Australia to introduce Google, Facebook legislation to parliament next week
The legislation is absolute trash, but Google's response as been absolutely abysmal.They spent multiple days inserting unremovable yellow banners on top of every search results page for every Australian that directed everyone to YouTube. Their spokesperson spoke to users like they were kindergarten children; their literal argument was that the legislation would be "like if you had to pay to tell your friends about a new coffee shop"[1].They also started running "tests" where they would silently blackhole Australian news sites for a subset of users. They simply pretended that ABC.net.au didn't exist, even though 90% of the content on that site is not news.I don't know what their PR team were thinking, but they've successfully demonstrated that they both have too much power and neither respect nor care about their end users.[1] https://youtu.be/dHypeuHePEI?t=56s