Microsoft Urges US and EU To Follow Australian Digital News Code (theguardian.com) 88
Microsoft is calling for the US and the EU to follow Australia in introducing rules that require technology companies to share revenue with news organizations and support journalism. The Guardian reports: The company, which stood against Facebook and Google in supporting the proposal, argues that it is necessary to impose such a levy to create a level playing field between large tech firms and independent media organizations. Australia's proposal requires large technology companies to not only pay a fee for news content they use or link to, but to agree to partake in arbitration to determine that fee. In response, Facebook and Google threatened to pull services from the country, while Microsoft took the opposite tack: eagerly stepping up to promote Bing, which currently has fewer than one in 20 searches in Australia, as an alternative.
In a blog post, Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said that he felt the Australian rule "deserves serious consideration, including in the United States." "Democracy has always started at the local level. Today, far too many local communities must nurture democracy without a fourth estate," Smith wrote. "As we know from our own experience with Microsoft's Bing search service, access to fresh, broad and deep news coverage is critical to retaining strong user engagement." "Our endorsement of Australia's approach has had immediate impact," Smith argued. "Within 24 hours, Google was on the phone with the prime minister, saying they didn't really want to leave the country after all. And the link on Google's search page with its threat to leave? It disappeared overnight. Apparently, competition does make a difference."
Smith says the change in U.S. government could be a chance for Washington to switch its position. "Facebook and Google persuaded the Trump administration to object to Australia's proposal. However, as the United States takes stock of the events on January 6 [the attack on the Capitol in Washington], it's time to widen the aperture. The ultimate question is what values we want the tech sector and independent journalism to serve. Yes, Australia's proposal will reduce the bargaining imbalance that currently favors tech gatekeepers and will help increase opportunities for independent journalism. But this a defining issue of our time that goes to the heart of our democratic freedoms."
In a blog post, Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said that he felt the Australian rule "deserves serious consideration, including in the United States." "Democracy has always started at the local level. Today, far too many local communities must nurture democracy without a fourth estate," Smith wrote. "As we know from our own experience with Microsoft's Bing search service, access to fresh, broad and deep news coverage is critical to retaining strong user engagement." "Our endorsement of Australia's approach has had immediate impact," Smith argued. "Within 24 hours, Google was on the phone with the prime minister, saying they didn't really want to leave the country after all. And the link on Google's search page with its threat to leave? It disappeared overnight. Apparently, competition does make a difference."
Smith says the change in U.S. government could be a chance for Washington to switch its position. "Facebook and Google persuaded the Trump administration to object to Australia's proposal. However, as the United States takes stock of the events on January 6 [the attack on the Capitol in Washington], it's time to widen the aperture. The ultimate question is what values we want the tech sector and independent journalism to serve. Yes, Australia's proposal will reduce the bargaining imbalance that currently favors tech gatekeepers and will help increase opportunities for independent journalism. But this a defining issue of our time that goes to the heart of our democratic freedoms."
Google indexes my site (Score:2)
And my own content so I want $$$$ too
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Yeah but they're probably losing money with your's
Re:Google indexes my site (Score:4, Funny)
Oups, that was supposed to be anonymous.
Ah, competition... (Score:2)
Right, it's Microsoft, the original evil empire.
Yet, one of the power players lobbying against the others is the foundation of the free market theory that the market will regulate itself... not, by itself, a panacea against overreach by tech's biggest players, but in the absence of astute government oversite, it is something.
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Re: Ah, competition... (Score:1)
+1, Funny, but really, call me when Apple usees go murder others while having a big crazy smile on their faces... Cause that's kinda normal for true religions/cults.
(INB4 iBelt with octanitrocubane "battery" XD)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Go look at the bible, basically every single book was written by a leader, be it a king , high priest or military leader.
Moses - prince of Egypt. Not interested in whether he is real, the point is the claim to be a royal.
King David, King Solomon, Samuel, Elijah, Jeremiah, even jesus claims to be "King". These are not humble nobodies they are or claim to be leaders. Even the apostles argue multi
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her uncle Mordecai was the 3rd in charge of the Persian empire.
Job i believe is traditionally attributed to Moses.
Job himself was hardly poor, you might want to read how much "stuff" he had.
Many of the Proverbs are attributed to Wise King Solomon. Many proverbs are attributed to "wise" solomon.
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Sheesh, why would you believe those books are actually written by the people with their names on them? That was merely advertising. Most of them were not even written contemporaneously with the names on the covers.
