg wordpress, or ghost, would be able to create a situation for their hosted blogs in which authors were paid for their content by virtue of the organisation itself having the minimum level of revenue.
> I wonder if eg wordpress, or ghost, would be able to create a situation for their hosted blogs in which authors were paid for their content by virtue of the organisation itself having the minimum level of revenue.
That would open up a whole other can of worms in terms of liability.
When Murdoch and Google duke it out using the Australian people as their human shield I find nothing to be happy about and plenty to be sad about. Both parties here are disingenuous about their stated positions, both are rather cynical in how the perform their negotiations. In the end the public, no matter what, will end up the loser because neither of these parties has their best interest at heart. Murdoch just wants money, Google wants to get as much content as they can for free and meanwhile whatever they agree on will be paid for by the public in one way or another. This is a disgusting spectacle at many levels.
The Australian consumer has already lost. This whole country is an exercise in trussing up the public and making sure they pay the very most for the very least.
I've long given up on Australian journalism - at least in the main stream. Obviously the Murdoch papers are garbage, but the Age and SMH are almost (and becoming) as appalling. The ABC and SBS have been cowered to the extent that they jump at their own shadows and now _have_ to include cometary from utter fuckwits like Gerard Henderson or that vast twit Greg Sheridan lest they appear biased. It now seems that the ABC almost has to ask permission to publish a story. The Age was a great newspaper, now it's almost unreadable - apart form the NYTimes and Wapo stories they run.
Google are not the good guys. They are a rapacious monopoly that have their shareholders interest at heart, NOT the Google consumer. And in terms of "trusting them with our data" - like that's the very least we'd expect from a product that purports to do this - and they don't do this for free - WE pay for it.
Like cry me a river Google - like News Corp, they pay fuck all tax in Australia, and, just like Murdoch, are more than happy to take advertising from fake news and conspiracy pushers that does nothing but fatten their profits and damage society.
There is good media out there - Crikey, The Guardian, New Matilda, new Daily etc, but it isn't mainstream, one has to, dare I say, search for it.
You and the parent post both sum up my feelings better than I can. We Aussies are being used as meat in the grinder between two companies that are each pretty awful in their own ways. I struggle to feel bad for either of them, really.
Probably the most depressing of all of this is how the ACCC - what has always been a very closely treasured and respected independent government body - has been used here as a pawn by the government-media oligarchy. It really soils all the really good work they've done to give us very robust and fair consumer laws and protections we enjoy. They've been used as the shitkickers for what is obviously a Murdoch-driven government play, where (not unlike the Five Eyes playbook) he hopes to ram through some draconian bullshit here as a proving ground, to which he can later point in the UK and US for similar laws there.
One of the best decisions I ever made was adding Newscorp's bullshit to my ad blocker so accidentally clicking URLs to it fails to load. One of the other best was disconecting myself from Google as much as I have.
Yep, it is offensive that the ACCC would even contribute to this nonsensical "debate". There is not a shred of preserving Competition in the News Media and digital landscapes in Australia. There is certainly no way the ACCC has acted in the interest of the Consumer. This whole debacle serves a few financial and political interests and works against healthy debate, democracy and the population's interest.
Access to a variety of editorial positions in the media is not possible for the average Aussie. Newscorp control the opinions of the country and the electorate - a balanced view is not within the grasp of Australia anymore, regardless of how this legislation turns out.
Couldn't agree more. Both are trying to appeal for pity to the very people they're taking advantage of and it pretty much sums up everything wrong with companies having this much power. We're living in the cyberpunk future of megacorps manipulating governments for profit at the expense of everyone else and there's nothing we can do about it.
To fully understand this, it would be a good idea to understand the degree of influence that the Murdoch media has on the Australian landscape.
Murdoch media owns the vast majority of newspapers across Australia and is also more or less the only cable TV provider in Australia.
A good highlight of the power the Murdoch press has over Australia would be to look at the fact that the vast majority of journalists who work in the Canberra press gallery (parliamentary journalists), work for The Australian or other Murdoch entities, and have such a stranglehold on political journalism that it is a commonly accepted truth in Australian journalism that "if you want to know tomorrows news, read The Australian today."
The real kicker is that the Murdoch presses political biases are not subtle or secret, they are about as overt and blatant as you can possibly get with The Australian frequently running full front-page articles trashing one political party (Labor, the "left" leaning party) and heaping praise on the other (Liberal/National, the "right" leaning party).
With all of that context, the bill suddenly takes on a slightly more sinister tone when you realise that it is more or less designed to benefit one man and his media empire.
Well, that's up to them though. The context of the "shame if something were to happen to it" quote is about destroying/stealing the other person's property, or hurting them. That's quite different to stopping providing a service to them which is currently provided under no compulsion...
Google is trying to say that the law won't make providing a free service viable. Is that an over-exaggeration? Perhaps. But maybe not...
yeah my 12 yr old son just got this pop up on his phone.
His response was "not cool Gov.." I had to explain that the situation is actually more complicated than that and he shouldn't trust one source for the truth.
I think he's starting to understand that there is no good guy here.
This is a very disappointing response from the ACCC. It seems to be extremely misleading in its own right.
> Google will not be required to charge Australians for the use of its free services
Google did not state this. The ACCC - the supposed detached "fair" regulator, in charge of creating this code, just made something up to suit their own ends.
> Google will not be required to share any additional user data with Australian news businesses
The code [1] literally says:
"The responsible digital platform must ... give information about how the registered news business corporation can gain access to ... the data that the digital platform service collects (whether or not it shares the data with the registered news business)about the registered news business’ users through their engagement with covered news content made available by the digital platform service" (Page 10, Section 52M).
The ACCC here is straight up lying. I would like any of the people vocally defending it here to say what they think about this.
NB: I think it is quite telling that it's quite hard to dig out the actual draft code [1] - they don't seem to link to it in any of their press releases etc. They actually don't want people to be able to discuss this openly from what I can tell:
My reading of the draft bill matches the ACCC’s statements: it’s not saying the platform has to share any more user data than they already do, just that the platform must provide documentation of what they are collecting, and how the registered news business corporation can access any parts of that that they do make available to them. Not that they must expose more.
In Google’s original open letter, the “Your Search data may be at risk” section matches your interpretation here, and it seems to me to be factually inaccurate; I believe the ACCC’s rebuttal is correct.
