Media mogul Rupert Murdoch yells ‘Jump!’ Frydenberg and Fletcher respond by leaping into battle

“News Corp is an $8.6 billion corporation run from Sixth Avenue in New York. It is controlled by the (American) Murdoch family. Its exploits over seven decades have been as brutal and Darwinian as any media company in history. It has regularly dispensed “we will wipe you out” threats to small and large competitors across the world. Now, we’re told, “international platforms” who have “no commitment to local communities” are responsible for depriving 60 Australian local communities of the news they have depended on for decades. At some point in Australian history, the malevolent abuse of power by the billionaire family who milks its former colony will be exposed.” [Crikey Editor Eric Beecher, News Corp’s abuse of power must be exposed — and stopped, 3 April 2020]

Australian Treasurer & Liberal MP for Kooyong Josh Frydenberg speaking at a joint doorstop interview on 20 April 2020:

Well, good morning. It’s a real pleasure to be here with my friend and colleague, the Minister for Communications, Paul Fletcher. It’s time the tech titans were held to account and we had genuine competition, we have a level playing field, we have more transparency and we get payment for original journalistic content. The rise of the digital platforms, and in particular Google and Facebook have delivered real and significant benefits to consumers. But it’s has also been a period of great disruption. And it’s called into question the adequacy of our existing regulatory frameworks and the viability of traditional media outlets. This is why Scott Morrison, when he was Treasurer,= tasked the ACCC to undertake a ground-breaking report, a report that took them 18 months to put together, into the digital platforms. The ACCC led by Rod Sims, produced an outstanding report which made a number of recommendations. Recommendations that the Government has accepted. One of those key areas of focus for the ACCC was to develop a voluntary code between the traditional media businesses and the digital platforms to govern their relationships. Last year, the Government announced that it hoped a voluntary code would be reached by November of this year. Well those negotiations were held and no meaningful progress was made on the most significant component of which the code was to deal with, namely payment for content. And in the words of the ACCC, they did not believe that progress would be made and a deal would be done with a voluntary code. So the Government's taken a decision to move to a mandatory code, with a draft mandatory code to be released by the end of July and to be put together by the ACCC. We hope it will be legislated soon thereafter. We’re very conscious of the challenges we face and that we are dealing with some of the most valuable and powerful companies in the world. In France and in Spain and in other countries where they have tried to bring these tech titans to the table to pay for content they haven't been successful. But we believe this is a battle worth fighting. We believe this is critical for the future viability of our media sector and it's all about competition and creating a level playing field. So together with Minister Fletcher and our colleagues led by the Prime Minister, we will move with the ACCC to put together this mandatory code in the weeks ahead and hopefully it will deliver lasting reform for the sector and importantly, ensure that we have a level playing field into the future…

the ACCC is going to be looking at the method by which the payment for content would occur. There are a number of different options. You can do it on a value option or you can do it on a cost option, meaning that the tech titans would end up paying a fraction of what the cost was for producing that original content every time that they use it. The other alternative is in terms of the value to that particular digital platform that they get from getting eyeballs onto their sites by using that content. So this is to be worked out by the ACCC over the next three months. This is a very significant reform. It’s about holding these tech titans to account. It’s about ensuring genuine competition. It’s about delivering a level playing field. It’s about keeping jobs in journalism, and it’s about ensuring a fair outcome for all….

...these are very profitable platforms so this may eat into their profitability, to the Facebook’s and to the Google’s. But it’s only understandable that they would be paying for that content that they use to get traffic through their websites. You see the way Google and Facebook operate is that they don’t necessarily charge a fee for their service but they attract eyeballs onto their sites and then sell the advertising that goes with it. So this is about ensuring that they are genuinely rewarding and compensating the content that they use….

...but what was clear from the ACCC is that on the key issue of payment for content, there wasn’t a hope that there would be a deal reached between the parties. And the fact that we could not see a light at the end of that tunnel meant that we would move from a voluntary code which was the original intention, to a mandatory code which would be legislated through the Parliament.

One independent media company did not agree with Frydenberg’s assessment of the situation.

Crikey, 23 April 2020:

Earlier this week, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Communications Minister Paul Fletcher got up and struck a blow for foreign multinational News Corp in its ongoing war with the tech giants that have used innovation and the internet to wreck the Murdochs’ media business model….

...government has recycled demonstrable lies peddled by News Corp about how it is being robbed by Google and Facebook, with the aim of helping prop up News Corp’s failing Australian media businesses….

News Corp charges that when Google (mostly) and Facebook use its headlines and automatically generated “snippets” of News Corp stories on their sites, they are stealing content, and should be made to pay for it via a licence fee that will “reflect the financial benefit digital platforms derive from using snippets”.

