What Is Happening With Google in Australia?
By: Justin Cheong
Tags: Big Tech, Media, Google, Australia, Journalism

Why does this matter? Because of how the news is displayed. Google’s algorithms decide which snippets to show you, and that determines which news providers will receive ad money from your view. When you click on a snippet via mobile, you also pass your data onto Google, rather than the news source.

What is ACCC trying to do?

ACCC is concerned with the power imbalance between Google and Australian news companies. News companies in Australia have little bargaining power when negotiating with Google about how their news gets shown.

Australia is experiencing a local news extinction event. Local newsrooms have been shutting down, accelerated by the impact of Covid-19. Loss of public interest journalism threatens a functioning democracy. Imagine trying to keep your local government accountable when there is no local news reporting — as is now the case in one-third of local councils across Australia.

Meanwhile, more people use Google to read the news than ever before. Google is no longer simply an online search directory; it is now a globally adopted service that acts as a portal to the digital world.

ACCC is attempting to restore balance by redistributing some of Google’s ad revenues to Australian news companies. Globally, this response is not new. For years, countries in Europe have been attempting the same thing.

What might happen as a result?

There’s a chance that the Australian public could be impacted by all this.

Australians who back the ACCC may not be aware that when a similar law was tried in Germany and Spain, Google followed through with their response to limit search results, and the decline of local news in those countries got worse.

In Spain, after a “snippet tax” was passed in 2014, Google shut down their news aggregation service in response. This led to a fall in news consumption across Spain, disproportionately affecting smaller publishers.

If ACCC follows through with their code, and Google follows through with their response, the local news wipeout in Australia could continue.

Why is this happening?

Some say Google’s operations are enabling the decimation of Australia’s news media industry. Others point out that the Australian government is passing a code that may favour larger media companies at the expense of smaller ones.

But really? It seems that both organisations are just doing their best to pursue their missions while abiding by the law.

Google’s loyal users back them for providing a free service. Others support the ACCC for trying to protect public interest journalism.

But as with many complex problems, everyone doing what they think is right can still lead to negative results.

What can we do about it?

The digital economy has grown massively over the past two decades, and these are unprecedented times. The most important thing is to stay educated.

For policymakers, the answers are not obvious because Australian regulators were designed to look after the analog world. What’s different about a digital one?

To find the answer, start by following the data.

Today, data is worth more than oil¹. Data flows are happening at lightning speeds and in immense quantities, on a massive global scale.

Unlike oil, it isn’t obvious to the public how exchange of value happens with data. It’s a complex topic.

However, once we understand that data is the currency that digital businesses deal in, we can perhaps begin to think of ways in which we can co-exist with news and technology. Again, the most important thing is to stay educated.

To make sense of it all, here’s a story about our current global transition to a digital world:

How did we get here? A visual metaphor for the internet in 2020