That’s the main factual point in Google’s letter and in ACCC’s response.
———
But then to the rest of the letter and response, which are much more about feelings and potential consequences.
The whole purpose of the legislation is to improve alleged bargaining inequality, because the platforms have lots of information they’re not telling the news corporations. It’s not an end in itself, but is the means to further negotiations and potentially legislation.
Other than the aforecited section, Google’s letter is saying “this proposed legislation threatens us”. An uncharitable view of this would be that they depend on their position of power, and if the inequality is balanced then their business model will come under direct attack—not by this legislation, but by what follows after it.
ACCC is saying “you have implied that this proposed legislation will harm you, but it doesn’t directly do so”.
Both sides are speaking very carefully and precisely, Google saying that things are threatened and at risk, and ACCC refuting the things that Google implied (again apart from the one point that Google did actually say which ACCC claims to be factually inaccurate).
———
I believe my judgement and remarks in this comment to be impartial. Moreover I am not rooting for either party over the other.
I am not sure why you are saying this when every word I cited is literally copied and pasted from the draft legislation?
You have cited section 52M(b) as if that is the only clause in that section, ignoring 52M(a) which I have exactly quoted from. Why are you ignoring that subsection?
> I am not sure why you are saying this when every word I cited is literally copied and pasted from the draft legislation?
With plenty of ellipses between them, sure!
> You have cited section 52M(b) as if that is the only clause in that section, ignoring 52M(a) which I have exactly quoted from. Why are you ignoring that subsection?
There is no section 52M(b) or (a). What are you talking about?
52M has 3 sections 1,2,3 which have even further sub-sections.
52M -> 1 -> (a)
information covered by subsection (2) is given to the registered news businesscorporationfor the registered news business; and
etc...
52M -> 2 -> (a)
a list andexplanation of the data that the digital platform servicecollects(whether or not it shares the datawith the registered news business)about the registerednews business’users through their engagement with covered news content made available by the digital platform service
etc...
“How you can gain access to [SECRET THING]: you can’t.”
“How you can gain access to [SECRET THING]: court order.”
Given that (2)(a) says “whether or not it shares the data”, it would be bizarre for (2)(e) to mean: “oh by the way, remember that thing from clause (a) that you don’t share (and that we were totally fine with you not sharing)? You’ve got to share it now”.
I think it's equally bizzare to say in (2)(e) that the platform must provide "information about how the registered news business corporation can gain access to the data" and not have a reasonable interpretation of that be that this means it is required to actually provide access to the data. At best it's horrifically badly worded - at worst, deliberately confusing, as if written by a lobbyist.
I interpret (2)(a) to mean, "whether or not it [currently] shares the data".
If the ACCC wanted this to be interpreted as they have written in their press release just now, perhaps they could try putting those words into the actual bill?
I agree with your other points, but it it seems like the intent of that clause it to require Google to disclose the nature of user data being collected, not the user data itself.
In particular, (a) distinguishes between user data that Google chooses to share and not to share. Technically it seems like one could read (e) as requiring access to both, but then the distinction in (a) wouldn't make sense, so I assume that's not the intent.
Wow, excellent pull from the code. I suppose you can say that the letter of the code is only informing news organizations of how they may go about accessing data, which isn't the same as actually providing the data, although even that seems like a bit of a disingenuous distinction to me.
There's no point in helping facilitate sharing of that data by providing information about how to access it unless you are intending for it to be accessed, and so denying that that's being accessed is disingenuous.
It's entirely banking on people getting lost on these distinctions and not putting the effort in to figuring out who is right. That approach is straight up contemptuous of the intended audience.
> That's implying that either the services would go, or they would no longer be free.
No it's not ... it just implies they could be harmed (damaged, degraded). For example as Google's letter goes on to explain in detail, things like "...Google Search results and YouTube will be worse for you". Google actually wrote these harms into their letter. To pretend an alternative interpretation is viable when they explicitly elaborated their meaning right after they wrote that sentence is highly misleading.
>Google did not state this. The ACCC - the supposed detached "fair" regulator, in charge of creating this code, just made something up to suit their own ends.
From Google's open letter: `A proposed law, the News Media Bargaining Code, would force us to provide you with a dramatically worse Google Search and YouTube, could lead to your data being handed over to big news businesses, and would put the free services you use at risk in Australia.'[1] Note the second part of this statement. This is a very clear statement from Google that, if this code comes into law, their currently free services may begin to incur a charge. The ACCC's statement says, in no unclear terms, that Google is free to do this but that it would not be required by the law - something which is either implied by Google, or presented as their having no other business choice.
>"The responsible digital platform must ... give information about how the registered news business corporation can gain access to ... the data that the digital platform service collects (whether or not it shares the data with the registered news business)about the registered news business’ users through their engagement with covered news content made available by the digital platform service" (Page 10, Section 52M).
I can't find where it says this in the document you linked. I can find pieces of it, but you've constructed a statement here which doesn't seem to exist in that form in that document - a fair bit of artistic liberty. If it is in that document, a screenshot would be helpful. Further, does any of this constitute sharing `additional user data with Australian news businesses'?
Let's not mince words: Google is saying that this law affects their bottom line, and they're using their immense platform to say to the users of their free services that Google might charge them if this law is passed. This in itself is an indication of the incredibly uneven playing field present in this particular market - no other company could reach over half of the users of the WWW in Australia with a statement like this[2], in a way which could profoundly impact the process of consultation with interested groups and the passage of this legislation. Whatever you think of this legislation, this is about nothing more than money - the fact that content producers (journalists) aren't getting enough of it, while Google's advertising empire reaps incredible profits.
> I can't find where it says this in the document you linked. I can find pieces of it
What I have done is taken 52M 2(e) and replaced the reference within it to 2(a) with the actual text from 2(a) so that the whole context is clear. The elipses show where I inserted the cross reference. Absolutely nothing I cited was not in there and nothing was represented out of context, as best I could achieve.
I understand it's a bit confusing, but I felt it was less confusing than pasting 5 subsections all cross referencing each other.
The services themselves. Google could simply decide to not do business with unprofitable Australia.
It's a veiled threat of course.
They don't want to specify exactly what's in jeopardy - the services themselves, the free status of the services, the quality of search results, or simply google's profitability.
