Government’s Google & Facebook laws little more than a Backrub for News and Nine

​It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the decline of old media started. Was it the founding of an online search company, Backrub, by a couple of software engineers in 1998? Or when NewsCorp sold MySpace for $US35 million in 2011, writing off an investment of $US580 million. Or maybe the seminal moment was the public listing of Facebook in 2012 for a seemingly ridiculous valuation of $US90 billion?

Backrub was renamed Google, Myspace became dead space and Facebook now has a market capitalisation of $US720 billion. No wonder the former giants of media in Australia are aggrieved – News Corp and Nine that is. Since 2012, the two dominant media companies, Nine Media (formerly Fairfax) and the newspaper arm of News Corp, have…