People don't want to pay for news. They don't like ads, but will tolerate them to a point, and most definitely don't want to pay for subscriptions. Laws can change behavior short term but long term the better product and platform will win.
I'm sure I'm not the only person here who subscribes to LWN. People with a special interest in a particular topic are willing to pay subscriptions to specialist news outfits covering that topic. Not enough for them to grow rich but enough for many of them to survive. The real struggle is retaining subscribers to mass-market generalist news as opposed to niche speciality news sources.
You have a global network of individuals and companies producing news. If you offer good news for $5 but someone else is offering acceptable news for $0 that acceptable news is going to win every time.
> Hence, the key effect of commoditization is that the pricing power of the manufacturer or brand owner is weakened: when products become more similar from a buyer's point of view, they will tend to buy the cheapest.
The two I'm looking at paying for in the near future are https://thebrowser.com/ and https://www.slow-journalism.com/, but I'd pay a lot more than that for some kind of Realpolitik executive summary which gave overviews of the most important trends, including the most common mainstream opinions and an analysis of any available evidence.
So, arguing that “these politicians don’t understand economics” is like saying “laws against theft don’t understand how easy it is to break a window”.
> "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia"
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/australian-pm-calls-en...
- Donald Horne, 1964
In Ontario as well we have this kind of problem with state-capture by industries all over. Regulations and land zoning are in many ways geared for the already-haves rather than a level playing field. An example being the wine industry regulation here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigneurial_system_of_New_Fran...
He was certainly one of the more forward-thinking, progressive PMs we've had. As just one example, he actually believes climate change is real.
He had the opportunity to act on Climate Change and he stuck to Tony Abbott's script. Weak as piss.
Australia's two choices.
There are no good politicians.
The only thing any of them have going is that some of them accidentally make reasonable policy choices occasionally.
Like, what you see on television or gets printed in a newspaper needs to go through an editorial cycle, fact checked etc?
The legislation is effectively giving actual journalists the ability to continue creating what we've historically considered news and protecting that form of occupation.
There's a lot of misinformation going on on the web and things can spread like wildfire.
No-one seems to care about this fact and instead focus on the wrong bits of this legislation.
Would you mind explaining how exactly does it do that? Maybe I am focusing on the wrong thing, but I haven't seen the side you've mentioned at all.
It gives them more bargaining rights when dealing with tech companies as to what a 'fair' portion of revenue they should receive for having their stories presented on these sites.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/google-nine-agree-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56101859
The Australian government's approach is working.
Google can afford to pay for the right to link to publishers. New startups can't.
Australia has strengthened Google's monopoly, all in the guise of "taking on" big tech.
The law specifically only targets Google and Facebook due to their monopoly power. New startups are not affected.
If /r/australia got too influential or troublesome to this politician, in the lead up to an election perhaps, then there is no need to get anything through parliament - this individual can essentially add reddit.com to a list and then send Condé Nast the bill.
Just so you know, Conde Nast hasn't owned reddit for over a decade.
Second, the Australian law does not apply to all companies. It just applies to the companies the current government decides it applies to. (It's not that it will even be selectively enforced. It literally only applies to a specific set of companies, which is currently FB and Google.)
It has everything to do with the new legislation. I can only suggest you read the article start to finish.
Facebook will be making similar deals soon enough.
It's not about the monopoly that FB has. If company XYZ started getting fined, we'd hear nothing about it. That garage based company would just go away.
FB, just happens to have enough cash to say no.
We have something of a natural experiment here on how much FB traffic is worth to news sites. We'll learn the results in a year if Australia repeals or maintains the law.
We already had a natural experiment, in which Australian publishers were free not to share their content on fb.
I’m not sure how discoverability is going to be effected and that may take a while to see the effects given how locals probably know the locals news sources.
I can't see how you could possible argue they do not provide value to the classic media companies by allowing them to be linked and discussed freely on their feeds.
What they want is for Facebook and Google to be forced to list them, but also forced to pay for the privilege. If they failed to craft or pay for legislation to that end, it was nothing more than a mistake.
Most likely this deal benefits the biggest stakeholders only. Small players would cave into opening up to FB/Google.
Such legislation is impossible given that Google/Facebook are not Australian companies. At the end of the day, if the legislation makes their involvement in those countries a net negative for their bottom lines, they can and will take their ball and go home.
Besides, this is obviously a good deal if facebook folds. Publishers seem to be overestimating their position so fb is calling their bluff. Both sides have stuff to lose, but im pretty sure the publishers have a lot more than fb does.
Thus the publishers have already revealed whether they benefit or not, by choosing to allow or disallow the traffic. There is no rational argument that they were being "hurt" by the traffic.
Of course Tech is now politically unpopular, and if you are Australian then it is foreign tech -- even more unpopular -- so why not use this political environment to try to extract some cash payments? Everyone wants to receive cash payments, and I can understand why a for-profit Industry would want cash payments, but what is harder to understand is why the public would view them as victims if they didn't get those payments, as they have already made it clear that they are benefitting from the tech traffic by allowing it and by setting up marketing accounts in Facebook and promoting/ sharing links to their stories there. Yet in addition to that they want to receive cash from Facebook. Well, that's a bit of a fantasy, now, isn't it?
The market dominance of a couple platforms is exactly the problem here. No organization is in a good bargaining position against them and so soon there will be regulation.
It's already working. Google is busy making deals. Facebook will do the same eventually.
Ben Thompson has a nice analysis of the situation: https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargainin...
Miraculously, after the Australian government gets involved, Google is now making deals with news media. Facebook will do the same eventually.