I think it’s highly unlikely they would exit the Australian market - the threat could be useful, but they have little to gain from responding to what is effectively a bargaining process with a lockout, at least as a permanent solution (e.g. it’s a captive market which would be immediately filled by a competitor, and Google only stands to lose money from such a move). However, consumers might not see it this way - I agree that their veiled threat includes withdrawing from the Australian market.
In addition, the platforms must give news media businesses clear information about the data they collect through users’ interactions with news on digital platforms; for example how long users spend on an article, how many articles they consume in a certain time period, and
other information about user engagement with news content across digital platform services.[1]
Sure sounds like they have to collect and share user data to me.
> Sure sounds like they have to collect and share user data to me.
This seems to be aimed at AMP. News sources get any information that google collect about users reading the articles. Seems fair.
Google could always not collect that information in the first place if they wanted to actually take the moral high ground. But of course they won't do that.
Google misrepresenting something which might cut into their profits? Who'd have thought it?
I hate AMP, and this law might see the death or at least reigning in of it. I hate the way Google has killed niche websites by scraping their content and then profiting from it. I hate the way Google says they want to keep user data safe, while also using that data to increase their ad revenue. Fuck Google.
> I hate the way Google says they want to keep user data safe, while also using that data to increase their ad revenue
Yet, from the perspective of many users, this is keeping their data safe. Many people I know are completely fine with advertising. In terms of keeping data safe from being lost, leaked, or hacked, I think Google is probably one of the safest places out there.
I'm Australian, and I created an account just to comment on this issue.
Imagine Google News or the Facebook news feed were normal news websites. If you count their traffic as the amount of times people went to those websites just to read news, their raw traffic would dwarf any other news website in Australia by an order of magnitude.
Journalistic websites have editorial standards, and at least some relationship and commitment to the truth (even the Murdoch ones). A news feed, while algorithmically generated, is for all intents and purposes the front page of a newspaper for many, many people.
There is no editor of a news feed. No one checks that what bubbles up to the top passes basic fact checking standards. Most importantly, there's no consequences for misinformation and conspiracy theories being on the same front page as a story about some construction disrupting your commute tomorrow.
The main gist of the new code of conduct, to me, seems like the ability for news websites to collectively bargain with a multinational corporation that essentially controls the news landscape in this country. We aren't the USA. Our news websites aren't the New York Times and the Washington Post. Unfortunately, the two biggest are owned by fairly evil companies (Channel nine and News Corp). Rupert Murdoch himself controls 70% of the Australian media landscape. When he dies, however, this law will still exist.
We've seen the consequences of a journalistic landscape that exists solely through social media without any significant independent news sources in Myanmar in 2015. Australia won't end up like that, but allowing independent journalism to wither on the vine distorts our ability to participate in democracy.
As a collective, if every single news organisation decided to go on strike from Facebook or Google tomorrow, the amount of money advertisers would pay them would drop off a cliff. Google is scared by this because they know that the value they give to the consumer is the sum of Australian journalism, a tasting menu of all the best stuff that newspapers have to offer. Why, then, shouldn't that sum itself have the ability to bargain against Google and get itself a better deal?
For Google at least they have the option to opt-out. They can add a robots.txt file to prevent indexing. It isn't clear to me why special legislation is required to give the media companies bargaining power. They already have the power to say no if they don't think the arrangement is fair.
(For facebook it is less clear, because you can't really force people to stop sharing your links)
Sorta kinda. You can completely opt-out of Google Search entirely but there's no way to opt-out of having your content excepted while also appearing in organic search results.
I mean I would be pissed if I was a major news org that saw traffic drop off because Google is copy-pasting content from my site in their omnibox. This stuff is extremely good for the user and I rely on it a lot but they should have to license the content they republish.
Is the "omnibox" a big problem for news? I mostly see it for "facts" as opposed to recent events. But yes, it would be good to prevent that. However it seems like this isn't the primary focus of the legislation?
I think it would be very interesting to have a copyright infringement case on the information pulled into the answer boxes, but I think that is a separate problem.
> there's no way to opt-out of having your content excepted
You mean the news carousel, or whatever it's called in the search results? Doesn't appearing in thst require you to add a lot of metadata to your page?
Let us not kid ourselves, opting out of Google is suicide for any kind of content. Google is (sadly) critical internet infrastructure by now and lawmakers can not ignore it.
Let me get this straight. It’s suicide because of how much traffic Google sends your way and... you’re entitled to get be paid to receive that traffic... why?
Pretty sure there are thousands of sites that will "quote" what you reported / investigated so there's no winner here. You can exactly copyright news entirely and people are faulty liberal when it comes to quoting someone else's work.
How does this protect independent journalism? The law explicitly cuts out media outlets with an annual revenue <$150k, meaning smaller and newer publications will see no benefits; and become easier targets of the Murdoch strategy of absorb and extinguish.
I disagree. The ABC has on three separate occasions delayed the issue of a retraction on false reporting I brought to their attention by months. SBS refused to issue a retraction at all for another piece of false information they reported, even though their own source had retracted it.
Additionally, ACMA and the Communications Ombudsman have zero jurisdiction over the online news content of ABC and SBS.
These organisations have a very laissez-faire relationship with integrity and facts.
On the other hand, I once emailed a News Corp journalist about a false claim in an article and it was amended in under 10 minutes.
Facebook and Google are not dependent on the news companies. They can make plenty of money without them. We've already seen Google shut down Google News in Spain when they tried to force payments there.
Even with this form of government intervention, I expect both companies to remove or block links to news wherever the law allows it, rather than pay the publishers.
I feel like this time it's different , google (and big tech it represents) will get little sympathy on reddit and other watering holes. Even if the law seems restricting, it's Google who broke the social contract of the internet and turned from a benevolent rent-seeker to a feudal lord. (E.g. check this: https://www.google.com/search?q=money+for+nothing , google just pastes the lyrics and there is NO link to read them on the original site. Even if musixmatch is getting paid , they are made irrelevant and this is a poisoned pill).
Reading the defenses here in HN, I have become personally partial to conspiracy theories that too many paid commenters are among the crowd here.
Plus i don't get what the fuss is about google news. I don't think it's used much outside the US, and even these websites aren't just going to lose all their traffic, because people are addicted to news. They 'll be partly visiting local websites more often, and this shift may actualy be enough to revive the income-starved journalism profession.
