Facebook, Google to be forced to share ad revenue with Australian media
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The first thing they could do is fine them. Google and FB might say "ha! but we don't have bank accounts in Australia!" and the government will simply collect from companies in Australia that have outstanding bills from Google for e.g. Adwords or Google Cloud.
Google can still run their websites to be reachable from Australia, but they wouldn't be able to do business in Australia. And what's the point of running an ad tech empire if you can't make money off of it?
They can also just drag this out in court for a long time until everyone forgets, they restructure how their money works, and then they'll share the useless info freely.
Just my take on the situation.
+ Firefox doesn't use the system DNS by default anymore (Defaults to the DoH provider, usually Cloudflare)
+ Chrome doesn't use the system DNS by default anymore (Defaults to Google's)
+ Businesses often set the default DNS to use Google's, not their ISPs.
Less pithily: Google crawls the web, offering a standard set of terms on which it does so. No website is compelled to accept these terms and have their links displayed on google.com, even if they're public-facing. The mechanism by which you can opt out, fully or partially, is a robots.txt file specifying to the crawler what it can and can't crawl and display. Australian media companies are saying that they don't accept Google's linking terms; they proposed counter-terms of licensing fees for linking, and Google can refuse them. As the two sides have failed to agree to terms on which the media sites can be linked to by Google, they fall neatly into the category of a website blocking robots.txt
that's not a fine.
That's a great way to get a law passed ;)
I'm not saying that I believe the Australian government has a legitimate case or anything, just that between "Google can do whatever it likes" and "all of Google's websites are blocked at ISP levels", there are a few levels of escalation that they can pick.
so the issues is using content in google news or in snippets shown in google search results. i commented before that i seldom leave news or the main search anymore because of these snippets.
why isn't it fair that the ads revenue is shared with these news publishers if their content is taken?
i don't believe that publicly funded journalism is a bad thing, or that taxes are a bad thing. i just think a sneaky end-run around the normal systems of taxation and subsidy are a bad thing. Google and Facebook should be subject to heavy taxation, and local journalism should be supported through public funding. What these countries are trying to do is good, in spirit.
i just think the government should not be in the business of deciding how much one independent private company pays another independent private company, and i don't think governments should be passing laws just for the purpose of being able to issue fines. if the government wants to redistribute wealth, they should do it through taxation, and they should be honest about what they're doing.
2. Google could just stop showing them. See Spain where this killed the newspapers.
This is entirely a case of publishers wanting their cake and Google's too.
I think there’s an element of Australian politics that would push for homegrown stuff over google/fb.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but alternatives already exist for both.
Context: left = progressive, right = conservative. I think those terms switch in some countries so figured id mention.
For the ABC, on two separate occasions I reported some pretty egregious incorrect reporting and both times retractions occurred over a month later.
Contrast this to the retractions I've gotten from the private sector. A reporter on a News Corp website replied to my email in under 10 minutes (!!) and issued a retraction. A reported for Fairfax similarly retracted a point in an article the following day after a complaint.
So, the contrast is stark and revealing. ABC and SBS will lie to you with impunity and zero oversight, while the private sector at least has the decency to correct themselves in a reasonable period of time.
I guess you could say search engines are nonessential like music and entertainment are nonessential. Somehow people end up wanting both anyways.
While there’s some precedents with piracy website DNS entries removed from ISP dns, I doubt the gov would want to pick a fight with a multi billion (trillion?) dollar company who would actually fight back.
Google and Facebook are not cutting edge technologies. They are in the position of IBM in the 80s and Microsoft in the 90s, a legacy technology with huge market share being able to charge monopoly prices. A home grown alternative to google search is not beyond any university with a 100m budget.
I admit I hardly visit pirate sites, but I didn't even notice that happen. I just checked and the Pirate Bay is still available so I don't know what they're even blocking.
https://thepiratebay.org is working fine for me today, although I'm sure that address hadn't worked for a while until very recently, and it wasn't the same sort of blocking as those above.
I have a new computer. On my old one I changed to Google DNS when a lot of torrent sites were being blocked a few years ago, and suddenly they all worked again. Kind of silly saying access is blocked when changing one number on the computer unblocks them all.
Imagine if you woke up and G was not available in your country?
You switch to an alternative: Bing, DDG etc..
Alternatives that many Aussies may not have really been aware of.
