Facebook rejects calls to share advertising revenue with Australian media | Hacker News Reader

Facebook rejects calls to share advertising revenue with Australian media

asiatimes.com

93 pointsgscott93 comments

Australia’s competition regulator, the ACCC, has estimated that Google and Facebook together earn some A$6 billion (US$4 billion) a year from advertising in the country.

Leading news publishers have demanded the two companies pay at least 10% of that money each year to local news organizations.

News organizations want ten percent of FB and Goog's advertising revenue? I guess I do too but this concept is facially absurd.

I don't find it too absurd if you consider that many older people go to Facebook to read the news. And by now, the young crowd is moving on, which means those older people are Facebooks main user base.

So a company getting outcompeted wants the government to force its competiton to give it free money.

And you don't think that's absurd?

Countries protect their domestic companies all the time.

Sure, but you generally don't want to be blatant about it. If the US decides to start swinging its weight around to protect Google/Facebook from this (or as retaliation) then Australia is most definitely going to come out on the losing side.

This is happening in the US too. Google/Facebook should pay for the news they use: https://www.editorandpublisher.com/columns/shoptalk-google-f...

You mean how the DMCA grants US companies legal immunity for most copyright infringements if the content is posted by an "unrelated" user account instead of the official company account?

FYI I work on catching image thieves in the US and we sadly see lots of cases where you feel that it should clearly be illegal that a company is using someone else's photo without permission, but oddly enough it turns out to be not legally pursuable.

If they are re-publishing content created by news publishers on their platform, they can pay money for this. If they do not want to pay the price, they can simply stop showing news. People will go back to the original platform.

These newspapers aren't getting outcompeted. They are having their content stolen. If Facebook would prevent people from posting links from these newspapers and instead show an error message that says that it isn't allowed because Facebook doesn't want to pay for it, how do you think people would react?

How is posting a link considered stealing content?

Some say that copyright infringement is stealing, and some say that the decline of the news media could be reversed by extending copyright to prohibit the unauthorised posting of links to, or snippets of, news content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_...

Posting a link is not copyright infringement.

The link is not the problem. The headline, text snippet, and image used in the box to illustrate the link, they are.

Because let's be honest, most people only look at the image and read the headline. So for them, the preview on facebook is "good enough".

From an American perspective, sure, but in a lot of countries we ask ourselves if letting these companies operate freely is a benefit for our society.

I can see why moving money from Facebook to local news media would benefit Australia, and let’s not pretend we can’t force Google or Facebook to comply. Just look at what they are willing to do for China.

Even if I try to imagine an Australian perspective, demanding Google and Facebook pay the newspapers 10% of revenue seems pretty bizarre.

It would seem better to just charge a 10% tax on advertising, put that in the general fund, and then subsidise newspapers however you see fit, which may or may not amount to the same AUD but can more easily change over time.

Yes, would think surely this ought to be managed by a tax that keeps some of the money in-country, whether or not it gets shared with the press (which brings a lot of issues about subsidies, free speech and more). Wondering, do FB/Google pay any substantial corporate tax bills in Australia?

> Just look at what they are willing to do for China.

... What are they willing to do? Aren't they both banned in China?

Forcing compliance is simple: Just change the tax laws. So what would the law say? A tax 10% of advertising revenue on... what kind of advertising? All advertising? That sounds really simple, just increase the VAT by 10% for advertising products.

Replying to myself because this reminds me of something in another country, decades ago.

This other country had a tax rule that was intended to help news media, and one of the ministries had to decide what "news media" meant, in effect set terms for who benefited.

This went well for a decade or more. Then, someone in that ministry wrote a memo that said (abbreviated and modernised): "Last week, <name> published a% clickbait, b% celebrity blahblah and other rubbish, and only c% factual news. We need to consider whether it is a news medium as required for the tax rule."

I have a feeling that the Austrialian companies that want a part of Googles/Facebook's income do not want any sort of just or equal tax rule, and also do absolutely not want to be restricted to publishing mostly news.

It’s a massive money drain out of Australia. Look at how aggressively China protects its businesses by blocking Facebook etc from operating in its borders.

That's not why China bans Facebook. China bans Facebook because it has a policy of internet censorship and government control of information.

China would be perfectly capable of achieving that goal with Facebook in the country, just as with the domestic platforms.

oh sweet summer child...

Why not both?

Because that's an overdetermined explanation. Their primary motivation is control of information, and that by itself is the only reason they need to ban Facebook. It's also why they ban a number of other sites that don't compete with Chinese companies.

Protecting Chinese social media companies from competition is at best a secondary motivation and it probably isn't even necessary -- Chinese internet users prefer Chinese social media for a variety of reasons, and I don't think Facebook is a significant competitive threat. Neither is Twitter.

