Google's 'experiment' hiding Australian news just shows its inordinate power
In the midst of a global pandemic and an unprecedented misinformation glut, Google has decided to hide some Australian news sites from its search results. It is “experimenting” with the lone supply of fact-checked, accountable information Australians can access right now.
Australians have been seeing current news disappearing in recent days, replaced by old links and old news: in some cases news outlets have disappeared altogether. Google says it is displaying older or less relevant content to 1% of users.
The news comes as the debate between Australian media and “Big Tech” revs up over the proposed news media bargaining code, which would require Google to negotiate a fair price for news content with eligible Australian outlets.
Google doesn’t want to pay for news content, on anyone’s terms except its own, and it appears to be manipulating search results to avoid it.
Though Google claims the bargaining code “will break the way Google search works undermining the benefits of the internet for millions of Australians”, the search giant seems to be doing that by itself.
The code is still being debated; there is no reason that we know of why Google should be cutting or downranking news articles. There is no reason we know of to tinker with search results to avoid displaying news and falling under the code yet. Unless the tech company wants to prove a point.
Google says it is running these experiments “to measure the impacts of news businesses and Google search on each other”. The data will probably be used to try to prove something to the Australian government: that the money generated by referral traffic to news sites is worth more than the ad revenue Google earns from that specific content.
The company has been arguing that news content is just not worth it if it has to negotiate payment for it in this way. These “tests” will probably be used in aid of that argument.
What the tests won’t be measuring is the true value of timely and accurate facts to Google search results. They won’t be measuring the value of the data collected by Google on which articles you read and how long you spend reading them, or the associated behavioural inferences they can draw from that for advertising. Essentially, they won’t be measuring what is uniquely valuable about news content, and what makes the search product itself a reliable source of timely and correct information.
Google is willing to drop that value in order to avoid setting a global precedent.
As the search firm has proven in Spain, where it shut down Google news altogether in response to similar legislation in 2014, it is willing to remove timely and accurate content from search results in order to avoid paying for news content on anyone’s terms except its own.
Google only wants to pay for news if it is in the driver’s seat: it wants to do it via its own product, Google news showcase, on its own terms. It wantsto maintain its control over where negotiations go and, ideally, which news outlets might be invited.
What these experiments in Australia have actually proved, in reality, is that Google has inordinate power: it can disappear news and news content entirely if it wants to.
As the gateway to information for the overwhelming majority of web users here (the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission puts
Google’s share of search traffic at 95%), it can readily control the information Australians have access to. By just tinkering with that power, by conducting little “experiments”, it can make or break news businesses. It can make or break people’s ability to sort fact from fiction in the middle of a pandemic.
What it also means, as Rod Sims has pointed out, is that there is a large power imbalance between news organisations and the platform when it comes to paying a fair price for news content. Namely: Google has all the power.
This is why Sims maintains that the negotiations should not happen on Google’s own terms in its own news showcase product: the power imbalance is too great.
As Sims said at a Reuters conference on Tuesday: “Google and Facebook don’t need any particular news media business, they need them all, but they don’t need them individually. That means you have massive bargaining power imbalance.”
That is actually the problem that the news media bargaining code is designed to solve.
So in a sense, by disappearing selected news outlets from some Australian search results, by manipulating the news reading and fact-finding ability of 1% of users, Google’s experiments have just proven the necessity for the code.
Belinda Barnet is senior lecturer in media and communications at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne
trial music – anything that wasn’t on the radio or seemed rebellious. By the time I was 15 or 16, my friends and I had already made records, played shows out of town. I had learned to play drums by arranging pillows on my floor and my bed in the formation of a drum set and playing along to Bad Brains. We discovered Led Zeppelin just as I started progressing as a drummer and I became obsessed with John Bonham: what he played and why. It’s hard to explain, but his feel and sound is unmistakable and undefinable. Anyone can take the chart of what he played, but it would never be the same because it was as unique to that human as a fingerprint. I became like a monk, listening to these records and memorising them. It was like poetry to me. I became so obsessed that I gave myself a three-interlockedcircles John Bonham tattoo on my arm with a fucking sewing needle and some ink. I was branded for life.
Travelling and touring
Like most musicians playing punk and underground music in the 80s, I didn’t have aspirations to make a career of it. When. When I was in my later teens, the reward was just some sort of appreciation from the audience. At the most, I hoped that some day I wouldn’t still have to work in the furniture warehouse that I was working in back then, and would have my own apartment. Going on the road at that age [with the Washington punk band Scream], it’s such a beautiful time in anyone’s life. You’re discovering identity, finding some freedom and you’re becoming who you are. So it was the perfect window of time to leave home and start wandering around the planet. I started touring at 18: carrying my stuff in a bag, sleeping on floors, and if I was lucky, I’d get seven dollars a day to budget on cigarettes and Taco Bell. I was open to experience.
If we were playing a squat in Italy, I’d be learning about their sense of community, their political ideas and language. Then Amsterdam and ending up in a coffee shop every night. I saw America for the first time through the window of an old Dodge van. It was John Steinbeck shit. I had a five-year plan: to learn music and become a studio drummer, then with the money I made go to college and become a graphic-design artist. When Nirvana got popular, all that shit went out of the window. I still can’t read music.
Free-thinking weirdos
In later life, I’ve realised how fortunate I was to be surrounded by really amazing creative individuals as a teenager. I wasn’t locked into any highschool social scene. I was hanging out with people in the Washington music and arts scene: photographers and writers or musicians who had labels of their own. In reconnecting with them in more recent years, I realised that they all went on to do such great things. One of my oldest friends from the Washington DC punk scene became head of the Sundance TV channel and worked with BBC America. Another one became a chef in Brooklyn. Another became an editor of Bon Appétit. Everyone went on to do great things, I think, because we were raised in the community of free-thinking weirdos that decided we weren’t going to follow the straight path. We were cool when we were young.
Home recording
In my teens, I also realised that I could record music by myself. When I was about 13, I figured out how to multitrack things with two cassette decks. I would record songs with my guitar on my little handheld cassette, then take that cassette and put it into the home stereo, then hit play as I was recording another cassette on the cassette recorder. So I would add a vocal. I could multitrack that way.
Eventually, I became close friends with another musician who had an eight-track in his basement, so by 17 or 18 I started recording songs by myself, playing the drums first, then adding guitars then the vocal. Really only as an experiment. I never played the songs for other people, but it was wild. I could do this and 15 minutes later I would have a song that sounded like a band but was only one person. I learned to write and record, and that turned into Foo Fighters.
• Foo Fighters’ album Medicine at Midnight is released 5 February on Roswell/Columbia Records
future draft classes.
For a player of Watson’s caliber, that’s a tiny asking price. Such players come around once in a lifetime. The
Texans have blown it. Now it’s up to the Dolphins to take advantage, and in doing so, redefine the league’s current power-structures. Both practically and visually.