SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2020, @05:37PM
No one is forcing them to have their content listed on Google. If they don't want their content listed on Google unless they are paid Google will happily remove them and put something else.
The problem is they want to control what Google lists and they want to get paid for them being listed. Google should just pull out at this point. They have no right to tell Google that they have to both list them and pay them to list them. Google can list what they want under whatever terms they want, if you don't like it then just don't get listed on Google. Let these organizations create their own search engine that they like and bring in their own users.
I'm sick and tired of copy protection extremists expanding and extending copy protection laws well beyond all reason. Time for the people to work to brings things back to something sensible. Copy protection lengths shouldn't be so ridiculously long and the penalty structure shouldn't be so ridiculously one sided for one thing. For copy protection to still be pulling in the wrong direction shows how bought and paid for our governments are.