Google and Facebook should abandon Australian news

What Google and Facebook do is display snippets of information from news websites so that readers know what information is there and are attracted to click on it. The media are complicit in this because they specifically dress their pieces up with headings, images and metadata so that they get the best displays on the search engine pages.

There are real problems with the social media giants, but it has nothing to do with them "stealing" content from news organisations, and this government/media proposal is a distraction from dealing with those real problems.

Google and Facebook use their almost monopoly status to rig political discussions. They pick and choose what opinions and facts will be made public, and they make undeclared contributions to political campaigns by biasing their algorithms.

They even de-platformed the head of the most powerful country on earth on the pretext of policy breaches.

They have a lot to be held accountable for, but that doesn't justify the government hitting them with a discriminatory tax to favour legacy media cronies.

If Google or Facebook refuse to carry Australian news, that would just be commercial good sense. If they entirely desert the Australian market, that is likely to be little skin off their nose – a market of 25 million eyeballs is Lilliputian – and fix some of the other problems by introducing competition into the search market, until those search engines are targeted in turn.

If the government thinks Google and Facebook should provide the service as a community service, then let them pay them a community service obligation payment which they could then be distributed amongst the legacy media on a per click basis.

Of course, this would effectively be a government payment to legacy media, and a reward to media companies for bad management. I wouldn't recommend it, but public assets being syphoned off for the benefit of select media proprietors is nothing new in Australia.