Australians suffering from anxiety caused by the imminent threat of having to switch to Bing for search results were given a warm welcome on Friday. Like the country lawmakers advance plans to force Google to pay news providers; the tech giant has launched a small paid news platform in Australia.
For months, the Dutch authorities have been pushing for Facebook and Google to cooperate in drafting legislation that would charge these mega-platforms a fee for news that appears on social media or search results. And companies have done their best to explain why they don’t like this plan. (TLDR: It’s hard and expensive.) Facebook threatened to get news from your network in Australia, and Google threatened to completely block searches in the country. But on Thursday, Google showed signs of concession announced the launch of News Showcase for Australian users.
According to the company’s statement, seven national publications have reached an agreement with Google to provide news content for an undisclosed fee that will be included in the news program. Outlets include The Canberra Times, The Illawarra Mercury, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, The New Daily, InDaily and The Conversation. The newsletter is part of a $ 1 billion program Google launched in 2020 designed to support news publishers. In October, Google said yes paused an Australian launch planned while he was negotiating with lawmakers, but apparently the company has changed its mind.
In a blog post, Google said that the content of its partners will appear within panels in various locations of its products. Here’s how it works:
The panels will appear on Google News on Android, iOS, and the mobile web, and on Discover on iOS, and will bring high-value traffic to a publisher’s site. We also plan to bring News Showcase to search, as well as to the rest of Google News and Discover surfaces in the future. Each linked article on a News Showcase board takes the reader directly to the corresponding page of a publisher’s site, allowing publishers to grow their business by showing users ads and subscription opportunities.
G / O Media may receive a commission
The launch of the news product coincides with the start of a parliamentary inquiry to review the draft legislation, in accordance with Reuters. In its current state, the law seeks to create negotiating conditions between the media and technology platforms to negotiate reasonable rates. In the event that mutually acceptable terms cannot be established, a government group would set the price of the fees.
On Thursday, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison they told reporters who had a “constructive meeting” with Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, but Morrison did not seem to back down. “After all, they understand that Australia sets the rules for how these things work,” prime msaid inister. “And I was very clear on how I saw him playing.”
It is unclear how Australian media companies receive the News Showcase but a spokesman for one of the country’s leading news organizations, Nine, told The Guardian that the program is just one more example of monopolistic practices. “It has to be all in its conditions and this is not an approach in which we participate, we support the legislation that the government is proposing as the best way to ensure a fair payment for our content,” the spokesman said.