Facebook and Google fight Australian proposal to make them pay media organisations for content

[MajorMitchell]

The Conservative~Liberal Federal Government in Australia is introducing legislation which will force tech giants Facebook and Google to pay for content. They're fighting back. I've used Bing today to get to Webdiplomacy & heard about something Interwebby called "dot dot dot go"??? which was described as the "anti Google"
What do the young enthusiastic whippersnappers think of making Google and Facebook pay for content & what is going on with this stuff?
Apparently one a is introducing a version of itself where the user pays for content and both are threatening to shut down their services in Australia

[Octavious]

Duckduckgo, maybe? It seems to be quite popular these days.

I confess I don't quite follow the argument. It sounds like forcing the phone book to pay for the businesses in it, which if anything feels the wrong way round. But I've no great understanding of how these companies generate revenue.

[orathaic]

There is a case to be made for news aggregrators to pay for their content.

That is, sites which don't pay any actual journalists but do share their content by scrapping it from news websites.

Whether you would consider Google a news aggregrator or not is a seperated question.

[Randomizer]

It's more of taking copyrighted content and using it without payment by claiming fair usage of more material than has been previously allowed. A country is now defining how much can be used legally.

[orathaic]

Does facebook do this?

The impression I got was that they share snippets of a page, (an image and a few lines of text with a title), and then linking to it.

I don't see actual news articles being used...