On the other hand, China allowed Google to operate even though it might have been a strong competitor to Baidu. Google was only blocked when it refused to comply with censorship policies -- again demonstrating that control over information is the government's main concern.

Australian here. We really are the testing ground for draconian laws to be tested and proven out before it makes its way to the west.

I hope something good is implemented to favor local news agencies. I don't use facebook but I see how google get benefits of the other news channels. I mostly go to abc, news.com.au directly for news headlines. But I know lot of my friends use facebook for the latest news. This does not benefit the original content creator.

Nobody makes any money off of news these days. Publishers are just looking for someone to milk and they, of course, go after whoever has the biggest pocketbooks.

Here's a good read on the fate of a US publisher that illustrates what has happened over the last 10 years to publishers

https://digiday.com/media/caught-in-the-mushy-middle-how-qua...

Why? I have no sympathy at all News Corp and Nine Entertainment. No one is forcing them to share content on Facebook if they don't like the deal. This is pretty clearly old media trying to shake down new media.

(And tell your friends to stop using Facebook for news and go to a real news site.)

I think one argument is that the news papers do the recording, then if you share a link Facebook scrapes it, takes the image and puts it on their site (regardless of copyright/licensing status) and takes the news headline.

Most users then don’t click through, but the content is stolen to fill up facebooks timeline.

You can stop Facebook scraping your site via robots.txt, so the control is at the publisher. If FB crawler is blocked then it can't scrape anything and only the link is posted.

It's not local news pushing for this, it's being pushed by Murdoch's media empire.

Based on the poor (some would say downright disgusting) quality of their content - they absolutely do not deserve even the funding they currently have.

I don't really watch the news and not from Australia originally even though I live here, so forgive my stupid question: is there local news in Australia? I've never heard of any.

There are a bunch of different TV networks, some with local news. I must admit I haven't kept track for a good decade or so, it's possible they've all died out.

I would say local newspapers and radio are the majority of local news sources though.

The ABC also has a strong local presence, with 50+ regional radio stations and their websites.

There's definitely local news but you'll find more locally specific programming on radio or in newspapers than on TV.

On TV the ABC, Channel 7, Channel 9 and Channel 10 all have state-specific broadcasts and newsrooms while SBS runs a single national program. Because the capital cities in Australia make up such a large proportion of the population you will rarely get "local news" on TV if you live in a regional town or area.

Most regional and local papers are owned by either News Corp or Australia Community Media (which was formerly owned by Fairfax before they were acquired by Nine) though, so even these local news outlets rely on the big players.

If you live in Melbourne's north I recommend trying to get a hold of "The Local Paper", which is an independent paper that focuses on things like what the local council gets up to. It's a pretty different experience to reading one of the big mastheads.

Let's not forget that other major centres have their own tv studios and broadcasts: Wollongong, Newcastle, Mackay, Townsville, and probably many others.

Similar for radio. ABC has local radio programs that are bulked with national programs. Triple J supports up and coming artists and alternative tastes, is ABC funded, and has local productions including in country towns around the country.

The real issue here is Facebook and Google scalping the news content and reselling it as their own.

The bigger issue is that Murdoch media undermines everything and needs to be broken up.

For anyone confused, ABC here is the Australian Broadcast Corporation, which is Australia's national news network, mostly government funded. Not to be confused with the ABC, the American Broadcast Company.

This is similar to what Spain did in 2014 when passed a law to make Google pay for the news they published on Google News. Google closed the Spanish version of the site. There hasn't been a Google News for Spain since then.

https://www.rt.com/news/201031-spain-google-tax-law/

Good

This just feels like the old gatekeepers are envious of the new gatekeepers. Neither of them deserve sympathy for the actions, however NewsCorp and Nine Entertainment might the first ones to buckle under this.

Here's hoping. NewsCorp have had a tangibly negative impact on my country, and likely everywhere they operate. If only all they wanted was profit, you could at least understand them. But they seem to want division and violence too. Someone needs to tell Rupert that he can't spend his money in a country that has fallen apart.

They want profit. Everything else is a by-product. If I as businessman want to put money on a media venture, I will choose the conservative side too.

That's just wrong. News Corp has for years allowed its newspapers and editorial divisions to lose money or operate inefficiently while it can cross-subsidise them from cash cows such as Foxtel. It is quite clear that Murdoch highly values the influence that his media conglomerate can give him.

Yes, money is important too, but it is not the only thing that matters to the shareholders (a.k.a. Rupert Murdoch).

> The initiative has been strongly pushed by Australia’s two biggest media companies, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Nine Entertainment.

These two companies are scum, and the fact that this proposal was taken seriously by the Australian government is embarrassing. Murdoch's News Corp already interfered with the country's internet infrastructure plans in order to protect its profits from cable television; this is just another attempt to stem the bleeding.

