Google: “acting the bully” in Australia
“Try to imagine even a single day without Google,” said Jamie Bartlett in The Times. “You would be lost, metaphorically and literally.
Bouncing from irrelevant website to website. Hopelessly wandering the streets without a little blue dot to guide you.” This is the fate that may befall all 25 million Australians (who use Google for 95% of their internet searches). Why? Because their government has drafted legislation that would compel Google, Facebook and others to pay news companies if their stories are shared on the tech companies’ platforms – which Google thinks will be “unworkable”. If it were to become law, said Google’s managing director for Australia, Mel Silva, “it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia”.
Google is “acting the bully”, said The Sydney Morning Herald. It won’t work. “We don’t respond to threats,” warned Prime Minister Scott Morrison. And there’s a crucial principle at stake here. Tech companies should “pay a fair price for the use of media content generated by others”. The new law was a key recommendation of a government competition inquiry last year, which found that Google and Facebook were abusing their dominant online position, and draining advertising revenue from traditional news media companies. It may sound like rather a technical argument, said Andrew Griffin in The Independent. But make no mistake: it “could change the future of the internet”. It comes down to a fundamental question. Should you be able to share other people’s content freely online, or should you pay for it? Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, argues that the law “risks breaching a fundamental principle”. When you put a price on linking to particular information, you no longer have a free and open web.
But Google and Facebook don’t just “link” to news stories, said Damien Cave in The New York Times: they take headlines, summaries and pictures, and serve them up to users, from whom they generate ad revenue. Besides, it’s not really a point of principle: Google has just agreed to pay licensing fees to news publishers in France to use their stories. The issue in Australia is power: “who gets to decide the payments”. Under the proposed system, an independent adjudicator will help set prices. This greatly strengthens the news media’s hand. Google’s “overreaction” is evidence of its fear that other countries will follow suit, said The Times. It illustrates why governments around the world should join Australia in “standing up to the digital bullies”.