>conspiracy theories that too many paid commenters are among the crowd here
I think HN just has a large pro-google crowd. I remember it used to be everyone loved google. So it shouldn't be a surprise that one of the remaining bastions of google public support would be a silicon valley startup community.
I suspect a lot of people outside Australia are unaware of how respected an institution the ACCC is. Maybe that is why they are so quick to discount their response here.
Maybe we’ve been living in different Australias, but over the last decade the ACCC (like virtually every other public institution) has become yet another mouthpiece for the government.
From their attacks on solar, their constant support of “traditional media” (Murdoch), and their utter ineptitude to actually protect individual consumers, any respect left is there through inertia alone.
Mmm... Stereotype much? I see why you don’t mind the newscorp news.
Then ACCC is far from in the right here; this seems to be being driven by political motivations, not some motivation to do the best for Australia / Australians.
The ACCC has plenty of opportunity to explain why it’s better this way, and don’t seem to have clearly articulated it.
“Better for democracy” or “better for newscorp”? You tell me; why the ABC and SBS are excluded from this?
...because that’s what the government wants. The ACCC Looks increasingly like it’s just a mouthpiece.
>Mmm... Stereotype much? I see why you don’t mind the newscorp news.
I don't like the newscorp news actually. But it is revealing that you would think this. One might suspect we just have different views on who should be controlling things in this case. I am not as confident as I suspect you might be about who should be controlling media access. But I think google is being very disingenious in their letter, and the ACCC seems far less so.
I'm more suspicious of the fact that the tech community shat all over the EU Copyright Directive, calling the EUCD's news aggregation rights a "link tax", when the ACCC's proposed code goes further and stricter than EUCD Article 15.
Either techies suddenly think that the EU was right, their opinion of Google massively cratered in a year and a half's time, or they have an unreasonable love affair with Australian news companies.
I have no idea if there is pro-Google astroturfing happening on HN, but there is definitely pro-CCP astroturfing happening on HN in every thread with even a tangential connection to China. So it would not surprise me if huge corporations paid for services which may include astroturfing.
It's easier to game because it has minimal verification procedures and much less traffic, and the tech being used is way less advanced (and mods are less active).
The ACCC is there to enforce competition laws and if those laws are designed to benefit the government's mates then I expect that is what they will do without fear or favour.
I think what cblconfederate is getting into is the business environment with nothing but bad options. It's the Walmart conundrum for suppliers except for internet content production. Google and Facebook are the Walmart in this.
The success of Walmart created an environment where only good business decisions in a short term destroyed of the brand and profits in the long term.
(1) If supplier did not deal trough Walmart, their market gradually declined because Big-Box Retailers squeezed out alternative channels.
(2) Eventually supplier made deal with Walmart to stop decline in the market share. First years saw profits increase and huge increase in sales. But Walmart buyers come in regularly every year and demand smaller price. And they don't take no as an answer. They are ruthless negotiators and religious about cutting prices. First supplier profit margins drop, then absolute profits, then they must cut the quality of the product. Eventually they have destroyed their brand and the product.
There are hundreds of suppliers who suffered this fate. Destruction of Levi Strauss brand and quality is classic business case.
All businesses operate under constraints, and the constraints change over time as technology and tastes develop. Most possible businesses face constraints that make them unviable, and so they are never created.
Music lyrics sites just seem like an unviable business. They license low-value data from the owner, surround it with a crapton of ads, then serve that up to users. They have very little stickiness and one is about as good as another. From a user perspective, having those results directly on Google is better about 90% of the time. There are only two lyrics sites I'm aware of that offer any value above Google's version: songmeanings.net and genius.com, and the little value they provide comes from the hosting of user comments.
Lyrics sites come up a lot on here, but I do not really understand why. Consumers do not get much benefit from their continued existence. The only people who benefit are the site owners themselves.
>But isn't this also why prices are do much lower today?
Yes. And if lower prices are the only reason for antitrust everything is fine.
In the US at the beginning of the 80s Robert Bork broke from the traditional antitrust thinking and started a tradition where only "consumer welfare" (lower prices) are meaningful reason for antitrust policies.
Rest of the world never bought that and now thinking even in the US is starting to change. Free markets are not just about low prices. Restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles are coming back. Such as applying common carrier obligations and duties to platform economics.
The license is basically a death sentence (or alternatively a fragile lifeline) if the lyrics page is not being linked to. Former content producers for the open web have turned to content producers for Google. This is how serfdom works
Are you Australian? Because I'd be a little surprised if you'd be saying that if you had a lot of exposure to our media.. Especially given the quality (or lack thereof) of our mainstream "news" sources, and the fact that this specifically cuts out ABC, SBS or most independent sources...
70% of the commercial media here is controlled by one American company, and perhaps not coincidentally they have a very close relationship with the Government. The Government has literally just given their cable network $40 million dollars over the last few budgets, completely un-tendered and without any reporting requirements or anything, to "help advance women's sport" - even though 75% of Australians aren't subscribers and SBS would be a better venue for such content...
Sure. Let them die - that ship has sailed. News Ltd and Nine have destroyed most of the quality journalism on their platforms already, and I honestly don't think anything this bill proposes will make it better.
I don't have all the answers, but the best way I think I can support quality journalism is to subscribe to some independent news sites now (Michael West, MacroBusiness, Anthony Klan's new site The Klaxon. Might think about Crikey too because it seems pretty good).
You mean those journalists who spent decades working for News Corp papers? Michael West did. Anthony Klan did. Anthony Klan is proud of his News Corporation Australia journalist of the year awards.
Seems like News Corp helped them both get started. Why shouldn't News Corp continue to fund others as well?
I don't think Google News displays ads on result pages, just the title + thumbnail. Why should they pay for displaying these links when they don't earn anything on them, it doesn't make business sense.
As for news discovered by regular search, I think that is different because the user has to input specific search keywords and restrict to recent results. The difference is about intention and recurring visits.
The situation seems similar to the Google Books fiasco, where we didn't end up with a searchable online library of out of print books. Lots of arguments were raised back then as now, but the bottom line was that everyone tried to do good for himself and we all got less - the prisoner's dilemma in action.
If it didn't make business sense then Google wouldn't be showing them in the first place. It plainly does make business sense. Google shouldn't be afraid to pay for what it uses.
