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Google: Open Letter to Australians

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Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#341

Post by postingawayonhn »

deminature wrote: post #13
throwaway45349 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK you're missing a crucial point - they're trying to require G/FB to pay out billions to old (read: dying) media publications, which will crush small publications. On the Open Web, ABC News should get the exact same treatment at JoeBloggsYT2020.

Murdoch's News Corporation and the currently incumbent Liberal party are very cosy with one another, so it's not surprising the government is legislating to prop them up financially. It's beneficial to consumers to have a well funded fourth estate, however I doubt this is being done out of public interest.

> It's beneficial to consumers to have a well funded fourth estate

Fine. Have the government pay subsidies. It's not Google's duty to fund the newspaper industry.

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#342

Post by saalweachter »

ricardo81 wrote: post #214
darawk wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure how Google wins this one because it seems like an easy comeback is "well why don't you just be transparent and tell everybody that information". Ultimately, as long as they have anything resembling "secret sauce" they will be in the cross hairs of regulators for unfair treatment (even if just alleged, not proven), and the minute they don't they will lose their competitive advantage. Because then people…

Yes, same as the phone book for AAA Plumbers. 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…

> 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.

This was actually done back when Google+ first was launched — people could attach their authorship and it would be displayed on the search page, and you would also see a list of “experts” for particular categories on the right hand side when you searched for things like “python” or “poker”.

I believe it disappeared with the rest of Google+, because no one actually cared.

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#344

Post by [deleted] »

rokweom wrote: post #331
thu2111 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This law is the latest iteration of newspaper's attempts to turn Google into an ATM for the industry. The first attempt was in Germany. The law said search engines must pay newspapers to index their content. However it didn't specify what the price should be, so Google simply negotiated a fee of zero and the law was in effect nullified. The second attempt was in Spain. It is the same law, but this time they added a c…

How can government tell you what services you must provide? That's ridiculous.

[deleted]

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#345

Post by rbg246 »

autisticcurio wrote: post #340
rbg246 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may add: theguardian.com/au michaelwest.com.au theconversation.com themonthly.com.au All do decent analysis of policy and economics and holding government to account.

There are some things just never discussed. Do Australians sign a contract when they are born agreeing to the laws imposed on them, or do they sign a contract when they reach 18 years of age agreeing to the laws of the land or is Australia like every other patch of land on this planet bar the Polar regions, which dictates its laws and penalties just like every other dictatorship thats existed past and present? I'm su…

As they say ignorance is not an excuse, politicians are just a reflection of the people who voted for them.

But it sure beats authoritarianism, at least there is a chance of making it work!

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#346

Post by dash2 »

autisticcurio wrote: post #340
rbg246 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may add: theguardian.com/au michaelwest.com.au theconversation.com themonthly.com.au All do decent analysis of policy and economics and holding government to account.

There are some things just never discussed. Do Australians sign a contract when they are born agreeing to the laws imposed on them, or do they sign a contract when they reach 18 years of age agreeing to the laws of the land or is Australia like every other patch of land on this planet bar the Polar regions, which dictates its laws and penalties just like every other dictatorship thats existed past and present? I'm su…

I’m not saying this post is by a Russian troll. I’m just saying it’s so incoherently angry, so full of irrelevant heat and devoid of useful information, that it might as well be.

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#347

Post by squiggleblaz »

mgraczyk wrote: post #37
DetroitThrow wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually preferred it on Google services. I seem to get the same recommended videos on YT otherwise and I like how unlikely I am to click on an ad if I ever see one. What personalization products do you work on? Just curious if there are other services/situations where it's a better experience.

I work on a lot of different products, usually trying to answer the related question "how much better on average is the personalized experience". Often I look at the more relevant but less profitable question, "what percent of users would have had a better experience without personalization". It's always been <1%.

I guess "less than one per cent" is a lot more than you implied in your original post, and many of the people most likely to be in that less than one percent are likely to be part of this audience here.

It's true that it's probably not significantly profitable to worry to much about that group, but saying "I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer" is not a valid use of a statistic of "less than one percent have a better experience".

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#349

Post by squiggleblaz »

reaperducer wrote: post #43

To all the people (hopefully Australians) who paint this as the government propping up legacy media: Isn't it better to have control of your media in local, Australian-owned and regulated megacorps, rather than some faceless megacorp in another country?

Neither our media nor our tech giants are local, Australian-owned and regulated. There are some local media (Channel 9 and Channel 7) but most of it is Murdoch.

Re: Google: Open Letter to Australians

#350

Post by paulnechifor »

eru wrote: post #286
harry8 wrote: post #221

Open comment from an Australian to google: "Pay your f#$king tax like the rest of us or shut the f%$ck up." This comment stands apart from any and all implications of their special interest policy pleadings above which are all pretty tedious in comparison. Google don't pay tax for profit made selling in Australia. To hell with them and literally any case they have to make.

Google complies with all the relevant laws. If Australians want Google to pay more taxes, they should change the tax laws to make them pay more taxes.

Is this what Google is complaining about, changing laws?
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