I think you are mis-understanding what the news organisations source of business is. It's NOT the consumers of news, and never was. It's the advertising companies who place ads on the news organisations properties - and now the news organisations customers (i.e. the ad companies) have found it more beneficial to advertise with Google and FB.
You're right for the vast majority of news organization on internet but we can't say that it's "never was" (or "is" for the matter).
I have at least 3 examples [0] in mind of news organizations for which advertising is not part of their business model (or a very insignificant part compared to "consumers of news" part). And I'm sure we can find similar example all around the globe.
Of course such organization generally relies on subscription and/or donation. And of course for this to works "consumers of news" need to pay for it.
[0] Sorry all French : Le Canard enchainé (paper) ; Le Monde Diplo (paper and web) ; Mediapart (web)
"Facebook didn't bat an eye before blocking the pages of food banks and emergency service providers..."
No, FB obeyed the law. The legislation of what constitutes a "news organisation" is opaque. The legislation said pay for links or don't show them. FB complied with the law and elected not to show them. I cannot see the problem here - FB obeyed the law.
The alternative would have been for FB to clarify what you say is opaque about the legislation.
The fact that FB would rather outright ban charities and emergency service providers instead of clarifying the spirit of the law shows you that they are not operating in good faith and will maximize their profits at all societal costs.
I'd think Google could easily get around this by limiting the frequency with which their GoogleBot visits News Corp web sites to, say, once a month. Effectively makes being indexed worthless for News Corp.
The ACCC response if disingenuous. It fails to mention the requirement that Google and FB must give news entities 28 days of any changes to their ranking algorithm. I mean WTF. It's the most brain dead piece of legislation you could imagine.
I think it actually misrepresents Google's statements too - the ACCC response makes it sound like Google are saying they would be required to charge for their services, but Google actually said that the code might make it no longer worthwhile for them to provide their services for free in Australia.
It would have been fair to say that part of Google's statement is probably an exaggeration, but the ACCC instead muddies the waters by rebutting something Google didn't actually say...
Ironic you should reference the ABC when the legislation specifically excludes the ABC from any benefit other "registered news organisations" may enjoy.
I didn't mention the government funded ABC but rather the Australian Associated Press (AAP) which is a collection of local journalists funded collectively by the large media companies on both the left and right wing.
The AU government wants to give private media a leg up, but won't allow the ABC (or SBS) to receive any moneys from Google/FB, and at the same time regularly cuts funds to both the government funded media entities.
1.100
Discrimination in this context will be considered to occur if the news content of a registered news business is disadvantaged incomparison to other news content in terms of the crawling, indexing,ranking, display, presentation or other process undertaken by the digital platform on any service provided by the digital platform, on the basis ofthe registered news business’ participation in the code.
IANAL, but my simple reading of this seems to imply it will be illegal for Google to NOT crawl and index News Corps content.
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