And now, 100% of G's user base is being 'conditioned' on competitors' products - their default behavior, the icons they click, the default search engine for browsers changing over.
And for most people - DDG/Bing is probably just as good as Google.
A month later, G comes back to Australia, how many people bother to switch back? How many people have come to 'be fine' with something else? How many people resent G?
Does the Aussie Gov, which will realize that 'search' is an essential aspect of operating ability, will even allow government workers to use a service from someone who will drop it instantly, and sign a service contract with Bing? Corporations who see it as an existential flaw and require everyone to have 3 search solutions 'at the ready'.
For FB obviously it's a different story, however, a smart politician would paint FB as a 'foreign enemy' and turn the tide of populism against them as well. Because Aussie didn't 'ban' them, FB/G pulled out themselves, denying people their service, most people would 'blame them'.
FB has some seemingly essential aspects in terms of communication, but I think that people would soon discover that it's not essential at all.
It would be a disaster for both of them.
The other risk is that this disaster becomes contagious.
If G 'shuts down' in Australia - what does the UK government do? The EU gov? If they are smart they react with legislation forcing more 'choice' in search on every level.
Google pulling out of any regular nation would be existentially damaging.
MS/Bing would weaponize this to the nth degree - they already have service contracts with businesses and corporations around the world and they'd be in a global push to 'drop Google' for the inherent risk of pullout they just witnesses.
This would be the #1 talking point for their massive global salesforce.
Why are you quoting the words "pulls out" next to an actual quote from my comment? I didn't use it in my comment, and neither did anyone else in the comment thread. Google refusing to play ball here could take any number of forms, from the extreme hardball of simply refusing and tying it up in the courts (and getting fined and perhaps blocked), to just blacklisting links to the companies that the government is extorting them on behalf of. The latter wouldn't even be "hardball"; companies that are explicitly disagreeing with Google's terms for inclusion aren't included in their results, in the same way that robots.txt allows for.
> Google pulling out of any regular nation would be existentially damaging.
There's plenty of precedent for this level of targeted reduction in service as a response to gov't demands. They shut down Google News in Spain, removed French news links under very-similar demands, etc etc. None of this has had the ripple effect you're describing, and is evidence in favor of the fact that Google is concerned about a broader ripple effect: Why else would they give up all the revenue from referral to these sites instead of paying a portion of the revenue in protection money?
+ " They shut down Google News in Spain, removed French news links under very-similar demands, etc etc. None of this has had the ripple effect you're describing"
The 'ripple effect' is happening right now in Australia.
Second - it doesn't matter that much where the tit-for-tat is - it would be existentially disastrous for Google or FB in either sense.
If a corporation was 'out' of a major, regular western nation for any reason I think the CEO's job would be in serious trouble, even Zuck.
I think the media conglomerates overestimate their importance to Australian customers - for countries like France there's a language barrier, but the vast, vast majority of searches by Australians can be served well without needing any content from the Australian news companies. If linking to your content is expensive, and linking to other content is cheap, then it's perfectly reasonable and generally legal to prefer cheap sources whenever possible.
What makes you think Bing or DDG wants to pay news companies to share their link and drive traffic to these companies? If anything, forcing revenue sharing would cause a small search engine like DDG out of business as it tries to scale up. If you wanted to start up a search engine today, imagine what these extra costs would do?
> If they are smart they react with legislation forcing more 'choice' in search on every level.
In your anti-google crusade, you are missing the point. It makes no sense for search engines to pay news or any company to drive traffic to those companies. If anything, the news companies/etc should be paying search engines if you really think about it. It isn't a Goolge vs Bing/DDG/etc issue. It's a Google/Bing/DDG/etc vs news/media companies issue.
If these news websites don't want to be part of google search, then they can easily exclude themselves via robots.txt.
But there is 0% chance of Google/Facebook not complying.
> I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship
Not even close.
These companies don't push themselves into politics everywhere (yet), but I'm sure that the more governments squeeze them the more they'll get involved.
I used to work at Google. It wasn't often discussed, but when lobbying came up (including in formal contexts) the general attitude was "you can try to ignore Washington but Washington won't ignore you". The perception was very much that Microsoft had gone through the anti-trust trial not so much because of what they'd done but because for years under the Clinton administration they didn't grease the right wheels, in fact they barely had any presence in Washington, which left them politically exposed. The combination of no powerful friends, extremely vague laws and extremely empowered and political regulators was seen as a very toxic one. And that's especially remarkable because Google was (at that time) a company whose executives really didn't like Microsoft, they feared them and treated them as the biggest threat to their business. A lot had come out of the Linux/open source world, academia, UNIX vendors etc and they were really the last people who would give Gates a break, but nonetheless their conclusion was that lobbying was basically a requirement of doing business in the USA.
