We weren't discussing the uniqueness of low-quality content or clickbait, nor were we even discussing politics. We are discussing the introduction of changes which will largely benefit News Corp who owns 70% of newspaper circulation, Rupert Murdoch isn't even Australian. It boggles my mind an American media mogul (with clear historically proven cases of political bias) cannot only have plenty of influence in the USA, but also here in Australia.

We talk about Google and Facebook being these influential corporate conglomerates (and they are), how bad monopolies are and all the while, News Corp continues to get favours from the Australian government, if it's not millions in no strings attached money, it's laws like these which should not even exist in their current form. And the kicker here is: News Corp doesn't even pay tax in Australia. Thanks to some clever accounting (which others are also guilty of), they pay no tax on their profits and they are expecting us to feel sorry for them? Shouldn't the fact they don't even pay tax be good enough.

There are a lot of clickbait/low-quality news sites, but the ones not owned by Rupert Murdoch or big media companies aren't complaining to the Australian government about how unfair it is Google is linking to their news and providing free snippets. Things get even crazier when you realise that many news sites in Australia (especially News Corp) are already paywalled, many of the links from Google to the news stories results in a paywall notice asking you to pay. You essentially get a headline and an opening paragraph. Sometimes the headlines are clever, but they're not worth paying for. So, are they asking Facebook and Google to pay for the privilege of being able to link to their own site for free, which they are subsequently monetising through ads and subscriptions? None of this makes sense.

I agree that good quality journalism is worth paying for, which is why I personally have both a Crikey subscription as well as a Guardian subscription. I would never pay for the Courier Mail or Australian, the content is subpar and often republished news from other sources. Even former Fairfix news which Nine Entertainment purchased have gone downhill since the purchase.

He may not be Aussie any more, but he was born here to a father involved in news media so it's not really a surprise to me that Australia is one of the places he has an iron fist over media. I mean, he ran media here from the 60s to the 80s before renouncing AU citizenship for US in order to make inroads there.

The state of news media in Australia is utterly dire and I cannot wait for Newscorp to collapse.

His Australian media properties have been losing money for years, long before the recent collapse of advertising revenues. He only runs them as a vanity project, because he enjoys the political power it gives him in his former homeland.

I'm in the same boat, I pay for the guardian, a couple of smaller newspapers and the Australia institute just trying to even out the balance a little bit since Murdoch and what I would now call the extreme right have over 90% of newspaper of newspaper circulation Australia. A really sad state of affairs, the Australian at least used to have some decent conservative articles with a considered opinion but now it's just rabid and unreadable trash.

Nope. You're just wrong. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_News_C...

The quality of these properties is categorically just worse than the independents, and there are a lot of them.

There's certainly some bias showing here, but it's not in the parent post.