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lentilla writes:

The Australian federal government has decided to force Internet giants to pay for content they collect from local publishers. Treasurer Mr Frydenberg says "It's only fair that those that generate content get paid for it".

According to this article appearing in the Sydney Morning Herald: 'The ACCC [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission] will be asked to draft a new industry approach for consultation in July with a definition of the "news content" to be covered by the mandatory code, with the expectation the search and social media giants will have to pay for content.'

Students of history will recall that German publishers tried something similar in 2013. Google responded by removing links to these articles rather than pay the publishers for the privilege of linking. The result: "visitors from web search fell 40 percent; from Google News, they fell 80 percent". Two weeks later and the group of publishers decided to give search engines a free licence to index their content.

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