News stories are written to give a summary first, then more detail, then more detail, if you didn't know. That's how it's worked for a long time.

Hence google simply steal the most valuable bit, the headline and the summary, and users can get away with merely browsing the free content, which Google has stolen.

It's as if google owns a newspaper store, that they allow any person to just browse for free. In a real world newsagents you'd be told to buy or GTFO because the newsagent makes money from selling the papers. But because google already made their money, they sell the land, they gleefully give it away for free.

Don't forget, Google is worthless without the content, if everyone banned Google from scraping content tomorrow it would go bust overnight.

But almost every site would make more money without search engines.

Reflecting on this, it's actually in every governments interest to make it as hard as possible for Google/Facebook/etc. to do business in their territory. If google just "give up" on Australia, it means all that advertising money will probably go to an Australian search engine, and be taxable.

> google simply steal the most valuable bit, the headline and the summary

People are rightfully pointing out that nobody forces you to put any of that on Google.

But I also want to point out that if the headline and snippet summary are the most valuable part of an article you write, then you're not providing much value. Copyright law was never intended to protect summaries of what your work is about.

At a basic level, facts are not copyrightable. To argue that saying the title of a news article is "stealing" is like arguing that multiple papers shouldn't be able to cover the same topics. It's like arguing that I shouldn't be able to tell my friend about current events because a newspaper broke the story first. If people can look at multiple sources/titles and get a summary without clicking then tough luck, the thing they are intuiting is not the thing that was copyrighted. News orgs never owned copyright over the individual factual parts of their stories.

If people genuinely believe that IP laws should cover facts about the world, that a reporter should have the exclusive right to talk about an event just because they arrived on the scene first -- I just can't take that argument seriously. If that's what people think, then our social education efforts about copyright have just gone off the rails.

The news is not copyrightable. Your writeup of the news, the specific language that you use, is. Trying to change that would be a disaster for everyone, it would be declaring a war on information itself just so that some entrenched news orgs can make a quick buck.

> Hence google simply steal the most valuable bit, the headline and the summary, and users can get away with merely browsing the free content, which Google has stolen.

Google is hardly "stealing" this. The news sites are offering it directly to Google, and asking for them to make use of it. They could ask Google not to index them, or they could stop asking to appear the carousel, at any point.

Google actually prepared to stop listing news sites to Australians at all, in preparation for this law, and so the law was changed to force them to continue listing the sites.

If Google is stealing the content, they are also being required to steal the content. They're not allowed to opt out of showing the data that the news sites are offering. They're not allowed to decline showing news at all.

Indeed. You can set a search result not to display the snippet, and google will respect that choice. News articles are choosing to display the snippets.

What a ridiculously stupid thing to say.

There is no choice, you either list on Google, or die. Google has an almost absolute monopoly on search in the West. They are the only game in town. There is no 'choice'.

> Don't forget, Google is worthless without the content, if everyone banned Google from scraping content tomorrow it would go bust overnight.

You're making the same point I am, but drawing the opposite conclusion. If what these news sites are producing is so valuable and google is stealing it, why do they not just ban google from scraping their site?

The answer is that they were making money when they were the only way news got out into the world. Now that anyone can break news the news itself is not valuable. Google and Facebook aren't hurting these publications, the existence of the internet is.

> It's as if google owns a newspaper store, that they allow any person to just browse for free. In a real world newsagents you'd be told to buy or GTFO because the newsagent makes money from selling the papers. But because google already made their money, they sell the land, they gleefully give it away for free.

I've never tried this at a newsagent, but on multiple visits to bookstores I've just read different books without a transaction.

Newsagents do have the power to tell google to GTFO by editing their robots.txt though

> Users have every opportunity

"But that's how I get to the website, I type it into the Google!"

If you want to ban Google, then just ban Google. You don't need to set this kind of awful precedent while you're doing it.

This weird, "we hate Google, so we're going to pass this massive indirect law that reinterprets fair use, but only applies to them" is pointless and counterproductive. If you don't believe that Google is providing any value, then ban search engines and see how the people of Australia react. But I don't actually believe that the problem people have here is that they think users are forced to look up websites through Google.

If that was the problem, then people on both sides would be encouraging Google to pull out of Australia. It's nonsensical to say that indexing websites isn't a valuable service.

