LEON SCENT | Tech| CONTACT
In a newest example of wealth-hoarding senior billionaires demanding legislation to save their businesses from being swallowed up by innovative competitors, the Prime Minister has this week remained firm on his Murdoch-fuelled campaign against Big Tech.
With about as much tact as he has been showing during his diplomatic stoushes with China, Scotty From Marketing has now put Australia at risk of becoming a technologically 3rd World country.
If Morrison continues ‘calling bluffs’ with this legislation, Australians will be left without access to Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and YouTube.
The News Media Bargaining Code, according to the government, is necessary to address the fundamental bargaining power imbalances between Australian news media businesses, run by major Liberal Party donors and key election allies Kerry Stokes, Rupert Murdoch and Peter Costello – and major digital platforms.
Google, alongside Facebook, has been engaged in a stoush with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) since August over the code that entered the House of Representatives in late December.
But according to Google, the code is “unfair” as it puts the “way Aussies’ search at risk”.
The laws, which aim to redefine tech platforms as ‘publishers’ – will also set an undesirable global precedent – one that Facebook and Google would prefer to avoid by completely pulling out of the measly Australian market of 22 million people.
Google and Facebook believe it contains an unfair arbitration process that “ignores the real-world value Google provides to news publishers and opens up to enormous and unreasonable demands”.
This follows the nearly two decades of Rupert Murdoch and his mensa club at NewsCorp struggling to make a dollar out of this brave new online world.
After the genius idea to buy MySpace around about the time everyone stopped using it, Murdoch has maintained his marketshare by bullying consecutive Liberal governments into delivering a lacklustre national broadband made of copper wire – in turn delaying the evolution of streaming content, and forcing Australians to drill holes through their houses for Foxtel cables.
While even corner store newsagents have managed to find alternative revenue streams with the slow death of paper edition newspapers – The limping, boomer-run Australian media companies have decided they do not have the edge to compete with ‘the internet’ – and have instead demanded the Government to tax his competitors into leaving the market.
Morrison, who owes his 2019 election win to the partisan bias shown by all the NewsCorp rags, as well as the commercial TV network – looks to be doing what he’s told.
However, in their newest return fire, Google has said it may have no other choice than to go as far as pulling its Search function from Australia if the News Media Bargaining Code goes ahead in its current form.
MORE TO COME.