Islam is even worse than Christianity for cooking the books after the fact. And Christianity is worse than Judism.
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Just dont understand why anybody would not figure out the obvious that rich kings etc of the past were arseholes and only do things for their advantage, its never about whats right. I mean does anybody really think the Saudis are muslim because its the right thing ? Of course not they are musl
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Dont think the Saudi royal family are muslim because its the right thing to do, no they keep it alive because it serves a purpose for themselves.
The same is true of christianity , the torah, even all the way back to the times of Mohammad.
Yoc an repeat the same process with say the Aztecs, the religion there was legitimising the power of the e
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There was a book (I forget by whom) which recounted some meetings held between some Saudi royals and FDR during WWII or immediately before. The part I recall the best is the recounting of how the Saudi royals drank everyone else beneath the tables.
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Standard Oil would like a word.
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With who? One of the East India companies?
Re: Ah, competition... (Score:1)
*laughs in Great Britain*
*laughs louder in Gaius Julius Cesar's Roman Empire*
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as would United Fruit
Since I consider most media today (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Since I consider most media today (Score:1)
Funny, since it's all ad money, and I'm running ad blockers all day every day.
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that's what the BBC is with the TV licensing, and cable TV in North America.
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I consider you to be incorrect. Most of the major quality news organizations (i.e., not Fox) work hard at establishing the truth and their sources. You are just suffering the usual post-modern ennui, and picking a common meme is all of which you are capable.
Yup democracy... (Score:3)
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Re: Yup democracy... (Score:3)
Re: Yup democracy... (Score:1)
And you seriously trust them to actually report it all? Why? Because you ask nicely? :D
And come on, this is not the 80s. Who does bribery anymore? You only pay to elect one of your biggest believers (and the biggest tool), and then he goes on to work for you, not for money, but because he truly believes it.
Bribery is for the losers from the competition who fail to brainwash that guy to switch sides, and want a favor anyway. Bribery is for beggars. Not choosers.
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Call, few, just talk to, plenty if you can find him. Unlike the POTUS the PM doesn't traditionally hide behind an impenetrable wall of secret service. I remember years ago the outrage of some guy just going up and talking to our PM while he had a some kind of large gardening tool in his hand, I think it was a hedge trimmer or chainsaw or something. The media was pushing this as some major breach of security. The PM was like "WTF? it was just some guy who wanted to chat!"
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I knew it was a schoolboy with a screwdriver working on his boat, but it was driving me nuts not remembering which PM it was.
Found it: Screwdriver hug was no threat: Howard [smh.com.au]
Prime Minister John Howard says he was not troubled by being spontaneously hugged by a schoolboy who was holding a screwdriver.
Mr Howard was enjoying his morning walk along Melbourne's Yarra River on Wednesday, his 67th birthday, when Steve Battaglia, 16, raced over to hug him.
Mr Battaglia, a member of the Carey Baptist Grammar's rowing club, had been adjusting his boat and was still holding a screwdriver when he embraced the prime minister.
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Screwdriver! That could have been it. I knew it was some kind of tool.
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I wonder how many Australians can call and talk to the PM just like that.
That's a bloody outrage, it is! I want to take this all the way to the Prime Minister. [youtube.com]
Hey! Mr. Prime Minister! Andy!
Publicly funded news reporting (Score:5, Insightful)
If we want the public to finance news reporting then we should just pass a law and do it. Search engine companies should not be compelled to do this. If a search engine and the news entity can't come to terms, then don't do business with each other. Passing a law forcing one industry to subsidize another is not how capitalism works.
If this bothers you pretend like the taxes Google pays are used to fund public journalism. If you then want to raise taxes on search engines, that's a different question.
Doesn't Google honor robots.txt anymore? (Score:2)
Because I thought that they were one of the good search engines that you could tell if you wanted your site indexed or not. So if you don't want it indexed by them, just tell them using the age old techniques that every webmaster should know.
But telling them to index your site (for free) and then demanding that that they fork over money for traffic directed to you? No. Start paying them to index or find a way to sign a mutually beneficial partnership and then you can start asking for revenue share.
If they
Re:Doesn't Google honor robots.txt anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
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yep.
google should say WELL FINE THEN. and stop linking to them.
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The Australian proposal prohibits them from taking their ball home too. If I understand correctly, they would have to completely shut down all operations in Australia so that there is nothing for the government or courts to take from them in order to escape its requirements.