I'm going back here - eventually that changed and they came to fear Facebook more. But for instance the Google Toolbar was basically an anti-Microsoft play, as was Chrome.
Bill Gates kept politicians at arms length.
If Microsoft had given Washington a little attention, the antitrust lawsuit would never ever have happened.
Google has squelched antitrust investigations in US every single time through lobbying.
Even Apple would been in hot regulatory soup if they didn't buddy up to politicians.
Google is already the largest industry lobbyist stateside
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/09/google-is-techs-top-spender-...
They also risk losing that entire market as well. Let's be honest, nobody loves F or G. If a decent competitor stands up people will gladly switch, even more if they market it as "by Australians for Australians".
SV companies are big and great and all that, but to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.
For example: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/27/16550640/verge-tech-surv...
https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/amidst-techlash-m...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/opinion/tech-backlash.htm...
I read a similar one in the last 6 months tying it to politics. One was that Trump is ironically more tech-friendly than Sanders or Warren (~Nov 2019), despite tech workers generally not supporting Trump. The other oddity was that polls don't really show that there's a techlash, so why are Democratic frontrunners making it a talking point?
Refusing to do business in a country due to regulation isn't acting above the law. These companies have no requirement to conduct business in any given country.
Are Australians really so nationalistic? I thought they would mostly choose whatever tool allows them to do what they want as quick as possible.
> SV companies are big and great and all that, but to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.
Google can follow the law by simply not indexing Australians sites anymore, or they don't have to service Australians. If they are told to share revenue, they can choose to simply shut down the revenue source instead, especially if the cost of revenue sharing exceeds the revenue they are generating. FB/G aren't charities.
When GDRP came online, many web sites in the states found that blocking out EU viewers was cheaper than complying. That isn't going against EU law.
The concept of forcing a foreign business to run a business it doesn't want to is a bit bizarre, and I doubt a court would support the concept, let alone the idea of holding the rest of the company hostage.
Nobody loves the media either. Across every market I’m aware of trust and respect for the media has been falling for over a decade.
I think this is probably just your HN bubble; lots of the criticism of Google here is tinged with irrational bitterness, along with the classic tech culture distrust centralization and the power structures around control of data. I happen to align fairly strongly with the latter view, but neither of these have much purchase in the wider population, where Google remains wildly more popular than most institutions that you think of as benign or popular.
> to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.
How do you explain the situations as they played out in Spain (in 2014) and France? It seems a lot more delusional to me to ignore precedent and forecast based on wishful thinking about the power dynamic between these companies and states.
Like how I promote telegram to my friends but I'm "forced" to use WhatsApp for some "niche majority"
I'm not trying to imply they are above jurisdiction, I am quite tired of hearing the "No one likes these guys" narrative though.
There are no ads on Google News.
There is an apparent glut of online news: supply exceeds demand and so the price has fallen.
This is the ironic part of the policy. You're right about the glut, and there was a glut in print 20 years ago, too. Google's definitely hurt businesses, but it's usually though disintermediating them (think Yelp). Google News and search don't really do that for news--snippets and headlines aren't the same as an article. I find it hard to believe that ABC's brand isn't strong enough for them to pull their content from Google and expect people to go to abc.net.au; I just don't think than can sell enough ads to give the content away.
There are very many news aggregators and most do serve ads next to the headlines they index. I assume that people typically link out from news aggregation sites more than into vertically-integrated services.
Perhaps the content producers / information service providers could develop additional revenue streams in order to subsidize a news aggregation public service. Micropayments (BAT, Web Monetization (ILP)), ads, paywalls, and public and private grants are sources of revenue for content producers.
I think it's disingenuous to blame news aggregation sites for the unprofitability of extremely redundant journalism. What happened to journalism? Internet. Excessive ads. Aren't we all writers these days.
Unfortunately they killed the "most cited" and was it "most in-depth" source analysis functions of Google News; and now we're stuck with regurgitated news wires and press releases and all of these eyewitness mobile phone videos with two-bit banal commentary and also punditry. How the world has changed.
