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Comment by davros | Hacker News Reader

“The principle of unrestricted linking between websites is fundamental to search and coupled with the unmanageable financial and operational risk if this version of the code were to become law, it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia,” That's a big threat, but pretty risky if their bluff is called because I think that might reveal that other companies could fill the search need if google vacates the space.

edit: quote source https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jan/22/google-threate...

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Other companies already do provide search tools. They're widely regarded as not being as good as Google's. Since other search companies are not covered by this code because they are not dominant, they will have an incentive to remain non-dominant, which implies that they will have an incentive to not significantly improve their algorithm.

Obviously leaving the market will not be great for Google, and staying in the market will not be great for Google. This is from their perspective an entirely crappy situation.

Moreover, the entire situation for Australian web users will be harmed by this.

But the fact of the matter is, the Australian government doesn't care about Australia web users, Australian businesses, or American web search companies. They do not care about free markets or equitable remuneration.

Their primary interest is in a certain American media company, because to get the American citizen who heads that American media company on your bad side means you lose government.

> Moreover, the entire situation for Australian web users will be harmed by this

How? There are other search engines to use. I don't use Google search. I haven't missed it.

Speaking as a DDG user, I "shell out" (!g) to Google multiple times a day because the results it offers are often hopeless.

> How? There are other search engines to use. I don't use Google search. I haven't missed it.

Well, I think there's a lot of disagreement about whether DDG or Bing are adequate. I use DDG most of the time, only rarely searching standard Google (tho often searching Google Scholar). If Google disappeared, I'd be fine; I'd simply get more precise with my searches.

The reason I claim it will harm Australian web users is because I have argued that it will motivate web search providers to make their product no more competitive than the market average. If their product is more attractive than anyone else's, then they risk becoming dominant and subject to the restriction. Consequently, the search engine space in Australia will always lag significantly compared to the space in other countries.

It's not the absence of Google Search that will harm Australia, it is the presence of a rule that makes exceptionalism costly.

We’re in the midst of a mass exodus from whatsapp to signal.

If google pulled out the same would occur.

This is a battle between monopolistic titans (google and news Corp). If google pulls out and news corp misses out on this new revenue source, I feel thats the best of both worlds.

We need fresh competition in search and news.

> We’re in the midst of a mass exodus from whatsapp to signal.

Don't you think this is just in the tech tech world? The only time I've heard a non tech person talk about signal, it was as "an app where you buy weed". :-/

Is be surprised if more than 1% of users hence left WhatsApp.

Do you think it is a bluff??

A free search engine operating under that law would have to have to be filled with allot more ads to recuperate the costs of showing links. Seams easier to just stop indexing Australian websites.

It's not a question of indexing Australian websites - be clear about this.

In Australia, they cannot provide a search facility that shows news - whether domestic or international - if they don't sign up to the code. So they cannot provide results from the NYT or Deutsche Welle in their search results that are accessible from Australia.

Why would a news paper in the us be classified as a newspaper in au?

What I don't get is why must Google Search completely shut down to fight this law. Can't they just stop crawling news sites that complain about revenue sharing?

They could go down that path. But the law prohibits linking to news in general, including international news that is unrelated to Australia. It is vague enough to likely include blog content as "news". Should Google accidentally link to something that is considered news, then that opens them up to serious fines.

It would require an incredibly intelligent algorithm to filter all of that kind of content out.

There’s the restrictions on serving any news that others have mentioned, but the proposed code also requires them to advise the media organizations of any change to their algorithm that could affect the media companies at least 14 days in advance of that change. For a company that doesn’t give anyone a heads-up about changes coming, let almone specifics of the change and how it might affect their property, that’s enormous.

I've said this elsewhere[0], but as I see it Google no longer simply provides links to the content, it also provides substantial excerpts. In that way they are effectively copying the original works.

That's called Plagiarism[1].

I've said more in the longer comment[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25870825

[1] Added in edit: squiggleblaz[2] correctly notes[3] that it's not plagiarism, since Google is not passing off the words as their own. It's more accurately a form of fraud, or perhaps copyright infringement. Copyright laws allow for short snippets to be quoted as "fair use" (or similar) and so far the quoting by Google has been regarded as legitimate. Perhaps that needs to change.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=squiggleblaz

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25870909

It's not plagiarism. Words have meanings. Plagiarism is when you take someone else's work and pass it off as your own (or an earlier work and pass it off as new); it as a form of fraud.

This is closer to copyright infringement, although so far it has been regarded as legitimate.

I've added to my comment ... thank you.

>Copyright laws allow for short snippets to be quoted as "fair use" (or similar) and so far the quoting by Google has been regarded as legitimate. Perhaps that needs to change

From my observations Google is trying to pull out the answer you are looking for so you don't have to visit the source website, seen it with Stack Overflow answers , or list of commands to run to do X, or sometimes it can understand questions like "how I do X" and finds the correct forum post and the answer with the steps recommended by users to run.

The end result is less people are visiting the original page, so it would be similar with Google just cloning the entire Web and all the pages you browse will be on Google servers.

I think you're missing that it's voluntary:

Australians being Australians, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Google pulling out simply led to VPN subscriptions spiking.

It's been a while but Australia used to be in a position where Australians were hungry for US-made media (TV shows, movies) but only received it several days (TV) or weeks to months (movies) after their US release. Piracy was crazy rampant through this time. It wasn't just the tech-savvy folks doing it, even the elderly would know someone who could get them a DVD of some new movies for the kids.

So circumvention of idiotic geoblocks aren't anything new.

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