I was on @alexandermats show on ET Now yesterday, to discuss Facebook and Google vs Australia when it comes to News content, and how they've taken different approaches.

The key question: can this happen in India?

A thread 👇

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1. What's going on?
A proposed News Media Bargaining Code released by the Australian competition watchdog forces Google and Facebook to enter into arbitration with news publishers to decide a price for News on their platforms.

Price for Google to surface news. For users to share on FB.

2. Power imbalance: Australian competition commission believes there's a power imbalance between News publishers and social media platforms. This is true.

3. Google has done a deal with Rupert Murdoch's News corp

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and is now offering it “significant payments” for featuring it's publications in its News Showcase. This is a bad precedent in my opinion. Microsoft waded into this debate and supported what Australia was doing.

Why is this bad?
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4. There's no compulsion: Google doesn't need to index news. Users want news and Google prioritises news on search results anyway, but publishers can prevent Google from indexing using their robots.txt exclusions. No one is forcing publications from being indexed.

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