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I still haven't seen a reason why a limited set of govt favored websites should be paid when they get traffic. For everyone else traffic acquisition is a standard cost of doing business.
Concrete example: both http://domain.com.au and http://realestate.com.au are housing sites. The former would get paid to receive traffic, the latter has to pay to acquire traffic.
I also dislike the principle of a govt shaking down some companies to force them to give money to other, more favoured companies. It's gangster state behaviour.
This piece also lays out a bunch of other likely (bad) flow on effects from the media code https://overland.org.au/2020/12/the-trouble-with-the-media-bargaining-code/
If the govt wants to crack down on a bunch of corporate tax loopholes like transfer pricing, and use some of the money to fund journalism, great! But that would also hit their mining buddies so isn't likely.
Yes I used to work at Google but trust me I'm not particularly well inclined towards them.
And the idea that a govt who's continually slashed the ABC budget cares about journalism is laughable.
To follow on from the real estate example - what about car reviews? The car review sites hosted by Nine/News get subsidised, the ones that aren't miss out? Or restaurant reviews? How's that gonna work out?
Richard Holden has more to say on the dodgy economics of the media code too https://promarket.org/2020/09/21/australias-news-media-digital-platforms-bargaining-code-great-politics-questionable-economics/?amp&__twitter_impression=true
And as the Lizzie O'Shea piece mentioned - will the money from FB/Goog go to fund journalism or will it go to executive pay and share dividends? I'm pretty sure I know which one is more likely.
Reminded that Greg Hywood, who helped send Fairfax down the drain, parked his Maserati outside the SMH building where the staff were on strike and holding a picket line.
FB has an easier job of dodging this, fwiw. They can just block sharing of links to AU media companies. Ironically this will savage Sky News new found business that's largely about FB sharing of rage bait.
And anyone who doesn't think Google would block search in AU is kidding themselves. Again, I no longer work there, and had absolutely no interaction with the levels that the decisions like this would be made, but I'm pretty sure they'd do it.
Of all of Google's revenue, AU makes up maybe 3%. I'd guess direct search revenue is at most a third of that (again, I had no actual view of numbers other than the public financial reports).
If they were to also pull things like AdSense it would be a larger hit, but that would also cripple the revenues of the media sites trying this on.
It's also not just the money - it's the being forced to share search algorithm details with the govt preferred media companies. That's not even remotely likely to happen.
An extremely tiny percentage of folks who work at Google or Facebook are able to see the deep details of how newsfeed or search and ads bidding works. There's approximately 0.0000000% chance they'll be willing to share this with rando AU media companies.
Oh yeah and forcing a company to hand over something of value (intellectual property) well, yeah
