The trouble with frenemies is that you don't quite know whether they are, well, friends or enemies.

That's the predicament at News Corp Australia, where executive chairman Michael Miller has taken to the columns of a rival Fairfax Media daily to say that Google is not journalism's friend, while you'd think columnist at News The Australian Mark Day reckons the search giant could be traditional media's best mate.

Miller's response to comments by Google's Australian managing director Jason Pellegrino was published by Fairfax's Australian Financial Review in a rare cooperation between the two arch-rivals. The nuances weren't lost on Day, who called Miller's response "quite a spray".

Miller says Google is "only ever one's 'friend' if you obey the rules it dictates for your business in a digital world," adding that while Pellegrino argued news publishers are free to withdraw from Google Search and Google News, the reality that they little choice. Being discoverable should never be at the expense of publishers determining their own business models and how they invest in the premium journalism that underlies it.

He accuses Google of trying to stymie paywalls - which he says, threaten their advertising model - by making quality subscription news publishers suffer in search rankings unless they give Google content for free, using snippets in Google News listings to fund its advertising revenue and to put users off looking for content elsewhere, and manipulating search results to promote its own news vertical.

His comments support publishers' push for media reforms, without which local media will struggle to compete, "and the biggest losers are the Australian public".

Day's approach is more pragmatic: "I see very little chance that Google will reverse its worldwide policy of lifting content without recompense," he writes. "But peace is rarely won by war and in due course there must be negotiations.

"If Google were prepared to make agreements with publishers that enhanced their paywalls and delivered a fair percentage of revenue, there may be a chance of peace in our time."

Now there's a phrase with a familiar ring to it.

He says Google could negotiate with publishers to help build paywalls and help lift advertising rates attached to quality sites, instead of using their infinite inventory to drive down rates to near zero.

"Unless Google is prepared to use its undisputed market power to help public-interest journalism survive, its claim to be the journalists' friend is nothing but hypocritical horse feathers."

But while Day says that would provide "an irresistible invitation to governments and regulators of the world to move against it" - as the US government did when it broke up the Bell telephone monopoly in the 1980s - it's hard to imagine there would be many votes in breaking up the Goobook duopoly. About as much chance of that, as of finding politicians who'd dare vote for breaking News' own monopoly, for that matter.

Legislation could however, make bigger demands on Google and Facebook to apply higher editorial standards to their output: Saturday's UK terror attack saw social media publishing the venom of the attackers' supporters alongside the dialogue of those affected by it.

More could also be done to prevent the hijacking of copyright material. Alongside a terror-related report I read on the Courier-Mail site this week was a native ad for a device which allows you to "steal" (our word for it) film and other streamed content from the internet, exploiting a loophole in the copyright laws. The advertiser acknowledged that the law might get changed, but reckoned at $70 it was worth the chance.

Governments need to be more nimble in order to uphold the spirit, as well as the letter of the law... and to have higher expectations of Mark Zuckerberg and his contemporaries.

Peter Coleman