> No, Australia is trying to get Google to pay any time they link to a news website.

Reality is ... always more complicated.

The problem they are trying to solve is Google is a monopoly in Australia (government claims 95% market share). The news businesses are a disorganised rabble. And rabble is putting it politely - more like a pack of thieves, stealing content off each other.

Being a thief was accepted because it didn't matter business wise. Their business was selling a daily dose of ads printed on dead trees. The "news" they are now fighting over was just the bait printed on those dead trees to entice people to read the ads. (Corollary: you're the product, not the customer goes back way longer than the internet.) Geography limits how far you can distribute dead trees (aka, newspapers), so each newspaper (or "masthead") operated over a limited area: about as far as you can transport a truck load of newspapers between midnight and dawn, so people could read your product over breakfast. Ergo, travel about 200km and any direction, and you were likely to find a new masthead, so there are lots of them, all fiercely independent.

The thing they stole of each other, and still steal off each other, is the bait, the "news", the thing they are so pissed off at Google for stealing. They didn't outright steal it of course, it was massaged by what they call a journalist into something that almost identical but side stepped copyright issues. The end result being if you look at two mastheads not too distant from each other, you will see very similar news featured on each. It didn't matter because the thing they were selling was the ads and they had a geographic monopoly. It wasn't stealing, it was cooperative behaviour driven by cost minimisation and it benefited everybody. I exaggerating of course as there is also paid for syndicated news and reprints of press releases, but much of what you read is tarted up tweets, internet posts, and scraped from other papers. It's only bait remember. It could be kitchen floor sweepings for all they care. All that matters is people lap it up, so they read those precious ads.

Then Google came along, following the industry practice of stealing content, to the point modifying by reducing it to a sentence or two so copyright didn't apply, but then sold ads to all their customers. Stealing customers and their revenue is a whole other thing.

The solution for the news businesses has always been obvious, just negotiate with Google for a price on the news. It's highly unlikely Google would forgo all news in their search engine, and there is only one place they could readily get it: the Australian newspapers. Google is already paying some Australian outlets for their content so they aren't complete Machiavellian pricks. But they are businessmen, so they've tested the market and found there were literally hundreds of outlets all selling the same merchandise and of course they had a highly valuable thing to offer in return: if we link to you, you get to display your ads. The response on the undisciplined rabble was to undercut each other trying to get that lucrative link, driving the price to zero.

The ironic thing is Google already gives them the tools they need to withhold their content: robots.txt and other more selective things. Google respects it https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/in... , so all they had to do is use it. But like a pack of two years olds tasked with fairly sharing a bag lollies they couldn't, so they asked the government to do it for them. And that's what worked in France: the government rounded them up and forced them to negotiate as a single entity, so it was one monopoly negotiating with another, and after much haggling they came at a price.

I'm not a lawyer, but this Australian legislation appears to insisting on one on one negotiations between Google and each newspaper, with the government setting the price if they don't agree. This changes nothing, it’s still a 95% monopoly presented with a turkey shoot, so it’s inevitable they won’t agree. The idea of the Government setting forcing a price when two monopolies could just sort it out between them is I'm guessing what Google objects to, and I'm pretty sympathetic.

But now I'm floored. Google has retorted like some spoiled child: well we will just turn off Google search in Australia. It's, well, insane. It's making for great political theatre in Australia. We were regaled with nightly TV news footage of the pollies in parliament milking it for all it's worth (the Prime Ministers response "we make the rules" being just one of them). It's like Google walked into their home ground, and handed over their head on a platter.

I don't understand any of this. It's like we are dealing with a couple two year olds whose negotiating skills amount to making demands and throwing tantrums. What are they thinking?