Algorithmic

Which brings me back to Australia. It's undeniable that publishers get ripped off by Googbook. Their ad marketplaces are frauds from top to bottom: fake metrics for fake users seeing fake ads, run on bid-rigging and self-dealing.

Publishers that complain about this get slammed: Googbook uses the fact that they have created anticompetitive, vertically integrated cartels to tie a willingness to submit to crooked ad payments to traffic.

That means that publishers who make a stink about being ripped off – or who take measures to prevent leakage of their internal business data – have their traffic switched off. This is possible because regulators permitted vertical mergers between search/social and ad-tech.

This vertical integration is the source of confusion about whether this is a link-tax. The goal of the regulation is to clean up the ad markets, but Googbook use links as a stick to beat up publishers when they don't submit to corrupt ad practices, so links get implicated.

But the regulation's primary levers are transparency: it forces Googbook to disclose which data it harvests from publishers and how it uses it; it forces Googbook to disclose algorithmic changes that will result in significant changes to ad performance.

Just as importantly, it forbids Googbook from using their search/social business to retaliate against publishers who object to bad practices in their ad-tech units.

…

The hope/wish is that all this transparency and guaranteed of non-retaliation might means Googbook ending their market corruption so publishers will get a fair price for their ad-inventory. And if they don't, there's an arbitrator who hears both sides and sets prices.

This is how collective bargaining often works – when you have one side of a deal who has all the power (like a big employer) and a diffuse set of actors who lack power (like workers), an arbitrator hears both sides and hands down a deal that's meant to be fairer.

But of course, this isn't a negotiation between workers and employers: it's a bargain between a cartel of news organizations and a search duopoly. That's not ideal! For starters, it means that the government gets to decide who is a "news organization."

That's ripe for abuse. News organizations are expected to report on the government and the government gets to decide whether they are entitled to participate in collective bargaining with Googbook, which could mean the difference between financial viability and bankruptcy.

Remember, one of the problems this system is supposed to resolve is powerful entities (Googbook) using their power to punish news organizations for complaining about their behavior – governments were in that game long before Googbook came into existence.

And there's another problem: the structure of the Australian news market, which is yet another highly concentrated industry, dominated by a rapacious billionaire who uses his power to manipulate politics: Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch conquered Australian media the same way Googbook conquered the net: through anticompetitive conduct that was waved through by collusive regulators who never met a monopoly they didn't view as efficient.

It's not wrong to say that the only reason this regulation got off the drawing-board is that Murdoch viewed it as a way to shift a few balance-points from Big Tech's side of the ledger to Big Media's side.