johnnyYen

I think you are mis-understanding what the news organisations source of business is. It's NOT the consumers of news, and never was. It's the advertising companies who place ads on the news organisations properties - and now the news organisations customers (i.e. the ad companies) have found it more beneficial to advertise with Google and FB.

"Facebook didn't bat an eye before blocking the pages of food banks and emergency service providers..."

No, FB obeyed the law. The legislation of what constitutes a "news organisation" is opaque. The legislation said pay for links or don't show them. FB complied with the law and elected not to show them. I cannot see the problem here - FB obeyed the law.

I'd think Google could easily get around this by limiting the frequency with which their GoogleBot visits News Corp web sites to, say, once a month. Effectively makes being indexed worthless for News Corp.

The ACCC response if disingenuous. It fails to mention the requirement that Google and FB must give news entities 28 days of any changes to their ranking algorithm. I mean WTF. It's the most brain dead piece of legislation you could imagine.

I was referring to your reference [1].

The AU government wants to give private media a leg up, but won't allow the ABC (or SBS) to receive any moneys from Google/FB, and at the same time regularly cuts funds to both the government funded media entities.

Ironic you should reference the ABC when the legislation specifically excludes the ABC from any benefit other "registered news organisations" may enjoy.

Seems like massive legislative over-reach.

1.100 Discrimination in this context will be considered to occur if the news content of a registered news business is disadvantaged incomparison to other news content in terms of the crawling, indexing,ranking, display, presentation or other process undertaken by the digital platform on any service provided by the digital platform, on the basis ofthe registered news business’ participation in the code.

IANAL, but my simple reading of this seems to imply it will be illegal for Google to NOT crawl and index News Corps content.