I think this is about crony capitalism. The old mates want to have their cake and eat it too and get paid as well, and their mates are making that happen.
Just the fact that the ABC and SBS are excluded says it all really. This is clearly not about journalism.
To quote the ACCC chair: “We note that 88 smaller media businesses teamed up to submit a joint submission as part of the process of developing the code. Under our plan, these businesses could again work together to negotiate with the platforms over fair payment for their content.”'
You really are failing to understand this. You must try harder.
I understand and it's ridiculous. Just because your business is not profitable shouldn't mean another business should be forced to subsidise it. Unless you have mates that can make laws, that is.
If they believe that Google should compensate them then they can already demand that Google stop linking their pages, and then bargain with Google the ordinary way. Why is it fair or necessary to add extra laws here?
> This money would go to an organisation which largely peddles outrage and division.
Frankly that's Google, Facebook, and Twitter. They are aimed at maximising engagement and outrage does that for them. They keep feeding people what they think they want to see and the further down the rabbit hole they go the weirder and more extreme it gets.
If the number of organizations is the concern, the government could fund a larger number of organizations. This doesn't seem fatal to the option I proposed.
Haha, no it is not. Taxing a specific organization for a specific policy purpose is much more complicated than paying for that policy purpose out of the general fund and paying for it with general taxation.
To see the truth of my claim, consider what's going to happen if Google declines to "use" the Australian news media after this law is passed. I doubt any serious person believes this will be helpful to the news media's bottom line. So you'll have an even more serious problem for news media revenue, and also the search engine most people use will be doing a worse job of helping people get the information they're looking for. All because the government chose a complex policy solution to a simple policy problem. (At least, the problem as stated is simple. I suspect the actual problem the government is trying to solve is a little different than what is publicly claimed.)
I am not clear on what you're talking about when you discuss "paying Google's costs." It doesn't "cost" Google anything to link to a news article. And it doesn't "cost" a news media company anything to be linked to. "Everyone" is not paying Google's costs in any of the scenarios we're discussing.
Google profits from the content. Google must pay for it. We're not talking about just linking to articles. We are talking about people's news reading being entirely mediated through Google.
It's disappointing that you've failed to understand the issues. Read more:
If Google removes all news links from their services (assuming that would allow them to avoid this tax), and remains profitable in Aus, please remember to update your beliefs on this subject. I will do the same if Google's removal of news links causes a material decline in profitability or allows for the creation of a profitable upstart that deals with the Aus news media on these terms.
In the comment I was replying to, your first sentence was "Google profits from the content." How then is it not about whether Google is profitable or not? I am contradicting your assertion that Google profits materially from this content. If Google removes the content and remains profitable, that strikes directly at your claim that Google profits from the content. It's not beside the point. It is exactly responsive to what you wrote. Maybe that is not the point you were trying to make, but IMO that is an issue with what wrote, not my understanding of it. The language you used was about profits, plain as day.
It seems incoherent to you because you haven't understood the issue. You haven't understood the issue because you're only listening to what Google tells you. Google wants you to have that narrow perspective because it makes you exploitable and that's good for Google's business.
Except for the Defund the BBC movement that's going on right now... I'm skeptical any government funded broadcaster is sustainable when it just turns into a propaganda outlet for the establishment.
I'm not super familiar with UK politics but it looks like this movement raised something like 45k british pounds on gofundme? Seems pretty fringe. I guess the BBC will remain funded.
The actual org is small, but it's caused thousands to pull their license fee, which is no small sum of money for the Beeb. It's not like they're rolling in profit.
There are around 65 million UK residents. Even if thousands pull their license fee it's not gonna move the needle that much. And if it did move the needle, I suspect the government would address the issue by enforcing the license fee more aggressively, or by doing the sensible thing and funding the BBC via the general fund.
They can't legally enforce it because the BBC guy has no special power to inspect your telly set and it's not technically a tax (as long as you don't consume BBC content). They also include YouTube/iPlayer consumption of BBC so it's unenforceable on a technical level too.
If you shouldn’t, why should google pay to link to news? Google news is not a profit center for google. They make money from ads.
The whole “pay us for sending us traffic” argument has the economics of the web completely backwards. Organizations try to get links, as it sends them traffic.
Should hacker news pay money to the sites it links to? Or do they benefit from being here?
To the Musixmatch index page, not the actual page they’ve sourced the lyrics from, thus: there is NO link to read them on the original site., merely a link to find them yourself.
Clicking “Full Lyrics” also just leads you to another google page. With another link to Musixmatch’s index page at the bottom, not the actual lyrics page.
For the health of society, all recommender algorithms have to be daylighted. For a start.
Yes, the gamification will be terrible. So what? Is maximal advertising revenue for monopolies societally important?
Every other efficient open market is heavily regulated. Accountability, transparency, fair play, information symmetry, prohibit self-dealing & conflicts of interest, tort, etc.
Right now we can't even imagine applying casino level scrutiny to social media.
What's so special about social media that it doesn't warrant some hygiene, some guard rails?
> Yes, the gamification will be terrible. So what? Is maximal advertising revenue for monopolies societally important?
I don't really see how gamification being terrible will only cause ad revenue to drop. Surely it will also make the results worse and less relevant to you?
As in, if SEO spam managed to take over the top results of major queries, it doesn't just drop ad revenue but actually makes Search suck, right?
I actually don't see how "gamification" (adversarial websites exploiting loopholes in ranking) can even result in making ad revenue lower excepting the scenario where it makes Search itself less useful and therefore less used overall?
1. the quality of the recommendations is the real competitive advantage. It's like saying that all the sports scouting agencies need to fully reveal their algorithm to finding top talent to ensure fairness, when that exact algorithm is the thing that makes them a top scouting agency.
2. The company itself doesn't really know how the recommender works.(source: I built explainable ML models for a living).
The inherent black box nature of any non-linear function approximator makes it near impossible to enable Explain-ability and gauge fairness for any system. In fact, I'd go as far to say that a sufficiently complex system of any kind quickly goes beyond human understanding. There are some decent proxies for it (SHAP, attention maps, gradient maps), but many recent papers raise questions on whether they really capture what we think they capture.
I think regulation of some form is certainly a good idea for tech ethics. However, it does appear that laws are being drafted by politicians, lawyers and social scientists. There is a glaring lack of qualified ML/CS researchers and practitioners on the implications of vaguely worded policy to their current processes and pipelines.