If Facebook wasn't so effective a platform for Fox News, The Daily Wire, and Breitbart, I'd genuinely celebrate their role in strangling News Corp.

This law would establish de facto unit economics for some to-be-defined unit of news/content consumption. Clever entrepreneurs could then scale up new properties focused on the optimization of whatever that unit is, with much lower overhead/content production costs than traditional media companies. An unintended and potentially quite painful consequence follows for the two named incumbents: tremendous amounts of new, nimble, well-funded competition. Be careful what you wish for.

Facebook's effectiveness is neutral to the side of politics it pushes unfortunately. It's just that some people are not beneath using facebook to push an agenda.

It's not so surprising that Australia's government listens to what Murdoch wants. After all Murdoch played an important role in their election.

So the other shoe has finally dropped: If it hasn't been apparent to everyone yet, the vast majority of "anti-tech"/anti-FB articles has been the dying gasps of attempted relevance from an antiquated media ecosystem.

Old media is upset and angry that they no longer have a monopoly on controlling the narrative. They're scared that their business model is no longer viable. They're worried about their loss of credibility (of their own making).

This is just the latest attempt (as blatant as it may be) to wrangle the state to help them survive. Let's see if it'll work.

While it's true that this is the reason for companies like Murdoch, the small and mid-sized ad and journalism industry suffers from this consolidation and market power as well and just brushing the issue off by appealing to unsympathetic entities like Murdoch is just as wrong.

It's not at all wrong to be concerned about the diversity of the news and ad ecosystem and what Facebooks or others role is in vacuuming up economic rents due to sheer size.

I sometimes thought I was a singleton set of people who believed this. I'd add that the old media is also in a vicious cycle wherein they can only attempt to gain dwindling share of attention by reducing their credibility. At the micro level, (e.g. on Twitter, where a pan-outlet collection of journalists "mutually discover" the preferred narrative) this sometimes looks a bit like fixed point iteration about a circular firing squad.

I would predict that in this case, Facebook is probably right that news content could be excised from Australia without much cost to the company. It may hasten the demise of the old media in Australia.

While I will celebrate the fall of NewsCorp, old media does include a swath of local television and print media that are doing good work for the communities they're part of.

I often hear that concern met with unsympathetic calls to get with the times, but making a media company purely out of social media isn't profitable either. We'll be left with nothing but social media if we're not careful.

I somewhat agree (though I do think local TV news often makes Anchorman look more like a documentary than a farce), but some of the local papers really are more of a community institution. In my experience, most of their problems involve inability to have reliable operations, e.g. setting up billing accurately or delivering the paper accurately and on time, which angers subscribers.

It's not even really about controlling the narrative though, they still do to some extent. They're angry that they don't have a monopoly on advertisement anymore.

I don't believe that's entirely true. There is a lot of anti-facebook/social-media that's mostly stemmed from the tangible negative influence it's had on society. We can disparge Facebook and News Corp in the same breath, as it seems to me that they were cut from the same cloth all along.

I agree that the old media is worried about losing control of the narrative. However, i think that sweeping all negative coverage of Facebook under this rug is not helpful either.

There is a real loss to the community if newspapers don’t have the money to pay journalists to do real, investigative journalism - and it’s tough to argue that Facebook has not accelerated the decline of newspapers.

Unfortunately it seems like the vast majority of content churned out by newspapers is not "real, investigative journalism", but rather clickbait that seeks to heighten anxiety and inflame tribal relations within a population.

I love and want more real, solid pieces of reporting. But it's not there enough to make it worth defending the whole lot of them.

The issue is that this clickbait anxiety is what Facebook et al. are good at anyway. But investigative reporting has mostly been done by established news orgs. So by losing the news media, we would still have more than enough crappy clickbait articles, but lose the good parts.

What kind of new media can replace the value old media had? Good journalism and investigative journalism is needed for a healthy democracy and is also costly. It's almost a pillar that holds it up. What is this new media you speak of? Clickbait articles that consist of a bit of text with embedded tweets?

It was a Wall Street Journal (owned by Murdoch) investigative journalist that led to Theranos being exposed.

Old media is upset and angry that they no longer have a monopoly on controlling the narrative

But they do: Facebook doesn’t produce any original content. It has its own narrative that it want to push of course but it has to get the raw materials from somewhere.

If I had been trying unsuccessfully to monetise my uninformed, poorly researched, and barely coherent opinions, I too would pivot to a strategy of blaming platforms that peddle similarly poor content for free and demand 10% of their advertising revenue.

Which begs me to question the eternal ambiguity about Facebook trying to position itself as a self publishing platform or that with a news arregator/personal communication hybrid model.

