Google threatens to withdraw search engine from Australia
From the text of the bill &quot;(1) For the purposes of this Part, a service makes content available if:... 21 (b) a link to the content is provided on the service...&quot;<p>This is pay for linking. It means anyone linking to a content provider is putting themselves at financial risk. Even if Google withdraws from Oz, whoever becomes the &quot;Baidu&quot; of Australia will essentially be faced with the same issue: They would have built their user base because user search engine demand is driven by content on the internet, one of the main purposes of a search engine is to provide links to that content, and this law exposes any search that links to content to claims on their revenue.<p>Of course, small sites need not worry, we hope, unless people can use the law to launch frivolous lawsuits and nuisance claims, but whoever would replace Google (even DDG) would face the same claims from news providers.<p>The reality is, the news business has been disrupted by the internet. They used to face competition only from a few local or regional competitors, but now the internet puts them into competition with all news providers around the world at the touch of a button. There&#x27;s no going back to the way things were.<p>In much the same way that music and tv got disrupted by Spotify and Netflix&#x27;s models, the publishing world needs new business model, and trying to siphon off search engines I don&#x27;t think is sustainable. They need a Spotify for News. And by that, I mean, content publicly discoverable, but paywalled behind a subscription service, that needs to be super low overhead.<p>A number of distributed mechanisms have been tried, by both Google, and others, at micropayments, but it seems to me that micropayment systems have largely failed for some reason.