Do you think Google has any strong competition?

I think a lot of what’s not being discussed in this thread is that in a competitive market consumers could vote with feet, and the resulting competitive pressure would naturally drive better behaviors, but because that’s lacking governments are now poorly attempting to “fight back”.

In a sense, with enough kludgy regulation, eventually there may be enough daylight for a competitor to pop up, and until then people will argue passionately past each other, one libertarian side worried about libertarian things, and the other populist side worried about populist things, etc.

Enough competition in what? Search generally? No, but that is because every other site sucks, not because google is being bad.

In finding news? yeah, I actually do. You can find the current news by going to any newspaper of your choice, and read them there: you don't need to search at all (archives are another matter, but then I suspect that that is a very small amount of their traffic).

I actually think Facebook is a harsher competitor: people will share interesting articles (or those that make their side look good) there, and that traffic is harder to replace.

> Do you think Google has any strong competition?

I think that link taxes are not a good substitute for antitrust law.

My take on this thread is that a lot of people want to break up Google, and they're picking one of the worst possible ways to do it. Australia is codifying into law an idea that will fundamentally change the way it looks at how the Internet works. Other countries have figured out ways to target Google without breaking the Internet.

I'm also (mostly because of the general wild arguments I've seen under the main article about what is and isn't fair about links) mildly skeptical about what people actually mean when they say that they want to "drive better behaviors."

Indexing information is a better behavior. People having the freedom to build and share indexes of information without anybody else's permission, including news organizations, is a better behavior. There are criticisms I have Google, including of Google's algorithms. I would like to see antitrust brought up. But I'm not honestly sure the criticisms I have of Google are the same ones that Australia has. I'm seeing people argue that summarizing an article is stealing. It's not, that's not what copyright is.

> In a sense, with enough kludgy regulation, eventually there may be enough daylight for a competitor to pop up

This is the worst possible way to make a competitor pop up. Why doesn't Australia just pass a law banning Google search if that's what it wants to do? I'm completely serious, a law banning Google would have less harmful effects on the Internet than the rules they're proposing.

My very cynical take on this that I am tempted to slip into is that for a lot people proposing this kind of legislation, it's not about banning Google or increasing competition, it's about "Google has money and what if established media sources had some of it." I'm pulling back from that take and assuming that most of the people on this thread actually believe this will increase competition. But even with that more charitable viewpoint, this is such a pointlessly clumsy, harmful way to accomplish that goal. If you want Google to pull out of Australia, just be honest about it. Don't this song and dance about how repressing fair use is somehow good for small businesses and the general public.

This is a law that says that Google has to pay to do something it's required to do. There's no consistent thread of logic running through the legislation. It's stealing for Google to link to websites, but it's abuse for them not to link to websites. Snippets provide no value to websites, but removing snippets is playing unfair. Facts aren't copyrightable unless you have a bunch of them from a bunch of different sources in one place. It's just a nonsensically bad law. And the alternative isn't "let Google own the entire world"; there are other pieces of legislation that Australia could pass that wouldn't be so toxic.

Agree it’s not the best response but not sure I don’t agree that indexes should be held to tighter standards of copyright control.

Google has effectively slowly turned the lever on a mass amount of industries, year by year shifting their money slightly more from their pockets into Googles, by inching forwards evermore with inlining their content. You can see entire industries being starved out basically, and in a way because they are so big it’s just hard to stop them.

I guess in the end I’m not an idealist and if a single company is suffocating many others, and if you have some levers you can pull to increase their competition, I think it’s totally fine to pull those levers. Like, I think the precedent of “we shouldn’t let any one company get too big” is the sort of Ur-Principle and it overrides any sub-principles like “free market” or whatever.

Again, this specific one seems like it’s a bit weirdly structured, I agree, but I also have about 0 sympathy for Google and even if the news media is rent seeking here and the politicians are daft, it’s a much smaller issue than “stop fucking Google now” so I’m not too worried with various countries experimenting with different kludgy rules, any help in curtailing one of the (somewhat unintentionally but still) worst actors in the market is not the worst thing, certainly won’t keep me up at night.

If you actually type the website into google, it will almost certainly send you there.

But websites are free to compete with that, by offering better ways to access the content, such as emails tailored to your interests. I know CNN had that option back in the day.