So, as far as scientific experiments are concerned, it might be interesting to see what the impact of de-listing from free time sites X, Y, and Z is.
Do the papers in Australia and France now intend to compensate journal ScholarlyArticle authors whose work they summarize and hopefully at least cite the titles and URLs of, or the journals themselves?
This is said pretty regularly in the media in Australia, and honestly no one cares. Even big mining companies like BHP pay little corporate tax on shore, and after years of it being 'exposed', honestly the general public don't seem to care.
Nothing. Google isn't going to forego the entire Australian market or even an economy as large as the Eurozone. They'd just pay their x% tax and suck it up and consider it cost of doing business.
Google is a company, not a nation state and governments ought to stop kowtowing in front of companies. Reminds me of the story about the elephants and the rope
And then after that the companies will get involved in politics in those places so that it never happens again. This in turn increases the chance of regulatory capture and corruption.
Also, don't forget that increasing the cost of doing business will discourage others from trying. Oh, and there's also the US government too. They might just end up siding with Google and Facebook.
Sounds like a great reason to change the distribution of wealth and systematically reduce the power and influence of corporations.
Australia has 25 million people.
That's about half the size of Spain. The GDP of Australia is roughly equal to the GDP of Spain.
The only thing they extracted were their manufacturing operations, GM and Ford still sell vehicles in Australia. They even have the Focus which Ford dropped for the American market! Unless Google and Facebook are going to close their offices but still provide service to Australia, that seems like an entirely different scenario.
https://www.goauto.com.au/news/cadillac/spied-cadillac-ct5-p...
https://www.goauto.com.au/news/holden/gm-has-lsquo-a-future-...
Yet suggest they should give up their participation in military or US border security, two areas that are unlikely to be larger than their business in Australia (or, other times, the EU), and there’s no shortage of people explaining what a stupid trade-off that would be.
I guess the tech crowds’ priorities are clear: drone targeting? So what? This is strictly business!
A bit of taxation to maybe rescue the journalism a democracy depends on? To the barricades! We will gladly give up 100% of earnings to take a stand against the injustice that is...taking 5% of earnings.
I do think that journalism plays a role in a healthy democracy. I assume that at some point, journalism will settle into a new equilibrium and play the role that it's always played, without the messianic complex that journalism as a whole is currently afflicted with (and so dramatically fails to live up to).
In real life that happens through peer networks as much as the news.
There used to be this fantasy that hobbyist bloggers would fill in where professional journalism fails. Here's a map "news deserts" where the latter has happened: https://www.usnewsdeserts.com. There is no map of the former, because bloggers tend to get up too late to attend boring 9am meetings of the residential refuse working group.
You might be under the impression that relevant news will somehow "diffuse" to get to you. That's a common idea among what's called "low-information voters", who tend to never read any news themselves and extrapolate from there.
It's wrong because they miss that the information that gets to them is simply second-hand journalism: It's full of holes and sometimes has (brown) stains. But the parts of it that are accurate almost invariably originate from professional news sources.
>You might be under the impression that relevant news will somehow "diffuse" to get to you.
I am under no such impression. I am challenging the idea that "journalism" is "critical" for a democracy to function. It only seems critical to me insofar as "function" is defined as "people vote in the way journalists expect them to".
The time from about 1740 to 1800 was for newspapers what the 2000s was for the internet.
1787: US Constitution (first democracy)
1789: French Revolution (2nd)
1832 (to 192x): British Reform Act (expanding right to vote)
> I am under no such impression.
Then how does information about, say, laws being passed, or viruses going around, or wars being lost or won get to you? And if it doesn't get to you, how do you decide whom to vote for?
> It only seems critical to me insofar as "function" is defined as "people vote in the way journalists expect them to".
This is just superficial, cynical, contrarian ignorance. Power in the US has been flipping between the parties quite freely, so the press either changes their opinion just as often as the electorate, or their influence is rather limited.
Unless you watch C-SPAN all day and read every law yourself, you'll neither not be informed, or you'll get your information from people who do some of that reading for you (and, if you're lucky, also ask questions, send & litigate FOIA requests, call experts, speak foreign languages etc). Professional journalism is the closest you can get to the source of information unless you do it all yourself. Your 4chan pals or that YouTube bro yelling at his webcam can't and won't do that legwork, either. So what you like about them isn't that they are better informed––they add one step of transmission and can therefore only decrease information content, never increase. What you like is their capability to pre-digest the news, remove anything that might challenge you, and regurgitate the rest in a form that doesn't conflict with your conspiratorial mindset.