It also complains that longer “snippets” deter people from clicking through the attached link to the original story because they get all they need from what’s displayed.

Except the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) digital platforms inquiry found that News Corp’s claims don’t stack up.

Headlines and snippets aren’t theft of content: “generally, digital platforms’ use of article headlines is unlikely to infringe copyright protections in Australia,” the ACCC noted. “Digital platforms reproducing a snippet of a copyright-protected news article does not infringe copyright protections if the snippet does not reproduce a substantial part of the article.”

And the ACCC found that the tech companies, media organisations and consumers all benefit from the use of snippets. Specifically, “media businesses benefit because a snippet provides context and an indication to the user of the value of that content, increasing the likelihood of consumers clicking through”.

Real-world evidence backed this up. “As a result of a German copyright law requiring Google to pay fees to publish snippets from news media websites, Google stopped showing snippets from [media company Axel Springer’s] news articles. Axel Springer noted that the lack of snippets led to a nearly 40% decline in referral traffic from Google Search and an almost 80% decline in referral traffic from the Google News user interface”.

The ACCC also “does not agree that longer snippet lengths necessarily have a negative effect on referral traffic, with users remaining on an aggregator or search platform rather than clicking through to a news media business’s website”. As a result, it did not recommend that a mandatory licence fee be imposed.

Where it did agree with media companies is that they have little bargaining power with Google et al when it comes to the length and composition of snippets. They can block Google from automatically generating snippets, but beyond being able to “opt out”, they have no way of managing them, or maximising click-through.

The ACCC thus proposed the industry-led development of a code of conduct to be agreed between media and tech companies to address this “imbalance of power” and enable media companies to get access to data and negotiate more effectively with the likes of Google.

Such a code of conduct might also cover how revenue is shared “where the digital platform obtains value, directly or indirectly, from content produced by news media”.

How much value do digital platforms obtain from news content? Google doesn’t show any ads on its news feed, and “does not generally sell advertising opportunities next to search queries that are considered by Google as having a ‘news intent’”. In other countries where it has been ordered to pay fees, it has simply stopped carrying snippets if it can’t do so for free. In Spain, it shut down Google News.

Interestingly, the result in Spain — and one echoed elsewhere — was that smaller media sites lost a large volume of traffic while major media sites suffered relatively little loss. 

It would be to News Corp’s considerable advantage if that same result eventuated in Australia, with smaller competitors in an already marginal economic environment suffering a major loss in traffic…..

[my yellow highlighting]

Raising money to return Australian east coast rainforests to their former glory

Echo NetDaily, 24 April 2020:

The last few years have been a rolling wave of dire situations: floods that caused local devastation, followed by drought that saw much of the country dry out, compounded by some of Australia’s worst fires. Of course that was all before the current COVID-19 pandemic that is sweeping the globe.

But the rain has come, and while community planting events have had to be cancelled due to the virus, there is still plenty of opportunity to support having a positive influence on the climate.

The Rainforest 4 Foundation has been at the forefront of positive action, including planting rainforest trees to restore fire-devastated rainforests and buying back land in the Daintree.

‘We’ve purchased four properties this year, one each month’, said Kelvin Davies, founder of the Rainforest 4 Foundation.

‘We ran a crowd funding campaign in November with Mullumbimby based company We Are Explorers, and that helped to purchase Lot 305, Cypress Road, Cow Bay, Daintree.’

In fact Rainforest 4 have managed to buy back, or have under contract, six properties in the Daintree since August 2019. They are currently raising the funds to purchase the sixth, Lot 330, Cape Tribulation Road, which is currently under contract. It will cost $25,000, so far they have raised $9,895 and need to raise another $15,105 to complete the purchase.

Rainforest 4 work in partnership with the local Jabalbina Yalanji Aboriginal Corporation and transfer the properties they purchase to the Daintree National Park and World Heritage Area….

Closer to home Rainforest 4 are looking to keep planting trees to help rebuild the local rainforests that have been devastated by the recent fires……

Kelvin Davies at Upper Wilsons Creek.
Image supplied.

Only one per cent of the Lowland Subtropical Rainforest remains in this region and Rainforest 4 is aiming to directly support that rainforest by planting and restoring habitat in and near areas that were damaged by the Mt Nardi fires.

Over 5,500 hectares were impacted by the fires in the areas of Terania Creek, Tuntable Creek, Tuntable Falls, Huonbrook, Upper Coopers Creek, Upper Wilsons Creek, Wanganui and surrounds.

