Why are Australian media publishers so intent on going after Google and Facebook? Same reason robbers target banks: that’s where the money is. That’s why they’ve leant on the Federal Government to impose a mandatory code of conduct on the big digital platforms, including paying for news content.
Australia’s papers this morning were as one in bannering the story: “Giants told to pay up” said The Australian. “Tech giants face forced payments for news” said The Sydney Morning Herald. “Tech Titan Takedown” screamed The Daily Telegraph.
Not so fast: the government announcement is a win for the publishers, and particularly for News Corp who have been leading the campaign against the platforms on behalf of old media. But there’s a long way to go before we can expect the Silicon Valley giants to start cutting cheques to the Murdochs.
The main target is Google and a share of the $4.2 billion in (mainly) advertising revenue that it collects in Australia. By comparison, that’s more than the ad revenue taken by the three major television networks combined.
The mandatory code to be developed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is designed to go beyond payment to include how the tech companies rank and display news stories and require prior notice of any changes to their algorithms which affect news.
This morning’s media rewarded the Morrison government with “world first” pats on the back, but Australia is sliding into the slipstream of the European Union and its member states.
In 2019, the EU determined that headlines and opening words of an article (known as “snippets” in Google speak) were covered by copyright, requiring Google to do a deal with the publishers to reproduce them in search results.
As France moved to require payments for this copyright, Google removed the snippet text from its search results in France, leaving only the headline and the url. France’s competition authority has declared this action is likely to constitute an abuse of the search engine’s dominant market position. This month, it’s given Google three months to negotiate a deal with the publishers.
Google has form in playing hardball. When Spain legislated payments for news search in 2014, Google blocked its news tab in that country — and readership dropped as a result..
The debate may seem arcane, but Google search remains the dominant channel for accessing news stories. Snippets catch publishers both ways: they can provide enough information to satisfy the casual reader. Strip them out and there’s not enough taste to lure other readers to click through.
Facebook, meanwhile, has been attempting to fob off the publishers — particularly News Corp — with its news tab.
Last November, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined News Corp CEO Robert Thomson to announce that payments would be made for stories in a newly-launched news tab. Despite claims at the time that this would be rolled out across the world, six months later it’s still in trial in the United States.
The News Corp claim against Google in Australia seems to go beyond snippets. News stories, it argues, are central to the Google business model. They provide the body of up-to-date content that brings searchers in, even while Google doesn’t directly monetise those news searches through ads.
This is likely to mean that the Australian publishers will be looking for a formula that ties the proportion of news searches to overall search revenues. (These sort of formulas are not unheard of in copyright licencing: universities and schools, for example, have long paid a fee for photocopying based on student numbers.)
Despite the excitement that ran around newsrooms overnight (“designed to save the mainstream media” says The Australian’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly), it’s unlikely to significantly rescue the publishers from their financial mess. According to the ACCC’s digital platforms report, Australians only spend 2.3% of their time online on Australian news sites.
Google says it already pays significant copyright fees in Australia — mainly for music used on YouTube. (Digital streaming on, for example, YouTube and Spotify are now the major source of fees for music use.) However, this is based on clear and long-established copyright principles. The claim for a payment for news which the publishers, themselves have long provided for free is harder to determine.
As in Spain and in France, Google (and Facebook) will be approaching this with a global frame, conscious that any concession made here will generate matching claims in all other jurisdictions. Expect more hardball.
“Google search remains the dominant channel for accessing news stories.” says Christopher, the author. Does it? What evidence is there to suggest that? I know that I’m a weirdo, but Google doesn’t have anything to do with the way “news” reaches me. I certainly don’t ever “search” for news.
Mailing list newsletters (Crikey, The Conversation, The Briefing) and RSS feeds (ABC, etc) get the job done. I know that some prefer Twitter to RSS feeds, and I suppose that can work too, but you get the vagaries of algorithmic selection that way.
Facebook and their news portal is following Apple with theirs. How many people use Apple’s service? I don’t know anyone who does.
Would it be possible for INQ to collect some actual statistics to back up this sort of assertion?
I often find news from Google searches. For example, if I want to find how bad the Hillsong jamboree was in spreading covid19 I do a Google search since I don’t recall it being reported in my usual sources of news.
I doubt that INQ has the resources or perhaps even the expertise to collect statistics on how people access news, but perhaps it can quote others’ good studies.
My first thought reading the headline was “they will just stop linking to local news outlets” – then half way down the page, there’s the comment that it’s already been done.
i’m not saying that Google et al are blameless in their behaviours, but how can this go any other way?
Thanx for this informative report.
It is going to need some narrow drafting to exclude Google’s use of headlines from the fair use exemption from copyright while presumably retaining Crikey’s and my fair use exemptions from Nine’s copyright in quoting “Tech giants face forced payments for news”.
Ah, but that’s the rub, Gavin. Isn’t it. ‘Narrow drafting’? FFS. Such legislation is impossible. It cannot be written. The idea is nonsensical, in any but dull same-old-same-old Australian media-political bully-power terms. (‘This is the next-‘new’ landscape: same as the old, tough sh*t if you still don’t like it.) As we can see, as this absurd (desperate, Legacy-last-ditch) push actually gains traction, it’s nonsensical that the ACCC will somehow being able to ‘draft’ anything remotely workable. Parse the already-laughably outdated idea of ‘copyright’ further still. Not just ignore the voluntary – and calculated, knowing, mutually-beneficial cost-benefit – inherent in a Rupert availing himself of a Google algo-bot…which btw applies equally to every whining pro meeja Byline (what you ‘give away’ in free copy, you get back in free advertising AND search rank-accessibility, geddit?). Not just that breath-taking hypocrisy.