>This is just superficial, cynical, contrarian ignorance. Power in the US has been flipping between the parties quite freely, so the press either changes their opinion just as often as the electorate, or their influence is rather limited.
No, I'm merely pointing out that when one party wins professional journalism recoils into a state of utter confusion. Recall the famous quote from a writer for The New Yorker about knowing only one person who voted for Richard Nixon in 1972.
>What you like is their capability to pre-digest the news, remove anything that might challenge you, and regurgitate the rest in a form that doesn't conflict with your conspiratorial mindset.
I actually very much dislike the journalist who tries to tell me what to think about a certain topic or event, though I see that you're attempting to attribute this behavior only to the "4chan youtube bro", which is a little strange since most journalists today - especially, it seems, mainstream ones - have explicit online personae that reflect a certain worldview and work for news orgs who attempt to "explain" the news to you. This isn't reporting - it's advocacy and opinion journalism where they attempt to inoculate "opinion" by claiming they're just "explaining".
I'm pretty sure, for example, that the Times gets criticised for this at least ten times as often as the Republican Party does, even though the latter was not only the origin of the lie the NYT fell for, but the actual group of people making the decision to go to war.
Only Google shutting down Reader has a worse <magnitude of mistake>/<longevity of criticism> ratio.
what australia, france, spain, and anybody else who is trying to enforce revenue transfers from facebook and google to their local media companies is trying to do is called a state-funded media, but that's apparently a bad look. so instead of collecting taxes and then distributing that tax revenue to the companies they want to subsidize, they're trying to pretend this is still some sort of free-market, independently funded media. a newspaper that's staying afloat because of government-mandated payments from big tech companies isn't any more independent than one being funded directly by the state.
Oftentimes governments seek to redress one party whose work is being taken advantage of by another party whether that's from a principle of fairness, a desire to maintain the health of both parties, more mercenary reasons, etc. Doing this outside of the narrow regime of taxes and subsidies is not only not uncommon. It's entirely normal.
Also, it's worth mentioning that the most trusted media organisation in Australia is state funded so it can't be that much of a bad look.
IMO decisions like that require power to be concentrated in limited hands.
We'll get anti-google/facebook/tech propaganda campaign like in the past. Remember the months/years of neverending anti-google "news"? Remember the months/years of neverending anti-facebook "news"? Followed by congressional hearings/etc. Notice how it all seemed to have stopped when google/youtube/facebook/etc decided to give state-backed "news" companies preferential treatment on their platforms?
> I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship
In purely business/financial terms, sure. But not in the media/political terms. You think these tech companies have more power than state backed news companies?
This seems...confused. At that point why wouldn't Facebook, Google, et al just ban the media company links from their platforms and avoid the hassle?
Removing news links would probably eventually kill social media platforms in the long run, or at least accept a new path with much less growth.
Honestly it might be nice for information to move a little slower.
"We regret that due to the Spanish law, Spanish publishers aren't featured in Google News and Google News is closed in Spain."
https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9609...
Facebook is the antiquated ugly stepchild of social media. What's their engagement like for people <18?
IMO, news media is basically a public good, in the sense that it's non-rival and basically non-excludable. Unfortunately, it's also a relatively low personal value public good. What I mean is that the typical person cannot make decisions that benefit themselves based on the news, and the news provides little entertainment value compared to e.g. video games or television. That is not to say it has no value, just that the value it produces is low compared to what it costs to make.
In the past, news media was more valuable, because there was less other media around. Now there are so many media channels (videogames, cable, broadcast, music, social, YouTube, etc.) that even if they were all equally entertaining to the news, news' share of the whole pie would be smaller. But they're not equally entertaining, they're more entertaining. So news loses out.
Despite its low entertainment value, on a social level, there is definitely some value to having an informed public. So maybe the government should subsidize the creation of informative content, as it does with the BBC in the UK. And maybe funding for this should be partially derived from taxes on internet companies. But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the government would basically mandate a transfer of wealth from internet companies directly to the wallets of news media owners.
I don't know what is the "ethical" business solution to this problem but I know that Google, at least, is favoring clickbaits and text spinning over quality. If you write a good blog with a single article per week it will be in the tail of searchers below text spinning content that has a higher frequency of updates.