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If they leave altogether, it doesn't bother me. I can use a VPN, and I'll be showing my customers how to get their google back. Even the toady telcos that bowed to banning P2P sites will be hesitant about blocking www.google.com
Anything, ANYTHING that causes revenue pressure for NewsCorp is a net gain for the world.
I drove past an LED billboard two days ago, touting the "experience" of the Australian Fox news team. Their experience lies in telling lies.
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No, a lot of news sites what Google to index their sites to drive readers and not distill all the information into blurbs exclusively shown in Google's search results so no one goes on to their site.
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Those who want to make these rights a bastion from which to impose a mandatory and non-waivable fee are wrong. It is a model that has already proven its failure in Germany in 2013 and in Spain in 2014. Attempts to impose a mandatory fee on Google for the use of links to press news caused a major traffic drop Web of the group Axel Springer and the closing in Spain of the Google News service. /quote
Re: Doesn't Google honor robots.txt anymore? (Score:1)
> implying that "copyright" is sane
You need to look into how that actually works, mate. Seriously. It is literally making a monopoly legal to make artificial scarcity and usury legal to make racketeering legal, and actually has nothing to do with creators, and everything with "distributors". You know... the industry that the Internet made obsolete, but somehow still exists, By The Power Of Greyskull^WCocaine.
Inflation (Score:2)
All this does is drive inflation. Google spends money paying for news. So the cost of advertising on Google goes up. So the cost of the goods being advertised goes up. A quick check of history shows that wages have been flat for the last 40 years. We'll all have less money to spend on MS Office as our income buys less and less every year. Yep, great idea there Microsoft.
Can tell people who have no clue about ads or econ (Score:2)
How is the cost of Google ads going to change in any way? How does Google's costs drive them? Because, I've used Google ads, and I don't see how that would even happen. Mechanism please.
What really happens is that Google's profit margin goes slightly down.
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What makes you think Google is going to just absorb that cost? Google is in business to make money, not to give the world free news.
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What's the mechanism that Google will use to raise costs? Have you ever purchased online ads? They already charge the maximum the market will bear.
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I suppose you mean RTB, yes it an auction marketplace. Google is charging a flat rate or or percentage of ad spend to use its platform, participation is not free. Google simply raises its fees, its cut of whatever the spend is in the auction.
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Not quite.
When the aggregators begin paying money for indexing news, the companies that actually write the news will be paid, and they'll be able to afford the writing tools Microsoft sells, and also write better news. People reading better news will make better choices. Life will become a tad better.
Yep, maybe it isn't such a bad idea, even for Microsoft.
Also, see how one-sided storytelling works both ways.
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"'they'll be able to afford the writing tools Microsoft sells, and also write better news" I don't think there is a link between the two. My usual run in with MS tools ends badly in me swearing at their tools.
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According to you in another thread, US news is just FUD and Government propaganda. It makes no sense that you'd want to fund more of it.
There are a lot less journalists that win in your scenario than there are readers that do not gain financially. The trend is still downward after all.
No one in this thread has explained why companies like Google would simply absorb the cost rather than passing the cost on to their revenue streams. Google does not exist to bring you free news. Follow the money.
huh? (Score:2)
the f*ck? we have to pay to link to stuff? why stop at news media. if you link to my knitting webpage I want money too.
Re: huh? (Score:3)
No, not to link, but Google included several sentences from every news reports as well. That is copyright infringement.
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Since when? Who has been found liable for copyright infringement for doing that?
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Yeah I know Australia has been trying to do it, but the other commenter said it IS copyright infringement, not that it might become so at some point. So, is it currently against copyright law in some jurisdiction? If so, where?
so regardless of the legal basis or mechanism for doing so, society really will be better off if we find some way to bail it out.
I agree, but I very much doubt this proposal is the best way to do it.
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Google stopped showing news results from European publishers on search results for French users last year after local regulators urged it to pay for content, and then on Thursday [January 21, 2021] the firm said it reached a deal to pay media publishers in the country. In 2014, it shuttered Google News in Spain following new copyright legislation.
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False, that is Fair Use. Look it up.
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Not if it is a service designed to get you "all news in one place", as Google does, and you don't ever go to the source for most of the stuff you read there.
Re: huh? (Score:1)
PROTIP: If your "news" is so shitty, that taking the first three lines makes people never even go to your site, *it's not worth money*. Don't you have the concept of a threshold of originality over there?