For $10 you can support the planting of a tree, including its maintenance for three years. To donate, or to find out more go to Rainforest 4Foundation.

A perspective on society and the COVID-19 pandemic

This is a Twitter thread created by Janette Francis, a Walkley-award winning journalist, TV Presenter and podcaster.

Jan’s Twitter account was created in 2009.

The debate on the best responses to the COVID-19 pandemic is global and one cold-blooded aspect of this debate is currently found in British, American and Australian mainstream media articles and on social media - save the investments and assests of the well-off because old people and the chronically ill are going to die anyway.

This is Jan's contribution to this debate.

Jan Fran @Jan__Fran, 21 April 2020:

I keep hearing folks describe this pandemic as a kind of trade-off between public health and the economy. This trade-off is often framed around loss of life. 1

It usually goes something like this: if we ease the lockdown we’ll see people die from the virus. If we prolong the lockdown we’ll see people die from the consequences of possible economic collapse (i.e suicide, depression, poverty, ill health, violence). 2

We are led to believe that attempts to limit one set of deaths, will increase the other, that one group of people will have to sacrifice for the other. But whose lives are more important? 3

Do we sacrifice the sick now to save the healthy later; the old to save the young; the poor to save everyone else? We are led to believe that this is our dilemma and it is an impossible one. 4

Hey, here’s a fun thing to think about: guess how much money Jeff Bezos made today? 5

Jeff Bezos made 17,000 dollars. But he didn’t make it in one day. He made it in ONE SECOND. Every single second Amazon is reaping 17 thousand dollars worth of sales (this is AUD BTW) & this is happening SPECIFICALLY during this pandemic as more people seek deliverable supplies. 6

Jeff Bezos is now worth 216 BILLION dollars and good on Jeff Bezos, I say! I mean, the man is clearly providing a service that people need and reaping the rewards. That is #inspo, amirite?! Please speak at my conference, Jeff. 7

Thing is, there's a wee bit more to the world we live in. 8

We live in a world where, in the middle of a pandemic, one man makes 17 thousand dollars A SECOND and another is buried in a mass grave because his family can’t afford a funeral. 9

It’s a world where the homeless sleep in socially-distant quadrants in a hotel car park, while above them thousand-dollar-a-night rooms sit empty. It’s a world where folks are protesting their right to get sick in a country they can not afford to seek treatment in. 10

One thing this pandemic has done is exacerbated the gross inequalities we always knew existed. It has exposed them, brought them to the surface as the bodies of the poor and the desolate continue to be stacked beneath the ground. 11

The framing of this pandemic as ‘lives lost now V lives lost later’ is really just us tryna work out which sections of our society are more productive, more useful. Which sections are going to best replicate the system that was in place before all this Covid/lockdown malarky. 12

I mean, we all wanna get back to how it was ASAP, right? Now that we think about it we were having a great time. The system was working. But for who? 13

Not for the man whose body now sits in a mass grave on Hart Island NY, it wasn’t. Not for the homeless sleeping in their car park quadrants, it wasn’t. Not for the nearly 40 million Americans living below the poverty line, it wasn’t. This is the system we will replicate. 14

It is right to talk about sacrifice in this dark and uncertain time. I guess we all have to make sacrifices at some point so if not now, when? If not me, who? Before you answer that, know this … 15

Twenty-six individuals own as much wealth as HALF the world’s population - Lemme say that again: TWENTY SIX people (two. six) own the same amount of wealth as 3.8 BILLION PEOPLE. 16

That’s worth remembering the next time some legend waxes lyrical about why you might need to sacrifice yer nan for the sake of the economy. Maybe those 26 people should sacrifice the spoils they’ve reaped from a system that now needs saving from itself. 17

We do indeed have a dilemma but it might not be an impossible one. Maybe we actually don’t need to ask those who have the least to sacrifice the most, maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe that’s the trade-off? 18

Anyway, thanks for letting me share my thoughts on this website twitter dot com. 19/19

Quote of the Week

"Bronwyn’s self-importance and vanity was, even by political standards, off the charts and so initially everyone doubled up laughing at the absurdity of Madame Speaker descending out of the sky like a Valkyrie to entertain a gaggle of Liberal Party supporters at a Geelong golf course." [Then Australian Minister for Education and Training & Liberal MP for Sturt Christopher Pyne speaking about his colleague  Bronwyn Bishop, 15 July 2015, in "A Bigger Picture", April 2020]

Cartoons of the Week

Cathy Wilcox

Rex A. Jones

Banksy during COVID-19 pandemic quarantine in U.K.: "My wife hates it when I work from home"

Collosal, 15 April 2020:

Banksy is an anonymous England-based street artist, vandal, political activist, and film director, active since the 1990s.