I was at ACM FAccT (ACM's fairness,accountability and transparency conference) this year and too many of the attendees seemed to be more concerned with the 'what needs to be achieved' rather than the 'how we can go about achieving it'. Terms such as fairness and accountability do not have widely accepted or principled meanings, which makes it near impossible to make a structured discussion around how anyone would go about implementing these in practice.
In conclusion, what you state is necessary, but we are very far from coming up with actually useful laws to implement it. Moving too quickly risks haphazard rules that do more damage than help.
It's great that you're conscientious, seriously working on ML, big data, adjacent policy issues. Thank you.
In the spirit of "yes, and...":
Can't manage what we can't (or won't measure. So policy wise, we should not delegate judgement, and default to hippocratic until we know more.
ML & big data is following the fad cycle, just like optimization, expert systems, etc. I'm 95% certain that >95% ML and big data is hooey, most value has been realized, the rest is imagined.
But meanwhile, these foolsgold pathogens are wreaking the economy. Or worse.
I don't think I deserve it. I still work for a big conglomerate and most of the rest of my time goes into building the same algorithms that try to eek out that extra bit of accuracy. Although, we do have a lot of responsible AI, compliance, legal and interpret-ability committees we need to satisfy to make sure we aren't causing unintended consequences.
> foolsgold pathogens
I've flip flopped on this opinion, but over the last year or so, my opinion has solidified to being, "There is very real, massive untapped potential and value in the market, but most companies use it for marketing rather than solving the real technical problems at the core of it". I'd like to think we are the former, that solve real ML problems....but well, I'm exactly an unbiased judge of my own self.
I read this really nice paper that suggested grounding ideas of AI ethics in UN fundamental human rights, rather than hand wavy ideas like accountability and transparency.
Since UN Human rights are much discussed, well understood and have universal-ish acceptance, it is far easier to take policy written from that POV and actually apply it to ML/AI.
I'd like to see something similar to the ACL2020 best paper "checklist", that creates a whole bunch of narrow statistical tests to validate certain traits of ML models. It'd be nice to have something like that, but for AI/ML ethics.
An openly available, standardized suite of narrow tests that your ML pipeline has to pass as an audit, before being certified as "compliant" and deployed into the web. That way, the regulators get to control the test, and the companies get to control their secrets. It also ensures a level playing field and each component can be changed without an explicit dependency on the other.
You can't just open source the algorithms - you also have to release the data and the platform on which the algorithm was executed.
This is becoming a major problem because a lot of research papers publish their results and their methodology but not the data so it's not reproducible.
A LOT of the data Google would have would be semi-private. It's generally OK if Google has it because (arguably) the user shared the data with Google but they might not want other people to have access.
I'm not saying it's right - just that it's a problem
I don't disagree with you but not all reccomenders are causing the political issues we see now. As an example, what Netflix movies are being recommended to you is, in my opinion, immaterial.
I think there needs to be nuanced law here maybe just targeting and regulating recommendations on what we would consider news or communications platforms.
I think that's a product issue though and not something that requires regulation. I feel the exact opposite, I barely look at them and get my recs from friends or other sites I frequent.
It's interesting that "security through obscurity" is rightly shunned, but algorithms like search are kept closely guarded. It speaks to just how different a problem search is- it's not something you can achieve mathematically, it's an imperfect attempt to provide a subjectively good experience.
It was almost as if somebody said you need to put out a press release so find something to put in it, rather than we have something really important to say so we must put out a press release.
A small number of media owners control old media in Australia. There is a single national newspaper and most cities have a single daily. They are generally owned by the same person. That person flies in people at election time to aggressively campaign for the government of their choice. This only makes sense if there is some quid pro quo. I have no love for Facebook or Google but the Australian government does what it must to keep favour with media proprietors or risk toxic campaigns against them.
I’m just curious if anyone knows... does this specifically call out Google or does this also potentially have implications for other news aggregators that work in a similar way? Could this also target reddit or even hacker news?
I couldn’t find where they define the platform that is Google.
The draft doesn't name Google or Facebook, but 52C gives the Treasurer the ability to deem specific corporations and services "designated digital platform corporations/services", and they have announced that Google and Facebook will be the initial targets. E.g. in the explanatory materials,
> In the first instance, the Government has announced that the mandatory code of conduct will apply to Facebook and Google. However, the Treasurer may also make subsequent instruments in the future designating other platforms where fundamental bargaining power imbalances with Australian news businesses emerge.
This response does not respond to the claims made in the open letter. The bill as drafted is pure corporate rent-seeking, and appears to serve no genuine public good.
- traditional news companies not making enough money, blame google.
- Australian government decides it knows what is best, regulate the monopoly.
I would love to hear some input from actual journalists. It's telling that in the whole 29 page draft, journalist is mentioned twice and consumer(as a natural person) is mentioned once[1]. From the draft, I don't get the feeling the Australian government is really interested in a healthy news media sector but rather, making the existing news media sector happy.
I'm very curious how this law wouldn't violate various free trade deals Australia has struck.
Surely a tax that explicitly names only foreign companies is the opposite of free trade?
Sure, China has driven a truck through the whole concept of the WTO over decades and so I doubt anything will happen. Free trade deals are very much toothless, on the assumption that they are supposed to make sense on their own terms so enforcement is not required. But I can see the USA especially if Trump wins a second term deciding that Australia should be trade sanctioned for discrimination against US businesses. The White House won't want to see tech firms become piggybanks for failed industries and economies around the world.
The draft does not explicitly name foreign companies, it only refers to generic "digital platforms", so it's not a free trade issue. Free trade agreements tend to only be concerned with equal treatment, e.g. Most Favored Nation status.
If, say, a country requires mining companies to implement certain minimum safety standards, that's totally acceptable from a free trade perspective if it applies to all companies, even if almost all mines are operated by international conglomerates. Such a law might make it more difficult for foreign companies to keep operating, but without providing an advantage for domestic companies who have to abide by the same regulations.
I also disagree that China has driven a truck through the WTO, since it was China that had to agree to various concessions as part of WTO accession. https://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/iclr/vol27/iss2/6/ When people complain about hurdles for foreign companies in China, their information tends to be either outdated (e.g. joint venture requirements) or the same hurdles apply to Chinese companies (e.g. need to censor your website if you have one).
