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Comment by weissed | Hacker News Reader

"Software giant Microsoft Corp said was confident its search product Bing could fill the gap in Australia if Google withdrew."

This is opportunistic at best and a bad idea for the internet long term. Shame Microsoft is encouraging this only to gain market share.

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I'm a little confused, why is Bing exempt from this new law?

Edit: Okay, they are exempt because they are not called Google or Facebook. I didn't realise the law was only going to be applied to two companies by name. Which, I don't know, doesn't sound like how laws should work?

And what happens when Bing is serving everyone their news and News Corp is still not making any money?

Do they extend this particular law to any business that isn't owned by Murdoch and makes any ad revenue from news content?

The law is written such that the companies it applies to are those the Minister deems that it should. The Minister is also allowed to change the definition required for a company to fit eligibility without altering the law.

So, yes, if the Minister suddenly decides to add others to the list, that is exactly what will happen. But there's no need to pass it by Parliament first.

And that is as bad as you think it is.

That's... ridiculous.

Thanks for the info :)

Yeah that is my biggest problem with this legislation... the law should allow or criminalise specific behaviours or characteristics, not name specific organisations.

I'm no Google or Facebook fan but targeting them in legislation for who they are rather than what they do is crazy.

This is nothing compared to obliging the Chinese government when Google backed out there.

Microsoft has publicly endorsed this law, and has suggested that other countries should copy it. Personally I disagree, but it's worth reading their statement.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2021/02/11/endorse...

> 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. This means that news content generates significant indirect value for search and social media sites [...] Microsoft’s Bing search service has less than 5% market share in Australia, [<4% it seems...] if we can grow, we are prepared to sign up for the new law’s obligations, including sharing revenue as proposed with news organizations. [...] the obligations described above could easily be written to apply to any search business that has more than 20% market share in Australia. At Microsoft, we are fully prepared to aim for this search share and become subject to the law’s obligations the day we do. [emphasis mine]

So... If you quintuple our Aus market share, making it larger than anywhere else at present, then we'll happily give Murdoch a kickback. But if you just quadruple it, no, that's not enough. Until then, taking money from Google is good.

I wonder if the oft repeated "independent news organizations" was simply misdirection, or code for "not ABC or SBS". Public funding of news organizations is highly contentious in the US. Encouraging the forcing of a US company to fund a foreign public broadcaster... is not pretty optics.

I don't think that particular statement expresses an opinion on whether it's good or bad one way or another, just an observation that this law of attainder would block Google and not them, and that they have a working search engine. Probably Microsoft know that they don't do anything very different to Google, that they have lots of money and News Corp might come after them next, so I'd expect them to not be really rejoicing either.

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