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Hahaha, if a sentence or two conveys everything the news site sucks and has nothing to say.
It's fair use and fine, which is why google and other sites have been doing it for years. There is no problem.
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Yes, in Australia there is no problem now.
nobody mentions Murdoch ? (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought the Australian law was specifically intended to protect Rupert Murdoch's news empire. Is MS in bed with Murdoch or just trying to annoy Google? Seem to recall that Murdoch owns a huge percentage of the news sources available to citizens there.
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The reason Microsoft is urging this is because Google has threatened to pull search out of Australia, which suddenly makes Bing usage more likely.
If I recall, Google has about 95% search dominance in Australia.
So Microsoft's real motivation here is purely their own greed - it's not about the payment stream of news companies.
Re:nobody mentions Murdoch ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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"Microsoft sees something that's harmful to Google in Australia and wants it exported to the US and EU."
MS knows that's not gonna happen. Maybe in Tragikistan or Slobbovia. It could only happen in Australia because Murdoch owns the government. And even there, the citizens won't tolerate Bing; they'll storm the capital.
Re: nobody mentions Murdoch ? (Score:1)
Huge percentage? From what I've seen, it's pretty much 100%, and then some. (You can own things *twice* :D)
Re:nobody mentions Murdoch ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is MS in bed with Murdoch or just trying to annoy Google?
Don't look for conspiracy theories where there are none. MS sees a PR move in an unrelated battle between it's competitor and a news company and is capitalising on it. Nothing more.
It's called marketing.
Yes (Score:2)
So Microsoft should pay people to use Windows and Office as well. No? It only makes sense when it's not your business model.
Re: Yes (Score:2)
They would have to pay me quite a bit to use that shit.
The issue is not only linking (Score:5, Informative)
If the issue was linking, I think some sort of compromise would be possible, however:
https://about.google/google-in... [about.google]
1) They define "news" vaguely
"In this proposed law, “news” is defined vaguely and broadly—way beyond what most of us would consider “news”. There seems to be no clear or obvious distinction between news and non-news content, and the way that Google works, there is no algorithm that could navigate such a vague and broad definition.
2) They can ask for any price:
Unfair and unprecedented arbitration process: It imposes an unfair and unprecedented baseball arbitration model that considers only publishers’ costs, not Google’s and incentivises publishers to make enormous and unreasonable demands.
Basically, I can say "my blog was a news site, and you need to pay my hosting fees", and if the arbiter agrees, there is no negotiation or appeal. Any website becomes a potential time bomb.
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I'm going through my personal blog templates to make sure I can disable all outside href's in case this law does pass.
It's just a personal blog but whenever I start a project and make something, I always link to the youtube videos and other maker sites I initially got inspiration from or for code I used in the project.
The AU law defines this as linking to news, and even if not to a .au or .eu domain, if the site is in the eu/au they can invoice me when I add in a link.
Worse, if I link to a github repo, it d
Microsoft owns LinkedIn (Score:1)
I wonder if Microsoft will be so enthusiastic when they have to pay every time someone shares a news link on LinkedIn (which they own). It's an open-ended liability unless they limit/restrict linking in Australia.
Journalism promoted by Microsoft (Score:1)
Impact for /.? (Score:2)
Slashdot copies a lot of the original article, would it have to pay sites?
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Re: Impact for /.? (Score:1)
That is what Google is doing too. Apparently, Google copies a lot less too.
Narrow the focus? (Score:2)
it's time to widen the aperture.
In photography that would put focus on a smaller part of the subject, blurring the rest of the picture.
Google vs Murdoch (Score:2)
Don't like both, but I strongly hope Google will fight this battle and destroy Murochs evil empire. That is what this really is about.
Here's a solution. (Score:2)
Two step solution, no government money needs to be spent.
1. Google should drop all links to any and all websites purporting to be "news".
2. Google should offer a contract to those websites wanting relisted.
Done.
Calm your tits (Score:1)
and
The rules on linking are a little vague but the purpose of this bill is to prevent Google and Facebook displaying content and calling their piracy a 'link'.
So everyone else, calm your tits, it's not about you.
fu ms (Score:1)
WWW objective is to link. (Score:2)
WWW value is to link to other documents online.
Considering that definitions of "news" and "large company" is always disputable it would break the web, no?
And solutions already exists:
If a site does not want to be linked to, make it a paywall?
If "large companies" quote too much of somebody's else content would it not fall into existing copyright law?