The exposure draft doesn’t give Google/Facebook the right to opt out by “discriminating” against (ie. dropping) protected news sources. Refusing to comply with this could be punished with an infringement notice under Australian law. https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill...
> The exposure draft doesn’t give Google/Facebook the right to opt out by “discriminating” against (ie. dropping) protected news sources.
It doesn't permit digital service corporations from discriminating against protected news sources on account of their participation in the system. It does seem to permit actions that affect all news sources equally.
However, more frustrating and worrisome to me is that the exposure draft doesn't seem to define what conduct by Google/etc triggers these provisions. Some clauses apply to news content "made available" by the platform, but there's no definition in this bill of what "made available" means.
That could be read to require some sort of hosting of the content (e.g., rehosting an article or using a long extract), or it could be read to include mere linking. That's a huge difference: Hacker News could be a 'digital platform service' under the latter definition, but not the former.
How will they determine what counts as "news"? Are there be significant penalties if whatever algorithm they come up with to decide what counts as "news" has any false negatives? If so, that might make "stop showing news" an unworkable approach.
Yes, I think the last line in the anti-discrimination section is there specifically to thwart that, but one can still easily imagine a lot of legal acrobatics to get out of that.
As previously stated above, that method is explicitly disallowed by the law:
> Responsible digital platform corporations may not discriminate between the news businesses participating in the code, or between participants and non-participants, because of their participation in the code.
I don't get what you're trying to say. If Google stops showing news from participants, but show news from non-participants (due to false negatives causing their algorithm to fail to identify those sites as news), would that not be obvious discrimination according to the above quote?
That just comes back to my original comment then. How do you determine what counts as "all news"?
You can't just use the list of "businesses participating in the code" because that's considered discriminatory and illegal under the new law. And if you decide using any other method, you risk accidentally classifying one of the "businesses participating in the code" as "not news" and showing it in search results anyway, which is also illegal under this law.
The best solution I can think of would be to use the list of businesses participating in the code as a starting point, and then add other non-participants through some other method. But then you run into a similar problem: what happens if you accidentally classify a non-participant as "not news" and they see a surge of traffic because they're one of the only news organizations in Australia that shows up in Google search results? Wouldn't that also be considered discriminatory and illegal under the new law, since that organization wouldn't have shown up in the results if they were a participant?
I'm fairly sure that Google already has algorithmic classification for "news" that's accurate enough for these purposes. If not, "is this a news article" is quite amenable to machine learning techniqes. All that's left is ensuring that registered news sources are definitely classified as news.
It seems likely to me that Google will fight that part of it in court. Paying for the content...battle lost. Being forced to surface the content, not so much.
I mean, that's like the government saying that not only do you have to pay a toll when you use CityLink (okay, user pays) but it is mandatory to use that road as the only option, and that you must use it every day.
I really don't see how that can stop Google from dropping news from the search results completely. Or coming to an arrangement with Fairfax, where they pay a tiny amount, and nothing to NewsCorp.
Google and FB both argued that they send traffic worth of 200M to these publishers? What if they start charging for clicks? Earlier the argument was that they were doing it for free and not getting anything out of it. Now, since they have to pay, its only fair that they charge for the services (ie the traffic through clicks) they provide too
I am sure they will fight to minimise their costs one way or another. Rather than challenging the validity of the law, another strategy might be to submit to the arbitral process and come up with a strong argument that, for the purposes of section 52ZP(2)(b), the "benefit (whether monetary or otherwise) of the registered news business’ covered news content to the digital platform service" is negligible, and for (2)(d), any "remuneration amount would place an undue burden on the commercial interests of the digital platform service." https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill...
If this is true, how do you enforce it? Send goons to California to beat it out of them? If Google has no presence in Australia they can simply block the whole country. Or replace the home page with a "Your country is out of order" 404.
Google has a significant presence in Australia, including an office, many employees, data centres, and bank accounts for accepting payments from Australian customers. It would be very unusual for a company like Google to blatantly violate Australian laws and refuse to pay the fines, so it’s unclear how the Australian government would respond if that happened.