That's interesting. Other posters on this topic have asserted that the directive names Google and Facebook specifically, and nobody else. That's why I say it looks like a clear cut WTO sanctions case. The law would not apply even to Twitter at the moment, let alone Australian services.
BTW are you saying joint venture requirements no longer exist in China? Can non Chinese citizens get IP addresses now?
The draft of the bill is here https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill... Probably Google and Facebook (and maybe Twitter) were mentioned as a justification for introducing the bill in the first place, but they aren't mentioned explicitly in the text.
Regarding joint venture requirements in China, a new law on foreign investment went into effect this year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Investment_Law_of_the_... that supersedes the previous separate regulations for wholly foreign-owned enterprises, equity joint ventures and cooperative joint ventures with a unified framework for foreign investment. There're still some sectors where 50% or more of a company's shares need to be held by Chinese nationals, but those exceptions are on their way out. E.g. restrictions in the automotive sector will be fully lifted by 2022 https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-to-ease-rules-on-foreign-...
If you want a Chinese IP address, you might have to file a bunch of paperwork, but it should've been possible for a long time. Otherwise I can't explain how https://www.google.cn/ continues to be operated by Google. (Of course they only redirect to https://www.google.com.hk/ because otherwise they'd lose that ICP license displayed in the footer and get their website shut down, but that's a different issue.)
Ha, Of course govt. can regulate. Do you know in India e-commerce like Amazon is pure marketplace platform only. i.e. Amazon can't sell their own private label products on Amazon.in
Also India govt. is also preparing regulations to ask for data.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/retai...
You're right, it's not a tax it's an involuntary contract. Google is required to get a license to link to these news sites, and isn't allowed not to link to them or abandon the whole concept of linking to Australian news sites.
It violates every concept of free trade and free enterprise.
I'm all for sensible regulation and taxing big corporations, but this doesn't sound like that.
The government gets this money back in a) “business lunches”, gifts, etc; b) guaranteed industry “jobs” when their political careers end, which is far in the future due to; c) endless re-elections, as the entire media in this country exists as a Liberal Party PR firm.
> A healthy news media sector is essential to a well-functioning democracy.
This part at the end is interesting. If this fight goes down that rabbit hole, bearing in mind filter bubbles, Cambridge Analytica etc. it may lead to a discussion worth having
Google is totally in the wrong here, and ACCC is doing its usual good work of protecting the Aussie consumer. It's interesting to watch Google try to squirm out of this though - they probably see it for the precedent it is.
Google relies heavily on third-party content that they don't pay for in search results. If this law forces them to negotiate payment for that practice then I'm all for it.
I mean it's a search engine so it should rely heavily on third-party content in its search results.
Google links to these news sites in search results and drives traffic to them.
If Google grabs significant parts of news articles that users don't need to visit the sites, then Google should pay them. But Google is not doing that.
> If Google grabs significant parts of news articles that users don't need to visit the sites, then Google should pay them. But Google is not doing that.
It's pretty blatantly the case that AMP provides a SEO boost. What hosting service could possibly compete with the speed at which Google can retrieve content from their _own_ servers?
That's the whole point of this legislation: to give news orgs means to stop Google from twisting their arm in this way.
Literally ANY content delivery network would be able to compete with google. AMP sites are sites that the companies themselves build for google(could be any cdn) to just cache.
The news organizations themselves gains a lot from google crawling and indexing their sites (which do cost google money) and now this legislation would also require google to pay them for displaying the title/subtitle of their articles. In what world is that fair or balancing out the relationship?
> would also require google to pay them for displaying the title/subtitle of their articles. In what world is that fair or balancing out the relationship?
This is not what the legislation is about. This is about Google's practice of excerpting the actual content of the articles and putting it at the top of the page. Google is algorithmically republishing copyrighted content from these news orgs and hoping that surrounding it in quotes is enough to protect them.
You are ignoring that whether the snippets are shown is already entirely up to the news orgs. In fact I think they're the ones that decide what's in the snippets
> While AMP itself isn't a ranking factor, speed is a ranking factor for Google Search.
That seems to say that is isn't blatantly the case that AMP provides an SEO boost. But that speed does. And there are many CDNs that are on the same edge. AMP isn't about to beat Akamai, for example.
Google isn't in the wrong here, and framing this as just an honest consumer-first regulator doing their job omits critical context to help people understand what's happening.
The party in power federally is the Coalition, and they are deeply entwined, in a symbiotic relationship, with Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd: illustrated by endless editorial lines supportive of the Coalition in media across the country, revolving doors of Coalition advisors and News Ltd staff, through to regular questionable and controversial decisions in favour of News Ltd.
A great example was Foxtel being given a $30 million grant with no process, documentation or explanation around it [1]. It was simply explained as 'media reform'.
Like those 'media reforms', these proposed ones are also highly politically-driven and largely to the benefit of News Ltd.
This is not about supporting our news media here: the public broadcasters (ABC and SBS) dominate online and yet the proposed legislation deliberately excludes them from any claimed profiteering from Google.
This is just the abandoning of any free market principles the Coalition claims to have to provide support for their domestic media wing, in the form a local protection racket.
The claim of profiteering from search result listings, as you also imply above, is just not true.
As one ex-News Ltd and Google-associated Twitter account has emphasised, Google delivers billions of free clicks to publishers and makes very little ad revenue around search results. [2]
A good brief summary of the situation can be found from a local tech commentator, Justin Warren [3]. Two valuable points he makes:
* big publishers are salty over failing to see classified ads would get destroyed by online
* there are legitimate concerns with Google and Facebook, but they're largely orthogonal to any of this
The $30 million was just last time. They got another $10 million this year [1]. Despite the fact that 75% of Australia doesn't subscribe to Foxtel and that SBS would be a better venue for sports content anyway...
It's also worth remembering Foxtel demanded it get paid to retransmit ABC and SBS content, which was reduced to some lesser, unknown figure last year [1].
Apparently content is worthless unless it is privately funded.
> A healthy news media sector is essential to a well-functioning democracy.
This feels like a slap in the face. Whoever wrote this would be fully aware that our media sector is anything but healthy, and that our “democracy” flatlined years ago.
I can only imagine that this was written by a committee that was sinking beers and laughing their asses off as they watched this post go live.
