Not an Australian, but I don't find it entirely silly. Google delisting Australian news would be the inevitable outcome. It's worth almost nothing to them.

They're evening out the playing field. Google can shrug off Australian news, but they're going to have to think carefully about whether they're willing to turn off Search for a first world country.

One loophole I'm very curious about is Google creating their own news organization. Not even a news organization, really just a news licenser and republisher. They have access to everyone's Google searches. I would imagine they're capable of creating a piece of software that calculates how much they're paying to news organizations for what keyword searches, then automatically purchasing an article about that from another publisher that scores better for those keywords (putting them above the other publishers in the searches) and publishing it. Bonus points if they don't even pay for it, they have a human write an article summarizing the other articles, and run it through their scoring pipeline so the writer can tweak it until their SEO score is better than the other articles.

Then Australian news will really be screwed. Little money from Google, and even fewer clicks than they got before.

The one thing I do think was silly is making it adversarial. If you want news agencies to make more money, making Google pay to send them traffic is a bad way to go about that. They should have done something like introducing a tax on Google, and then refunding part of the tax when Google sends people to an Australian news site instead of a foreign one.

The article on Ars suggests that the new law would not allow them to delist one provider and allow another. This is not law yet, this is part of the proposal. I am still looking for some evidence that they are not allowed to delist all news sources. This may be my lack of understanding the legalese. There is maybe some 'poison pill' in just delisting news and they are going the nuclear option in Australia.

As a non-Australian, I somehow have this impression that all your recent governments sucked, and not just with the tech issues.

I agree. They declared legislation superior to mathematics. Crazy.

No, not just current government. Both major parties fully supported metadata retention and the encryption ban. This is not a partisan problem.

In my mind, following through on their threat is the worst thing Google could do. If they leave and Australia’s business and government suffer, other countries are going to make laws to ensure this doesn’t happen to them.