Opinion: Google and Facebook lose a battle to win the war

When prospectors made what was the biggest oil discovery in history at Texas’ Spindletop well in 1901, the world’s premier oil monopolist was absent from the scene. Standard Oil Co., a decade away from being split up in an antitrust suit, was content to sit back and let smaller local rivals establish themselves.

That’s a good analogy for the deals Alphabet Inc.’s Google is striking with News Corp. and Australian newspaper publishers, ahead of planned legislation there to enhance the news business’ bargaining power in negotiating with online platforms. Facebook Inc. is taking a more extreme approach, announcing Thursday that it would quit distributing news from Australian publishers, and to Facebook news feeds in the country, altogether.

John D. Rockefeller didn’t much care who produced America’s oil, as long as he had a stranglehold on piping it, refining it and distributing it. Google is little different.