The fact that Minister for Home Affairs & Liberal MP for Dickson Peter Dutton is always lurking in the shadows during national crises continues to be a worry

"I’m going to keep going until I get the numbers. I’m not stopping" [Minister for Home Affairs & Liberal MP for Dickson Peter Dutton on the subject of his desire to be Australian prime minister, quoted in "The Bigger Picture", April 2020]

It has become notable that since September-August 2018 when Peter Dutton's bid to topple then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull succeeded but his bid to become Australian prime minister failed - primarily because he and Turnbull were both outfoxed by a duplicitous Scott Morrison - Dutton disappears into the shadows during the worst phases of national crises or major political scandal.

One suspects he does so as he doesn't want voters to negatively associate him with either crises or scandal, because he hasn't given up his ambition to be prime minister after the next federal election.

As Dutton's worldview is as much a threat to democratic processes as is the worldview of current prime minister Scott Morrison, voters would do well to keep in mind what Dutton would like to impose on Australian society.

Sydney Criminal Lawyers, 20 April 2020:

Peter Dutton Proposes Prison for Refusing to Provide Passwords

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has been absent from the media spotlight in recent times, ever since he contracted coronavirus.

And many are asking where the man at the helm of curtailing civil liberties on a federal level has been in the midst of the current pandemic.

The man at the helm of the surveillance state

Mr Dutton has been credited with proposing a wide range of laws designed to increase the power of authorities at the expense of individual liberties.

Perhaps most recently, Mr Dutton proposed laws which would result in prison time for those who fail or refuse to hand over their passwords or PINs when requested to do so by authorities.

Peter Dutton has said the laws are needed to help police catch criminals who are hiding behind encryption technology – a line we have heard many times before as the country’s law makers put in place draconian measures to grant police and other authorities surveillance powers that encroach upon our privacy.

Under the proposals, which is currently on hold, people who are not even suspected of a crime, could face a fine of up to $50,000 and up to five years’ imprisonment for declining to provide a password to their smartphone, computer or other electronic devices.

Furthermore, anyone (an IT professional, for example) who refuses to help the authorities crack a computer system when ordered will face up to five years in prison. If the crime being investigated is terrorism-related then the penalty for non-compliance increases to 10 years in prison and/or a $126,000 fine.

Tech companies who refuse to assist authorities to crack encryption when asked to do so, will face up to $10 million in fines. What’s more, if any employee of the company tells anyone else they have been told to do this, they will face up to five years in gaol.

Under the legislation, foreign countries can also ask Australia’s Attorney General for police to access data in your computer to help them investigate law-breaking overseas.

Australia’s hyper-legislative response to September 11

Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, the Australian parliament has responded to the threat of terrorism here and overseas by enacting more than 80 new laws and amending existing laws – many of them with wide-reaching consequences, such as the terrorism laws used to conduct raids on journalist Annika Smethurst’s home and the ABC’s head offices, as well as charge former military lawyer and whistleblower David Mc Bride with offences that could see him spending the rest of his life in gaol.

Controversial metadata laws too, introduced in 2015, seriously impact our personal privacy requiring telecommunications companies to retain metadata including information on who you call or text, where you make calls from, and who you send emails to.

The problem is that once these kinds of extraordinarily heavy-handed powers are legislated, they are very seldom retracted or rescinded. In many cases, over time, they are expanded. Australia’s oversight body the Australian Law Reform Commission can review laws that are already in place, but it has limited powers which only enable the commission to make recommendations for change, not to actually change the laws themselves.

Police already have the power to seize a phone or laptop if you have been arrested.

Border Force has even more extensive seize and search powers.

The extensive powers of border force

In 2018, Border Force made headlines after intercepting an British-Australian citizen travelling through Sydney airport seizing his devices.

Nathan Hague, a software developer was not told what would be done with his devices, why they were being inspected or whether his digital data was being copied and stored. He believes his laptop password was cracked.

Australian Border Forces have extensive powers to search people’s baggage at Australian airports. These are contained in section 186 of Customs Act 1901 (Cth). These include opening baggage, reading documents, and using an X-ray or detection dog to search baggage.

The Customs Act allows officers to retain an electronic device for up to 14 days if there is no content on the device which renders it subject to seizure. And if it is subject to seizure, the device may be withheld for a longer period.

ABF officers have the power to copy a document if they’re satisfied it may contain information relevant to prohibited goods, to certain security matters or an offence against the Customs Act. A document includes information on phones, SIM cards, laptops, recording devices and computers.