Stand firm, Australia. Let them leave. You'll be better off without these bullies in your country.
* ' Ms Silva described the ultimatum as a "worst case scenario", adding: "It's not a threat. It's a reality". '
Note the authors description as 'ultimatum', while the plain language of the quote is "it's not a threat".
I'm not the biggest Google fan these days; but from what I know how Google operates [1], I don't think it's a threat either. I think Google would genuinely have to stop providing search.
[1] Google -as a search engine company pushes traffic to your site, which you can choose to monetize or not as you see fit. On their side the company monetizes their search engine by means of advertising in this case. If you ask for the traffic AND both sides of the money, there's no profit left for the search engine provider anymore, and they will be forced to shut down (in that region).
Any discomfort one may experience from that comment is misled, as the plain language clarified it’s not a threat.[1]
But more seriously, Google would not have to stop providing search.
For the most part, the code of conduct in question is regarding “content” while you’re talking about search engine results.
Google as a News Portal slurps content from publisher sites and you can get a gist of the news without leaving Google (see also Google’s AMP technology push which looked scarier at the time this dust up started).
Remember Google has sites such as https://news.google.com/, and remember how content creators and curators were not sure how upset to be over what Google did with Yelp reviews and the like. Using Google today, fewer and fewer searches return plain SERPs.
Certainly there are a couple sites in EU and elsewhere mad at having their search result links show up without getting paid for them, and for that, well, they should google robots.txt.
SERP snippets are one thing, structured content someone else spent money to bring together is another. For the most part, this is about usage of content.
1. Footnote: “Consequences of continuing to post here may include, but are not limited to, having additional postings posted.”
Google shows links or a small snippet of news articles, a user may decide hey I want to read that and clicks the link and goes to the media outlets website to read more. This is driving traffic to media websites?
If it wasn't for Google surfacing the content, unless the user was a daily reader of that specific media outlet that user would never of visited that media outlet to view the article.
I get it if one media outlet is ranked higher than another media outlet that can/may be unfair and some transparency on how news search results are ranked may help, it may also do the reverse if you no the rank algorithm you can game it.
I'm not sure how making Google pay to show a link to a news story helps though other than Murdoch trying to prop up there news properties that look to have reduced readership.
Have I missed anything or miss-understood the problem?
That is how it would work if Google presented simple search results, like they always have. But their snippets are different: they try to extract an answer to the users actual query. So if they’re doing their job correctly the user actually won’t visit the site, because they will have been given all they need by Google.
I’m undecided about whether this law is actually a good idea, but I can see the point. A contrived example: I want wonder “how much damage was caused by last week’s hurricane?”. A newspaper might have assigned a reporter to covering the hurricane, and they’d call up various local authorities that can estimate this kind of thing, then write an article containing that info. All salaried work that cost money. Along comes Google, grabs the relevant paragraph, and shows it on my search results page. No need for me to click, no money goes to the newspaper.
There is also the regulatory route where the will of the people demand change.
In France such an agreement was just signed: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/21/google-inks-agreement-in-f...
I'm not clear on the specifics but it seems clear thst Google is on a PR campaign to avoid impact to their profits worldwide from such moves.
Then I gave a shot using DuckDuckGo for a few days and boy was it apparent how far Google search has fallen.
And to think I resisted DDG for so long based on the silly name, thinking it can't be a serious search engine with that name. But now I realize, "Google" is just as dumb a name, so part of the blame lies with myself.
