Google: Open Letter to Australians

With little effort, I could start “Deco’s Local Newspaper” and publish a few issues online. This will give me a pathway to force Google to “deal with me.” This negotiation, mediation and arbitration could incur Google thousands of dollars in employee time, arbitration fees, and paying for half of the legal costs. Google cannot say “no” from the start. They can’t even ignore me without being in violation of the new legislation.

Relevant snippets:

“... news media businesses can participate in the code if:

- They predominantly produce ‘core news’, and publish this online: [...]

- They adhere to appropriate professional editorial standards: [...]

- They maintain editorial independence from the subjects of their news coverage: [...]

- They operate primarily in Australia for the purpose of serving Australian audiences: [...]”

“If the parties have not reached an agreement for the inclusion of news on digital platform services within three months of negotiation, and the parties have attended at least one day of mediation, news media businesses can elect to commence arbitration.”

“Arbitration under the code would be performed through ‘final offer arbitration’. The digital platform and news media business (or a collective of news media businesses) must each submit a final offer on the remuneration to be paid by the digital platform within 10 days of the commencement of arbitration. Parties would then have a further 5 business days to provide comments on each other’s offer.”

“After receiving submissions and comments from the parties and the ACCC, the arbitrator would have 30 business days to choose one or the other of the parties’ ‘final offers’, which would form a binding agreement between the parties.”

Therefore: I can force Google to enter into an agreement with me (even as a small business) and incur thousands of dollars of overhead costs in the process.

I’m not one to use hyperbole, but this is insane. I would not be surprised if Google turns off Google Search entirely for Australia when this code passes.

Also, this legislation is specifically for Google and Facebook: “Digital platforms must participate in the code if the Treasurer makes a determination specifying that the code would apply to them. The Government has announced that the code would initially apply only to Facebook and Google. Other digital platforms may be added to the code if they hold a significant bargaining power imbalance with Australian news media businesses in the future.”

This also seems strange, though I’m not against legislation specifically for mega-corps. Small businesses / startups are already hard enough to start with all the legislation they need to comply with, so protecting them from irrelevant codes like this is healthy for industry.

[0] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/DPB%20-%20Draft%20news%...

Playing devil's advocate, gaming search engines used to be about keywords then it became more about links. SEOs nowadays talk about "EAT", expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. It's still possible for marketers to mimic quality signals but it's less easy.

It would be much easier if the author of webpages were to declare themselves, sort of a Pagerank but applied on a person/topic level. It could/can be done with structured data. This of course has privacy implications but it keeps the publishers as transparent to the search engine as possible. Verification of sorts would be needed so other people don't use your authorship details on their own site. It's the kind of social fabric/data Google could've perhaps used Google+ for.

Slightly more on topic, marketers used to be able to do accurate keyword research with Google, and also see the keywords that people searched for when landing on their site, which is quite useful for figuring out their intent. Google keeps all that data to themselves now.

I find their "concerns" about "use of private data" a bit laughable, considering they used your personal search history to try and target you on sites you visit across the web via ads. They don't mind retaining data about users, they just don't like having to share it with anyone.

For example if I write `range`, it's extremely vague but one of the first results I get is Python. If I write range JavaScript obviously that'll be first.

Australians have become, in my view (happy to be proven wrong), very conservative because of the fact we've had it so good for so long, and therefore are a bit weak / soft and will cling to whatever excuse is presented by politicians that will appear to keep the good times rolling a bit longer, no matter how illogical the premise or how much it sacrifices a future just too far away to be scary yet.

Climate change and broadband as two divisive examples. They cost too much. Standing athwart history yelling Stop!

So, then it becomes, "what can be done to reduce the amount of data collected and the risk it isn't protected?"

That's where this law appears to be a step backwards.