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NST Leader: The face of Google

BIG TECH is at it again. It is either your code or our search function, Google threatened an angry group of senators in Australia on Friday.

Big tech's ultimatum comes as Australia plans to pass a law to force Internet platforms to pay for news they take from local media publishers.

Facebook, the bully-in-tow, mouthed the same menace, mutandis mutatis. One senator labelled the two giants' take-it-or-leave-it threats as blackmail. We, too, will label it so.

As one American analyst put it, the "move fast and break things" utopian ethos has taken a blatancy most vile. Not only at home in the United States, but also in every corner of the Earth where the Internet has a penetration rate. In this sense, "www" is really a worldwide web of discontent.

Size often does this. As an old saw notes, one becomes too big for one's own good. That is precisely what the Senate Committee in Australia is telling Google and Facebook: you may be big but Australia is bigger.

Just pay for the news you take. And that is all there is to it. Nothing more, nothing less. But Google and Facebook just don't want to pay.

In other times, such taking without permission or payment will be theft properly so-called. The Great Robbery, it is. It is not that media companies haven't tried to negotiate a just payment. The hubris of the tech giants has often stood in the way of negotiations.

No decent government will watch its media publishers be robbed by Silicon Valley thus. Never hold a nation to ransom like this, be you even so mighty as Google or Facebook. Big tech's free-lunch blatancy is built on some hard-to-believe bookkeeping. If the Daily Mail is right, Australian regulators are on to something.

Every A$100 spent on digital advertising, A$53 goes to Google, A$28 to Facebook and only A$19 to others. That's 81 per cent to the freeloaders. Here's more. Google turns over A$4.9 billion in Australia, A$4.3 billion of which is just from advertising.

As for Google's corporate tax, it paid only A$59 million last year. The financial harvest isn't too different for Facebook. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Facebook Australia's advertising revenue grew by 16 per cent in 2019 to A$673.9 million, earning it a profit of A$22.7 million. The company's profit is said to have fallen from A$39.5 million in 2018 due to an income tax bill of A$16.7 million.

Contrary to what Google and Facebook are saying, this is big money to be shared. Sure, the law, if passed, will force, even a fine of A$10 million will be imposed on the errant two Silicon Valley visitors.

But if they have any commercial sense, they will at least agree to an old idea floated in May in Financial Review, an Australian English daily. There, nine chairmen of media companies and former federal treasurer Peter Costello said all Google and Facebook had to do was place A$600 million a year to be distributed between the Australian media companies.

This isn't a big ask by the Australian media. At most, onlya10 per cent ask of ad revenues.

According to Costello, the government's analysis points to Google and Facebook making A$6 billion a year from advertising.

Like Costello, we ask: why do trillion-dollar companies don't want to pay for news content they use to earn ad revenues? Avarice? Hubris? Readers' choice.

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