Do you mean your grandma and grandpa can easily identify clickbaits?
The problem is fundamentally systemic. It is a price/reward ratio dependent upon users and the satisfaction of the advertising clients.
I frequent the web sites of a two publications that block both crawlers and social media referrers, and they're quite civilized.
Maybe if they news organizations weren't addicted to the tech companies, their sites wouldn't look like a meth addict's grin.
I'd guess the causal arrow flows in the other direction. Publications that are explicitly targeting a smaller, more specific market can afford to avoid courting the kind of person who get their news from Facebook. But pubs that are going for a broader audience can't ignore this channel.
I know someone's going to respond "maybe they shouldn't be targeting that audience then" but....why? If CNN stops pandering to the average dimbulb and said dimbulb's Facebook feed becomes even more dominated by Macedonian (actual) fake news sites, is that _better_, for either the reader or for society? The irreducible reality is that most people like the kind of crap that mainstream news sites put out, and those people need to get their news from somewhere. (By the way, this doesn't exclude mainstream "prestige" publications like the NYT that pretend they're going for high-minded audiences; their drivel just has one layer extra of tidying up than CNN's does).
And of course their "experts" are just random people who said some things. And they mention that even if they do keep customers out they while still have pickup and possibly delivery. So who cares about that part of the story then? Apparently it's not going to affect me.
The media has done nothing to prevent panic buying and everything to encourage it with these click bait headlines. There is no reason stores should be running out of anything but PPE and other things where demand naturally shot up because covid-19 like PPE and disinfectant. Demand for toilet paper only went up because of the media (and government). The other thing the media has been doing is shaming people but I'm not going to go there.
(IMO: both.)
The lockdowns have precipitated a huge shift in how we eat and what/where we purchase things. The supply chain is responding, but pivoting is expensive and groceries are a low margin business... the shortages could have been a lot worse. Going forward we may see shortages in imported foods/produce due to pandemic impacts in other countries and/or regulatory/logistics problems getting that food to market.
I'm not saying that the media has been responsible, just don't discount the bigger picture of changes in consumer behaviour.
Google, Facebook and Amazon owe their power to being great at content distribution. And I believe that if they take care to compensate content creators fairly, these sorts of upheavals will be greatly reduced. I think YouTube does a fair job of this. Not perfect, but a better balance, and I believe even that is enough.
Once upon a time if you wanted to advertise you had to go to somebody with a centralized distribution operation. They had to have a printing press or a radio station. Then they would charge you a large pile of money and put your ad in front of thousands of people. This revenue was used to pay for news reporting.
Today there are cat videos with millions of views. Advertisers who want to reach people in a particular demographic don't have to pay a premium to advertise in a publication whose readership skews towards that demographic, they can just advertise to the subset of the cat video viewers who happen to be in that demographic. There are more than enough cat videos and hot girls eating bananas on the internet to drive the cost of putting your ad in front of a person way down from where it was when you had to pay a newspaper or a TV station to do it.
Meanwhile Google makes a lot of money because the cat owner doesn't have an ad network, but if they put Google ads on their cat video channel they can make $72/month, and then Google gets a cut, times a billion people.
The news media assume that because they used to make a lot of money and now Google makes a lot of money, the money Google makes is mostly attributable to the work they do, but it isn't. It's mostly attributable to all the people posting videos of their cats and home improvement projects and college track meets and movie parodies and whatever else.
Their problem is that the value of an ad impression has fallen dramatically because there is so much more competition. But that wasn't caused by Google and they can't solve it. Even if you took all the money Google makes from ads related to news reporting and gave it to the companies doing news reporting, it wouldn't be as much as they used to make when they had a de facto monopoly on advertising.
And if you really want more of the money to go to the content creators, the best thing you could do is break up the ad networks (and prohibit them from ever buying each other again), so they would have more competition and move more of the margins to creators. But it still wouldn't be as much as they used to get.
Is there any merit to this at all?
It's a super dumb idea that will never go anywhere.
