The media laws proposed by the ACCC

 and now before Downunder's federal parliament are said to be designed to protect news services and their content from a "power imbalance". They are designed to make Google and Facebook "pay for the material they use".

Now I know Google and Facebook are multi-billion dollar and very powerful entities but..... they do not charge the media services involved in the argument for them to put their material up on the web. Content from the website of the media services involved appears without charge to them in the "search" and "Google news" functions. Google does not charge us for it either. A similar situation exists with Facebook. It is advertising which pays for it.

They actually direct traffic to those same media services - who do very nicely out of it thank you very much. They will do even more nicely now. One of the organisations which will do best out of this legislation is Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. He has been trying to achieve this for a very long time. 

An argument could be made that Murdoch should be paying Google rather than the other way around - but Google doesn't need the money.

I have not seen the legislation yet but a friend who knows a great deal more about drafting laws than I do tells me that it is going to cause problems. He thinks it is "very poorly drafted" and that there will be "many issues" with it. I have no doubt he is right.

One of the problems is that traditional reporting has not been able to keep up with the fact that anyone can now "report". In my job I often get told about issues on the ground before the major news services are able to get it out on "the six o'clock news" or "the ten o'clock news" or even as "breaking news". People can put up video footage of an incident almost as it happens. It can be violent, horrific and terrifying - Google and Facebook struggle to take such material down. Murdoch may claim that such material is never put up by them but that is ridiculous. It goes up long enough to capture an audience and is then taken down.

My BIL works for a company that helps to set the algorithm changes which decide which advertising appears and where. My nephew runs his own company which acts as a platform which allows independent journalists to bid for work and sell their stories. Both these companies are going to be affected by this legislation although in different ways. Many others will be too.

If we want "news" both local and from around the world then someone has to pay for it. For the most part we will continue to pay for it through advertising - which is added to the cost of the goods we buy. 

But journalism will need to change again - and we need to ensure that all those involved in the dissemination of it are not given the power to control all, or even the most part, of what we see and when we see it.  At the moment that looks all too likely.