Google V the Australian Government

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hamohawk1

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Feb 18, 2011
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You'd have to be living under a rock, or not using Google, Youtube etc.

I've attached the correspondence, below.

Open letter to Australians
We need to let you know about new Government regulation that will hurt how Australians use Google Search and YouTube.
A proposed law, the News Media Bargaining Code, would force us to provide you with a dramatically worse Google Search and YouTube, could lead to your data being handed over to big news businesses, and would put the free services you use at risk in Australia.

The way Aussies search every day on Google is at risk from new regulation
You’ve always relied on Google Search and YouTube to show you what’s most relevant and helpful to you. We could no longer guarantee that under this law. The law would force us to give an unfair advantage to one group of businesses - news media businesses - over everyone else who has a website, YouTube channel or small business. News media businesses alone would be given information that would help them artificially inflate their ranking over everyone else, even when someone else provides a better result. We’ve always treated all website owners fairly when it comes to information we share about ranking. The proposed changes are not fair and they mean that Google Search results and YouTube will be worse for you.

Your Search data may be at risk
You trust us with your data and our job is to keep it safe. Under this law, Google has to tell news media businesses “how they can gain access” to data about your use of our products. There’s no way of knowing if any data handed over would be protected, or how it might be used by news media businesses.

Hurting the free services you use
We deeply believe in the importance of news to society. We partner closely with Australian news media businesses — we already pay them millions of dollars and send them billions of free clicks every year. We’ve offered to pay more to license content. But rather than encouraging these types of partnerships, the law is set up to give big media companies special treatment and to encourage them to make enormous and unreasonable demands that would put our free services at risk.
This law wouldn’t just impact the way Google and YouTube work with news media businesses — it would impact all of our Australian users, so we wanted to let you know. We’re going to do everything we possibly can to get this proposal changed so we can protect how Search and YouTube work for you in Australia and continue to build constructive partnerships with news media businesses — not choose one over the other.
You’ll hear more from us in the coming days — stay tuned.
Thank you,
Mel Silva, Managing Director, on behalf of Google Australia

Tough to get a impartial read on this one as the MSM seem to blame Google, and vice versa.

Pretty hard to see Google getting beaten in this circumstance though.
 
Google and Youtube are all about gathering and selling as much data as they can on their users anyway. The only thing that changes is how Google controls this information. Nothing is truly free.

Same with Facebook and s**t too.
 

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I'm so-so on Google and Facebook having to pay news organisations (not a coincidence Liberal Government is assholing the ABC out of that by the way). Much bigger problem is these 'old media' companies getting Google's algorithm while nobody else does. Prepare for your search results to be drenched with News Corp, Nine and Seven West.
 
I'm surprised Facebook hasn't thought about starting up its own Australian news organisation. The Australian media 'giants' are small fish by comparison. Facebook could run it out of their small change and grab all the advertising.
 
I'm surprised Facebook hasn't thought about starting up its own Australian news organisation. The Australian media 'giants' are small fish by comparison. Facebook could run it out of their small change and grab all the advertising.
Who would be doing the journalism though? They like to repeat the work of others and direct traffic to their own version of the content and advertising associated with it.
 

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This shouldn't be a partisan issue.

The tax issue is a genuinely messy one. People point at Amazon (for example) and point out they pay no tax, but it's because they have genuinely not recorded a profit.

They are reinvesting their profits, and shareholders are taking the capital growth over that.

To counter this people are proposing wealth taxes, but they are not a simple and clean concept either.
 
The tax issue is a genuinely messy one. People point at Amazon (for example) and point out they pay no tax, but it's because they have genuinely not recorded a profit.

They are reinvesting their profits, and shareholders are taking the capital growth over that.

To counter this people are proposing wealth taxes, but they are not a simple and clean concept either.
This is something I'm willing to leave to the experts, because this is not my area. Suffice to say, multinational tax avoidance needs to be dealt with worldwide.
 
Who would be doing the journalism though? They like to repeat the work of others and direct traffic to their own version of the content and advertising associated with it.

Let's be blunt, it's the same with newscorp and nine. They ditched AP Australia, a baffling move if they wanted to support journos writing about the news.

Jump on news.com.au, and half the articles are cut n paste of what people are tweeting
 
This is something I'm willing to leave to the experts, because this is not my area. Suffice to say, multinational tax avoidance needs to be dealt with worldwide.

I'm the same, it's not all about tax avoidance though and that's part of the problem.

Don't get me wrong, the fact apple operates out of Ireland is all about avoidance. Just saying their example isn't the template for all
 
The tax issue is a genuinely messy one. People point at Amazon (for example) and point out they pay no tax, but it's because they have genuinely not recorded a profit.

They are reinvesting their profits, and shareholders are taking the capital growth over that.

To counter this people are proposing wealth taxes, but they are not a simple and clean concept either.

They are claiming the revenues earned in Australia in lower tax countries like Singapore by claiming their entity here is a Sinaporean agent.

Its not just dodgy but he know its illegal which ishy they have started paying it back. But its a tough battlue unless all countries get on board because they can claim and hide and offset making it hard to track.
 
They are claiming the revenues earned in Australia in lower tax countries like Singapore by claiming their entity here is a Sinaporean agent.

Its not just dodgy but he know its illegal which ishy they have started paying it back. But its a tough battlue unless all countries get on board because they can claim and hide and offset making it hard to track.

amazon isnt posting profits

you're thinking the likes of apple who changed their tax zone so they can post their profits in a low tax environment.
 
amazon isnt posting profits

you're thinking the likes of apple who changed their tax zone so they can post their profits in a low tax environment.

I was speaki g about Google which makes billions in revenue and pays billions in licensing fees to Google in Singapore so they pay 15% tax there rather than 30% tax here.
 
I was speaki g about Google which makes billions in revenue and pays billions in licensing fees to Google in Singapore so they pay 15% tax there rather than 30% tax here.

and this is also a bigger issue, because everyone from BHP to newscorp does this. why you think so many blue chip companies have offices in the Caymans, Bermuda, etc?
 
Who would be doing the journalism though? They like to repeat the work of others and direct traffic to their own version of the content and advertising associated with it.

Oh, it's definitely cheaper to do it the way they are at the moment, but if they were forced to pay, hiring a newsroom from the ever-growing pool of unemployed Australian journalists would be chicken-feed for Facebook.
 
May want to look at how much tax BHP pay each year. State and Federal. Not a good example.

may want to look at how much they are not too

i used to work for one of the biggest tax payers in the country they were based, and they still got one of the largest fines in history (back then) for transfer pricing
 

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