Facebook is essentially a link distribution platform. It only continues to get visitors because media companies keep providing, like spooky magic, new links to be shared on there every day. Many of their visitors would drop away immediately without news. The news is the basis for a ton of engagement once the visitors arrive (39.2K likes, etc.). If that were all true you'd think it would be enough to get Facebook to pay to keep news companies afloat, but it isn't: they don't care which news organisations survive, only that there are still new links every day. Importantly, because nobody reads articles, only headlines, news orgs get nothing without the click. So "link aggregation" without ad revenue or subscription revenue is worth zero in the usual case. Fb doesn't have a problem letting good journalism die out as long as there are enough Breitbarts going around producing engagement on Fb. It takes a lot less $ per link to produce fake news than real news with facts in it, and those headlines are pretty damn engaging, so those places will die out last or more likely never die out because the margins are still fine and their competitors have died out.
I think that means they have to pay fake news places as well, otherwise promoting quality news (Fb can control how much attention a link gets) costs more tax and is disincentivised.
At least, this is the argument used by Spain against Google News, causing Google to stop linking to Spanish news sites.
https://louisem.com/3838/facebook-link-thumbnail-image-sizes
No, you have this backwards; snippets don't leech revenue away from news orgs, they enhance their revenue. There have been cases in the past where Google was ordered to stop displaying snippets of certain sites without paying, and media companies immediately started whining about the sharp traffic declines. Complaints about the copyright of snippets is a fig leaf for protection money of the sort they're demanding once again.
If US tech companies want to generate profit from EU and other OECD countries why shouldn't they be taxed in the countries they generate that money from?
But this set of demands goes far beyond what's required to protect critical domestic production, by explicitly laying out specifics for how the market should be structured:
> require the companies to negotiate in good faith on how to pay news media for use of their content, advise news media in advance of algorithm changes that would affect content rankings, favour original source news content in search page results, and share data with media companies.
On top of that, the doublespeak about the purpose of demands like these rankle me:
> Frydenberg said it was only fair that media companies that created the content got paid for it. “This will help to create a level playing field,” he said.
Paywalls have existed for ages. The notion that "it's only fair" that a business that chooses a business model based on ad revenue also get a government-coerced payout from a third-party is lunatic on its face. Aggregators and referrers like Google and Facebook don't create content[0] and thus aren't eating media companies' lunch; competitors like blogs are. If it's "not fair" that they're paid, why not fund them directly out of the government?
> If US tech companies want to generate profit from EU and other OECD countries why shouldn't they be taxed in the countries they generate that money from?
Are you under the impression that their profits within the country aren't already taxed? The difference here is that the tax receipts are going directly to media companies instead of to the gov't (and the fact that implicit taxes generally don't manage to capture the attention of the uninformed voter, who'd probably be put off by the idea that a tax should be have such narrowly-targeted payers and recipients without being explicitly Pigovian (Eg cigarettes)).
[0] Except to the extent that individual posts on Facebook have reduced news consumption, but I'm not sure if that's true
It's the same story in Germany, France, Spain etc. Less so in the UK where newspapers are more diverse and have mostly either gone paywalled and stabilised, or have such huge popularity and reach (e.g. Daily Mail) that they can be profitable off of traffic and ads. But most countries have a lot of newspapers all hard to differentiate from each other due to journalistic groupthink. They can't/won't compete by altering the way they report news, so they are reduced to calling in favours in capital cities.
What makes me suspicious is that protectionist action such as this is only coming now, at a time where the already-concentrated landscape is threatened, and because it's already concentrated there are a lot of powerful people with their fingers in the pie - much more-so than when it was less concentrated (almost by definition).
Therefore, my take on this is that it's protectionist for News Corp / Rupert Murdoch more-so than any reasons of the "social good". Very much a case a of "when elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled".
This ruling makes more sense, it's like attaching a VAT on google's pipeline.
Google is a different problem and it looks like they recognized the problem more with them and wanted to deal with the algorithms but I still think that people have accepted too readily the problem is that people just scan headlines and not that Facebook and Google to a lesser extent have an incentive for people not to click links too frequently.
Also, break up their monopolizing tactics, like not sharing search queries with target sites (removal of referral) and monopolizing the browser search bars. Maybe G should share the search term instead of revenue.
This is just such an unnatural? forced? solution, and in my very limited experience, that leads to weird incentives later down the line.
It sort of feels like Google and Facebook are being incentivized to NOT display the content of traditional media institutions. That... doesn't seem like the intent.
Most Wikipedia content is licensed under a Creative Commons license, so, by intent, Google's free to use it as long as there's attribution. I'm not sure what would happen if a law forced Wikimedia to take money for something it's intentionally giving away.
Publishers will not get a cent, nor should they (they don't block Google by choice).