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Comment by beached_whale | Hacker News Reader

Could they just not operate in Australia and give the proverbial middle finger to their government. Then just continue to link as they choose?

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Yes and I hope they do. It's a bad law. If you have your news open and accessible on the internet without users having to authorize themselves then it's public information at that point.

Block it by a paywall. But they wouldn't do that because they would stop showing up in search engines. Google is providing a free service by directing traffic to these companies.

Reminds me of the LinkedIn case about bots crawling their website.

They don't even need a paywall. If they don't want to be listed on Google they can always use robots.txt.

We've been through this in Germany. Publishers demanded to be paid for Google usage of results and news snippets. Google thankfully didn't give in to such a ridiculous demand and gave publishers the option to de-index them or keep listing them for free. Obviously all of them opted for the latter.

Australia is not the first country to pass a law like this. Spain and France have both done some version of this as well. There's going to be a point where enough countries stand up to them that they can't just withdraw without substantially hurting their own business long-term.

I haven't noticed any affect from Spain and France doing this. Recent earning shave been great. As long as they have the US they'll fine. And I don't see Asian ex-China and Eastern Europe pulling this any time soon

I think the EU and Australia massively over estimate the amount of money their "news" links bring to google.

For google this will be a pure economics game, and when they passed the other laws Google looked at the numbers and noped out.

The same will be true for Australia.

I do not see the UK, US, or any of the emerging economies pulling this, so the EU and Australia will alone in this battle and the amount of money being demanded it seems to me most likely exceeds google profit, so they will just end the service to the nations, and blacklist the sites from search

Search will be fine because 3rd party sites will be indexed so it will be a 2 hope, and given the incestuous nature of "news" today where every story is written more or less than same on 100+ sites all over the globe I am sure people will find the news they are looking for just fine with out those sites in the index

The Eu and Australia are massively overplaying their hand

And who would be daft enough to take a niche which involves paying to advertise for others?

They can unite and tantrum all they want but it won't change the underlying reality any more than fervent demands for a "good people only" backdoor encryption won't exist.

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