Suggesting that Google pay 10% of revenue to news organizations is frankly risible.

Won’t this just play out the same way it did in Germany and Spain?

The only difference here is that Rupert Murdoch's media empire has a fair bit of political influence in Australia, and they are the ones behind this.

For the uninitiated:

Germany passed legislation that requires websites to pay a fee even to show headlines. Google said they won't pay and will pull the plug on Google News in Germany if they need to pay a single cent. The media organizations then granted an exclusion to Google News, giving Google News a competitive advantage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_...

To note: one company tried going without Google, saw the number of visitors drop, and went back to Google for the deal.

What is it that causes news companies to lose money because of Google and Facebook? I am still visiting their site to read the article.

If you only read the headline, you aren't a serious consumer of news anyway.

> you aren't a serious consumer of news anyway.

This is basically all of their ad dollars, what you described there.

So do they believe that FB users will instead go to their site specifically to search for the article?

When you come from a Google search they remove the pay wall apparently. I searched for an extension for specifically the wall street journal since people regularly post workarounds for their site on here and found the leading extension just puts the referrer as a Google search for dozens of sites. They warn you to blacklist any organizations you actually pay for or have a login for since the extension deletes all cookies as well. I assume Facebook works similarly.

Is that not something the news organization does though? Google isn't removing the paywall, they are.

On mobile, for example, some news sites are hosted via Google's AMP service. I think that's at least one of the avenues for this supposed 'misuse'.

AMP still has ads and the publishers chose to install AMP.

In that case they can just, you know, stop using AMP.

That makes no sense. The news sites implement AMP themselves. There's no way your site can become AMP'd automatically or accidentally.

Which is why this is merely a political stunt in order to save the revenues of failing Australian conservative press organisations (News Corp, etc.)

It's a consequence of three things:

1. Facts can't be copyrighted.

2. Continuous publishing.

3. Google and Facebook cause a large preference for free content.

If you do great journalistic work and try to charge for it, moments later (no longer a full day) someone else will change a few words around and offer it for free. And Google and Facebook will lead everyone to their story.

Those who create value are unable to capture it. This leads to great journalists getting fired, quality declining, a less informed populace.

> 3. Google and Facebook cause a large preference for free content.

And hackernews. I think the most frequent kind of post on this site is a complaint about a paywall. The second most frequent kind of post is a workaround or alternative source sidestepping a paywall.

edit: That's not to say the scale is anywhere near the same. HN is a not going to show up on any news site's radar. But the problem is the same.

Agreed. And I just want to clarify: I don't think there are any bad guys here. Just a dysfunctional system.

Couldn't it be argued that people just have a large preference for free content regardless of how they find it?

With such a focus on money, having it, and keeping it (especially in the West), it seems only natural that people would naturally gravitate towards free content of all kinds. If not through HN/Google/wherever, it seems they'd spend the time figuring out a way to find it elsewhere.

Agreed. I think it will be especially interesting to watch things in the EU as the link tax seems to me to be partially aimed at stopping the rephrasing and linking back to a paywalled article by another free website, and the copyright directive seems to be aimed at stopping a single user with access from posting the entire article in some comment which I see happen a bunch on reddit and sometimes here.

The issue is probably most people are not reading the article anymore. When you have enough comment density, actually reading comments is more like a summary service.

It’s unfortunate that the actual submission by Facebook hasn’t been published and the linked article provides little background on the “mandatory code of conduct” proposal Facebook is responding to. This relates to a concepts paper the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission released on 19 May [1], following the government’s announcement on 20 April [2] that it had “directed the ACCC to develop a mandatory code of conduct to address bargaining power imbalances between digital platforms and media companies.”

[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/news-m...

[2] https://ministers.treasury.gov.au/ministers/josh-frydenberg-...

The concepts paper seeks feedback on several alternative proposals and says nothing about appropriating 10% of Google and Facebook’s revenue (this suggestion appears to come from another unpublished submission from a news outlet). The ACCC paper highlights a range of problems faced by news publishers seeking to negotiate with digital platforms, including the difficulty of estimating the value to Facebook and Google of linked and embedded news content (especially without access to Facebook and Google’s internal data), the lack of transparency in the algorithms Facebook and Google use to rank and display content, and the inability of small publishers to meaningfully communicate with these companies through automated support systems. The paper also points out that the threat of government intervention appears to have triggered a response from Facebook and Google on some of these issues.

Addressing information asymmetry and other market imperfections is part of the ACCC’s purpose of “enhancing the welfare of Australians through the promotion of competition and fair trading” [3]. Let’s not immediately write this off as an anti-competitive attempt to entrench “old media.”

[3] https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/caca20102...

Just stop these social/tech giants from including anything more than a headline and a link from their platforms. If they don't want to include that either, even better.

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