But go further: let’s also pretend po-faced that any ‘government’ any ‘law’, any ACCC…is up for the job, too, of navigating subjective abstractions like ‘fair use’, not ‘picking media winners’, not ‘just bedding in the status quo’…yes, let’s make sure this ‘Magic Narrow Drafting’ takes into account the difference between Google and Crikey and a start-up and my harmless old granny’s Blog with six followers…(even, you know, if she happens to break a Meghan exclusive)….and the different functions of different ‘information products’, and the relative ‘values’ of that ‘information content’…(‘OK, Rod Sims, here’s what we’ve come up with: a Kate McClymont investigative piece is worth 17-Googly-Ruperty-Widgets, but a Sharri Marxson sh*t-hit is only worth 5.5 Googley-Ruperty-Widgets…a Chris Uhlmann Twitter-b*tch is a solid 8 GRW, both a Leigh Sales Prog PM Pash AND a Louise Milligan Sick Mick Bash = a scrupulously-balanced ‘9 Googley-Ruperty-Widgets’…while poor old Chris Kenny is worth Minus 23 (without the cute puppy Byline pic) and minus four million with it.
Really. FFS. FFS. This Legacy-Polly Flog-Bag Coalition must think we here on Teh InterWebz are…cretinous.
They must reckon we are cybermugs. The condescending info-tw*ts. The contemptuous info-w**kers.
And this is why I celebrate the impeding death of ‘Legacy Journalism’. The Death-by-Suicide-Of-the-Professional-Information-Hypocrites. Journalism is dying. Hooray. Hooray. Can’t happen soon enough. ‘Journalism’. What a construction. (Can’t wait for Rod Simms to tell me what it is…and isn’t. Put a value on it. Yippee!!)
What a farce. ‘Journalism’ – it’s just code for ‘Informayshuns-R-Us’.
Let’s be utterly clear about something. This has zero to do with safeguarding the viability of Australian reportage, of accuracy and openness in public information, of external independent scrutiny, independent thinking, material reality discovered, tested, tested again, structured accessibly, disseminated equally…etc, ie all the crucial information ‘procedural disinfectants’ of the Fourth Estate at its vocational best. All brilliant, sorely needed vocational things. Desperately needed, now, in this chokingly-toxic Age of Misinformation.
This has nothing to do with that. Murdoch, Stokes, the Chan9Fax…none of these people are reporters. None of their companies do reportage.
This has zero to do with safeguarding ‘Australian content’. This has zero to do with ensuring a media and content level playing field. This has zero to do with protecting the bylines and copyrights of Australian information sector value creators and adders. And it has zero to do with harvesting fair revenue from global digital giants, or even blocking their ongoing freeloading.
This is solely about protecting Rupert Murdoch’s rapidly dwindling information power in Australia (and, by extension, overseas), as well as shoring up that of Kerry Stokes, and Channel 9-fax (mostly a matter of ghostly-Packer habit). This is about politicians trying hard to protect ‘the Faustian devil they know’ – Legacy media – rather than come under increasing direct pressure from alternative sources of media and information, expert peak bodies, protest groups, academics, corporate interests unfiltered by the BAU lobbying hierarchy, the ABC, individual citizens….information. Proper information. Not ideology, not propaganda, not marketing. Not ‘for profit’ information. Commodified.
Politicians and professional media alike are terrified of the uncommodified (and now un-commodifiable) information anarchy of the internet. Whether it’s me ranting away in lonely obscurity here, or Zuckerberg’s empire, fizzing with lunatics, geniuses, dullards, astroturfers, experts, kooks, cranks, conspiracy theorists and community networks of every conceivable kind. It doesn’t matter…we can all be found. We can all have our say, and if it’s good enough – if it gets legs, as ‘information’ – they can’t control it: not the President, and all his minions, not the Barons, and all their minions.
Because we’re not necessarily here for the information-money. We can’t be bought, or bought off. As Malclm Turnbull might have it…that terrifies a Rupert Murdoch. And what terrifies a Rupert Murdoch…terrifies a Scott Morrison from Information Marketing.
The reason all of them – and their hierarchies of professional journalists – hate the internet so much is not just because they know it’s destroying their business model. It’s also their…entire basis of existence, raison d ‘etre, power, purpose…point. This attempt to government-strong-arm the impossible into functional existence – who gets to ‘own’ information – is just another play in a century-old Information Protection Racket that is no longer scary.
Tell Rupert’s enforcers to f*** off.
Bravo! Masterful. Better than the original article.
The presses want the free publicity that they get by posting their articles in public (on Facebook) or getting indexed by search engines (after diligently calling the “index me now” API), which drives traffic to their sites, and get paid for that attention too! Nice work if they can get it.
This is all the (obvious) result of “information” no longer being scarce. Now it is attention that is (relatively) scarce. Perhaps they (News/9Fax/etc) should pay me to read? No, my price is too high: it’ll never happen.