Australians suffering from anxiety caused by the imminent threat of having to switch to Bing for search results received welcome news on Friday. As a country lawmakers go ahead with plans to force Google to pay news providers, tech giant has launched a small paid news platform in Australia.
For months, the Dutch authorities have pressured Facebook and Google to cooperate in drafting legislation that would charge those mega-platforms a fee for news that appears in social streams or search results. And companies have done everything they can to explain why they don’t like that plan. (TLDR: It’s hard and expensive.) Facebook threatened take news from its network in Australia, and Google threatened to completely block searches in the country. But on Thursday, Google showed signs of concession has announced 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 to 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 news presentation is part of a $ 1 billion program Google launched in 2020, designed to support news publishers. In October, Google said so pause a planned Australian launch while engaging in negotiations with MPs, but the company seems to have changed its mind.
In a blog post, Google said that the content of its partners will appear in panels in different locations within its products. Here’s how it works:
The panels will appear on Google News on Android, iOS and the mobile web, and in Discover on iOS, bringing high-value traffic to a publisher’s website. We also plan to bring News Showcase to Search, as well as other areas of Google News and Discover in the future. Each linked article in a Showcase News panel takes the reader directly to the appropriate page on a publisher’s website, allowing publishers to further grow their business, showing users ads and subscription opportunities.
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The launch of the news product coincides with the start of a parliamentary review inquiry draft legislation, conformable Reuters. As it stands, the law aims to create negotiating conditions between the media and technology platforms to negotiate reasonable fees. If mutually acceptable conditions cannot be set, a government group would set the price of the fees.
On Thursday, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison he told reporters that he had a “constructive meeting” with Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, but Morrison did not seem to back down. “At the end of the day, they understand that Australia is setting the rules for how these things work,” he said.rime msaid inister. “And I was very clear about how I saw this being played.”
It is not clear how Australian media companies receive News Showcase, but a spokesman for one of the country’s largest news organizations, Nine, told the Guardian that the program was just another example of monopolistic practices. “Everything must be in their condition and this is not an approach we will take part in, we support the legislation that the government is proposing as the best way to ensure a fair payment for our content,” the spokesman said.