> There’s no explanation of how this fits in to their previous ads and videos that threatened to pull search from Australia.

That's because the threat to pull search from Australia was just bluff and bullshit.

Amazingly it worked - I've had a number of people come up to me in panic they would lose access to ad words (that was a business owner), their pictures, their contacts, and gmail. Turns out bluff and bullshit is all you need to make ScoMo from marketing (Australian's moniker for their current prime minister) do a 180. That's politics, I guess. To be fair, if though losing access to those Goole services was a real possibility I'd be in a panic too.

But it was never going to happen. As far as I know, the servers that handle all of those things aren't based in Australia now. All Google have to do is remove their legal presence out of reach of the Australian government. Unless the government resorted to some great firewall of china style thing, all of those things would continue to work, and the revenue streams they generated would be unaffected. The only change is no local people on the ground, no GST, and no paying the piddling amount of corporate tax they deign to give us.

> I wish they would pick a stance and clearly say what they mean.

Oh, they picked a stance long ago, and they haven't moved since. 6 months ago Google said they would pay for some news [0], before the draft code was first published. I don't think sharing revenue from a news.google.com.au or whatever it is going to be called now was ever a major issue for them.

Their stance is about a different line in the sand. The newspapers have asked their politician mates, the LNP, to pass a law to force Google to give them money from their search engine business.

Just how badly on the nose this is is not obvious because another piece of bullshit, this time finely finessed by ScoMo himself, is they've come up with some definition of a "digital platform" that somehow captures Google. They didn't. They can't make some general rule like "if you link to someone you have to pay them" - because it's farcical, capturing every web site out there. They can't claim Google primarily makes their ad revenue from newspaper links, because they are a tiny fraction of the results returned by most searches. They can't claim Google is stealing stuff because Google respects robots.txt so the newspapers can turn off Google search indexing at any time if they so wish, and they can't use copyright because the 1 or 2 sentences Google quotes are fair use. So in the draft legislation they don't devote a lot of words defining what a "digital platform" is and then leave the decision of which companies fit that definition to a Judge. In a fine act of obfuscation they do have lots of words defining a "digital platform" - but the companies who have to pay the newspapers are listed by name in a schedule that is at the sole discretion of the minister, and the legislation specifically bans legal challenges to his decision making all those words irrelevant. It is the most blatant exhibition of crony capitalism I've seen in a while.

Google has drawn a line in the sand at "you can force us to pay for links that you say in robots.txt we can index, and are publicly available for free to everyone else". That has not changed, and I'm guessing they would either stop indexing newspapers or remove their legal presence from Australia before they’d let the newspapers put their snouts into the search ad revenue stream. All they've done here is say "we will build a better site than news.google.com.au, dedicated to news, and share ad revenue that it attracts".

If you think this site will do any better than G+, then I've got a bridge to sell you. Rupert Murdock is not known for buying bridges, so if they government accepts this it will acceptance of total defeat from him. Sadly, for Rupert ScoMo from marketing is making conciliatory noises. I think it's finally dawned just how strong Google’s "we will just remove our legal presence" option made their position. Google does have a reasonable presence in Australia (maps.google.com is was an Australian company they purchased, and development is still done here), so moving would be a pain, but it would have stuff all effect on the one thing that really matters - their revenue from Australia. ScoMo is just waking up to the fact he's been played for a moron by Rupert, again, just as Trump did before him, and this offer is at most is a face saving fig from Google. I hope he's grateful they gave him one.

[0] https://www.news.com.au/technology/e5abf473f1091188f78d77589...