Australia can’t afford to lose battle with Google

Getting Google to pay something for the content it currently steals from media groups is an issue of national importance. Australia can’t afford to lose the battle.

The biggest issue facing Australia and Australians is clearly our relationship with China. Picture: AFP

The battle with Google is a battle that Australia just cannot afford to lose.

To stress, I’m saying that it’s a - actually, utterly seminal - battle that Australia must not lose.

Not Australian media, or even specific media outlets like this paper or its corporate owner NewsCorp, but the country overall - assuming we are a country that values having some control over itself and its future.

It’s also, not exactly incidentally, a battle and an outcome of just as great importance to the ABC as a media entity, and through it the taxpayer, because the - successful - outcome should generate dollars for it as much as the privately-owned media groups.

The national significance of getting Google to pay something for the content it currently steals from media groups - and not only steals, but can and does manipulate way beyond any’ fair user’ context - turns on two big things.

Do we really want to give to Google - primarily on its own, but perhaps in a duopoly combination with Facebook - near-total control of access by Australians to news and information?

To allow it to decide most precisely and in the finest detail what you are allowed to know about and what you are allowed to see?

Enabling Google - primarily on its own, but perhaps in some combination with Facebook - to be able to essentially totally seal off the possibility of any ‘unapproved’ leakage of information/images/videos that the manipulated Google algorithm and know-nothing teenage (mentally if not still physically) Google geeks don’t approve of?

For be under absolutely no apprehension, that is where we are headed - arguably, already anyway, but certainly and rapidly, if we surrender to Google’s threat to remove search from Australia.

Indeed, let them go and good riddance. Competition boss, ACCC head Rod Sims, might be a little optimistic by suggesting as he has that if Google goes this would let a hundred (pretty tiny) flowers bloom in the search space.

But whether he’s too optimistic or not, we have no choice but to call Google’s bluff. Surrendering to Google is quite simply not an option; it would be surrendering Australia’s future to it.

We have already seen disturbing enough evidence of Goggle - and Facebook and YouTube and Twitter - prepared to censor what ‘they’, the manipulated algorithm and their geeks, don’t like

It joins with a further disturbing development of recent years: a growing move not simply to censor ‘unacceptable views’ but to censor content for specific financial advantage.

So we see Hollywood increasingly not simply ‘amending’ movies and TV and streaming shows to be ‘acceptable’ in the biggest market in the world: China.

But increasingly, not making in the first place content that would potentially ‘upset’ the Chinese regime.

This is spreading like a creeping virus through all the major gatekeepers: Amazon removing product, otherwise known as literature, from its ‘store’.

This indirectly heading to making China the censor of what Americans (and Australians) are allowed to read or even know about.

The biggest issue facing Australia and Australians is clearly our relationship with China. It would be an act of utter stupidity to cede to the digital gatekeepers, effectively as agents of China, this sort of power.

Google claims what the government proposes is unworkable. The claim is utter nonsense. It is all about money and even more about power, monopoly power.

As I wrote last year, what the government proposes should be a win-win for both Google and publishers that create content; critically, as it is based on promoting co-operation rather than conflict, and market-based solutions rather than rigid regulation.

We must persist; indeed, insist.