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An Australia With No Google? The Bitter Fight Behind a Drastic Threat - The New York Times

An Australia With No Google? The Bitter Fight Behind a Drastic Threat - The New York Times

An Australia With No Google? The Bitter Fight Behind a Drastic Threat - The New York Times
Jan 22, 2021 1 min, 56 secs

The big tech platforms are facing a challenge unlike any other as Australia moves to make them pay for news.

SYDNEY, Australia — In a major escalation, Google threatened on Friday to make its search engine unavailable in Australia if the government approved legislation that would force tech companies to pay for journalism shared on their platforms.

In both cases, the dire warnings — which one senator called blackmail — revealed the apparent willingness of Facebook and Google to hide or erase reliable sources of information for millions of people at a time when social media platforms are under fire for helping misinformation spread worldwide.

The companies argue that they already help the media industry by sending it traffic, and that the bill would open them up to “unmanageable levels of financial and operational risk.” The response by Google, which controls 95 percent of all queries in Australia in addition to owning YouTube, has grown particularly aggressive: The company recently buried major Australian news sites in search results in what it called an “experiment.”.

The battle in Australia centers on power: who gets to decide the payments, what prompts a charge for the tech companies and when do they have to reveal changes in their algorithms.

Australia’s assertive challenge to the social media giants has placed it in the vanguard of a movement to bolster a traditional news media ecosystem that America’s trillion-dollar tech companies threaten with extinction.

Under Australia’s proposed legislation, if media companies and platforms like Google cannot agree on a price for news content, an independent arbitration body will resolve the dispute.

The tech companies say it would create an incentive for media companies to jack up prices, sending cases to an arbiter who will determine final payment.

The fight centers in part on a debate over the nature of search results, and on the question of whether tech companies should pay for every article that Australians see on their platforms.

One potentially groundbreaking element of the proposed legislation involves the secret sauce of Facebook, Google and subsidiaries like YouTube: the algorithms that determine what people see when they search or scroll through the platforms

Early drafts of the bill would have required that tech companies give their news media partners 28 days’ notice before making any changes that would affect how users interact with their content

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

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