Why are you air-quoting Australian democracy? Aussies have one of the healthiest democracies in the world--9th out of 167 ranked countries according to the EUI annual 'Democracy Index'.[0]
Is it posh to pretend to be misrepresented and/or oppressed nowadays?
Do you live in Australia, or follow Australian politics?
If not, it may interest you to know that we once had a carbon tax. It wasn’t stalled in the house or amended into nonexistence like a lot of politically charged law, but was repealed. The influence that the coal industry (leveraged by NewsCorp) has in this country is insane.
It may also interest you to know that Kevin Rudd, a previous prime minister, was (is) the subject of a relentless smear campaign on the part of NewsCorp. He was removed from power not by an election, but via a leadership spill brought on by the pressure exerted by Murdoch.
It may also interest you to investigate how our second wave of COVID-19 is being reported in Australian media. The second wave began in Federally funded and operated aged care facilities; however has been branded entirely as the “Melbourne wave”, pinning the blame on the Labour Party (the opposition to the party controlling the federal govt) and its state leader.
We are misrepresented. The Democracy Index is published by The Economist. They may not be owned by NewsCorp, but you can be damn sure they feel their gaze.
Oh I know they’re far from blameless, when my (Labour) MP voted in favour of that bill I was furious and she knew it.
I’m not trying to defend Labour in any way, but you’d have to be wilfully ignorant to not see the persistent assault on the party by our entire media; and more so to not see that it’s working.
Why would you go to bat for an anti-encryption mass surveillance party despite it being against your morals?
They deserve everything they get for not representing a viable alternative. In 2020, it's not enough to be 98% the same as the other party with a few differences in policy minutiae.
If they get dragged by the media, good. They deserve worse after betraying the entire tech industry repeatedly.
Because, we are in a two party system (practically if not technically). You seem to be glossing over the fact that the Liberal Party, who is the beneficiary of NewsCorps fuckery, are who introduced the AABill.
Labour, yes, betrayed not only the tech industry but the whole Australian public; but not out of malice, but because they’re spineless sycophants who didn’t want to look like they’re protecting terrorists.
I know they say not to feed the trolls, but at least pretend to stay on topic.
Let's put aside whether Google had justified concerns about this legalislation.
What's more appriopriate? Having a company incite the people in a foreign country to change laws or do it using diplomacy using experts in your state departement?
We are only talking about allied countries to the US because google doesn't do this with, for example, china, russia, north korea, etc...
I'm NOT advocating they should do this with those countries. Rather they should get out of the politics business or accept the regulations that come with it.
Problem is, once you get to a certain size, it's almost impossible to just "stay out of the politics" - because other companies won't stay out of it. The whole reason this bill exists is because another American multinational company that pays no tax in Australia and owns 70% of the readership of Australian news media is very effective in its politics. And they didn't do it by telling the public to ask for it - they have close ties with politicians, they give favourable coverage, they take all the Government's leaks and publish anonymously, they will minimise stories the Government doesn't want published...
Note that this legislation is the direct result of other companies getting involved in the politics business and pushing for this regulation. Google is seeing their business model made impossible and warns for the consequences, as they should, and certainly have the right to do.
Sometimes legislation can make a business model impossible or undesirable. For example, making information available in China with a strong censorship regime. Or in this case, being required to link to news sites while being forced to pay for it. If this loses Google more money than it's worth, they may have to abandon Australia.
This whole thing is really weird. We're bending over backwards to try and accommodate Google being allowed to profit from other peoples content. How about we simply ban Google and Facebook from reproducing news on their own site?
And if we are truly believe "A healthy news media sector is essential to a well-functioning democracy." we need to punish both Google and content creators for publishing things that are demonstrably false. Fake News in otherwords.
> How about we simply ban Google and Facebook from reproducing news on their own site?
News Corp is and always has been free to not have its content on Google (https://www.robotstxt.org/). But that's not what they want, they want a Money just for appearing in search results. Seems more like a rent seeking for News Corp.
> We're bending over backwards to try and accommodate Google
The funny/bizzare bit is we are bending over backwards to accommodate 2 multinational American corporate monopolies that don't even pay tax in this country.
> I don't like the news media but they can't just "not appear" on Google's results. Google has way more leverage than them. Their choices are: accept Google stealing your content and giving you some traffic in return, or die. It's like saying, "you're free not to farm on your feudal overlord's land." Where else are you going to go?
>
> The problem isn't a matter of rights, it's that Google has too much power. Individuals can't exert any leverage, they have to accept Google's terms. I don't think that's healthy, it's quite dangerous actually. The only way to address that is a collective intervention.
The leverage is that you stop using Google to get news, no?
Stealing your content? A quick google search for "Australia news law" shows a top stories box with just a headline and a thumbnail. Similar thing with the news tab adds but it adds on about another 20 words from the first paragraph. Which part of that would you prefer them not to show?
Also, I did not see a single ad on either of those pages nor can I recall ever seeing ads when I was looking for news on google. The only money they are probably even making from news is when they send you to a news website that happens to use googles ad services and that's a symbiotic relationship. Even with collective bargaining, I cannot see this going any other way than how it did in germany or spain with either no fee or just delisting all news.
Yes, it really sounds dodgy to me that the Treasurer is arbitrarily choosing companies that are subject to this law, and arbitrarily choosing which companies benefit from it.
The ABC and SBS don't qualify as news businesses. That says it all really.
> But the news sites need Facebook/Google more than the other way around.
This is oft-quoted, but the media organisations seemed to be doing better before Google/Facebook became the middle-man siphoning off advertising revenue.
User behavior has changed. Look what happened when a similar law was passed in Spain. Google News pulled out and people stopped visiting Spanish news sites, they didn't flock back to purchasing subscriptions and physical newspapers.
I'd say News Corp (Fox News, Sky News, NY Post, etc.) ranks pretty high on the list of damaging companies, and this law was clearly written to benefit them.
> Google will not be required to share any additional user data with Australian news businesses unless it chooses to do so.
I don't think Google actually made either of these claims in their letter.
They didn't mention charging for services at all. They said "the free services you use may be at risk". Given the context, I took that to mean the quality of the service would tank if they had to share their algorithm changes.
The data portion is a little less clear. Google was very weasel wordy - they definitely wanted it to sound like they would have to turn over user data, but if you read carefully they only say they would have to share data about how they collect the user data.