Australians suffering from the fear posed by the looming threat of switching to Bing for their search results got some welcome news Friday. Like the country lawmakers continue plans to force Google to pay news providers, the tech giant has launched a small paid news platform in Australia.
For months, authorities in the country below have been pushing Facebook and Google to work together in drafting legislation that would charge those megaplatforms for news that appears in social feeds or search results. And the companies have done everything they can to explain why they don’t like that plan. (TLDR: It’s hard and expensive.) Facebook endangered to get news from its network in Australia, and Google endangered to block searches across 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 domestic publications have signed a deal with Google to offer news content for an undisclosed fee to be included in the news program. Its outlets include The Canberra Times, The Illawarra Mercury, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, The New Daily, InDaily, and The Conversation. The News Showcase is part of one $ 1 billion program Launched in 2020, Google is designed to support news publishers. In October, Google said it was pause a planned Australian launch during negotiations with lawmakers, but the company has apparently changed its mind.
In a blog post, Google said that content from its partners will appear in panels in different locations across its products. This is how it works:
The panels appear on Google News on Android, iOS, and the mobile web, and in Discover on iOS, driving valuable traffic to a publisher’s site. We also plan to make News Showcase available to Search and other areas of Google News and Discover in the future. Each article linked in a News Showcase panel takes the reader directly to the corresponding page on a publisher’s site, allowing publishers to further grow their business by showing users ads and subscription options.
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The launch of the news product coincides with the start of a parliamentary investigation for review the draft legislation, according to Reuters. As it stands, the law aims to create negotiating conditions between media outlets and technical platforms to negotiate reasonable fees. In the event that mutually acceptable terms cannot be settled, a government panel would set the price of the fees.
Thursday, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison told reporters that he had a ‘constructive meeting’ with Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, but Morrison did not seem to be deteriorating. “At the end of the day, they understand that Australia sets the rules for how these things work,” the pripe minister said. “And I was very clear about how I saw this happen.”
It is unclear how the News Showcase will be received by media companies in Australia, but a spokesman for one of the country’s largest news organizations, Nine, told the Guardian that the program is just another example of monopolistic practices. “It must all be done on their terms and that is not an approach that we will participate in. We support the legislation that the government is proposing as the best way to ensure fair payment for our content,” the spokesman said.