Australians suffering from anxiety caused by the imminent threat of having to switch to Bing for their search results received a welcome news on Friday. As the country lawmakers move forward with plans to force Google to pay news providers, the tech giant has launched a small paid news platform in Australia.
For months, the country’s authorities have pushed for Facebook and Google to cooperate in drafting legislation that would charge these mega-platforms a fee for news appearing in social feeds or search results. And companies have done everything they can to explain why they don’t like this plan. (TLDR: it’s difficult and expensive.) Facebook threatened to get news from your network in Australia, and Google threatened to block searches in the country completely. But on Thursday, Google gave signs of compromise because announced the launch of the 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 to be included in the news program. The media include The Canberra Times, The Illawarra Mercury, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, The New Daily, InDaily and The Conversation. The News Showcase is part of a $ 1 billion program Google was launched in 2020 and was designed to support news publishers. In October, Google said it was pausing a planned launch in Australia while negotiating with lawmakers, but the company apparently changed its mind.
On a blog post, Google said that its partners’ content will appear on panels in various locations of its products. It works like this:
Dashboards will appear on Google News on Android, iOS and the mobile web and Discover on iOS, bringing high-value traffic to a publisher’s website. We also plan to bring the News Showcase to Search, as well as other Google News and Discover surfaces in the future. Each article linked in a News Showcase panel takes the reader directly to the corresponding page on a publisher’s website, allowing publishers to further increase their business by showing users ads and subscription opportunities.
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The release of the news coincides with the start of a parliamentary inquiry for review the draft legislation, according Reuters. In its current state, the law aims to create bargaining terms between media and technology platforms to negotiate reasonable fees. If the mutually agreed terms cannot be agreed, a government panel would set the price of the fees.
On Thursday, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison told reporters that he had a “constructive meeting” with Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, but Morrison didn’t seem to be backing away. “At the end of the day, they understand that Australia sets the rules for how these things work,” oprime minister said. “And I was very clear about how I saw this happening.”
It is not clear how the News Showcase is being 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 has to be everything on your terms and this is not an approach in which we will participate, we support the legislation that the government is proposing as the best way to guarantee a fair payment for our content,” said the spokesman.