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Comment by rafaelturk | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to side with FB on this. This law is so bizarre.

It's a law that's either written by media lobbyists or people unfamiliar with technology. Potentially both at the same time.

If the news organisations want people to pay for news, they can change to a subscription model and put their content behind a pay wall. Many companies already to this: I myself pay over a hundred pounds a year for the Economist for their excellent reporting. The old establishment needs to understand they're not special, and if they want people to pay for news they need to provide content that's worth paying for, just like everyone else.

>It's a law that's either written by media lobbyists or people unfamiliar with technology.

It's a law written mostly by the ACCC.

> It's a law written mostly by the ACCC.

Which is operated mostly by Murdoch cronies.

Its not bizarre. Its protectionism, the government has strong relations with people whos business models are failing and rather than help them on a path to being successful organically, they chose to simply suck money from other successful businesses.

I beg to differ. If you read the wording was designed to affect only two companies, not an industry neither a concept. This is illegal or legally null in most democracies, hence bizarre.

Can you elaborate on what you find bizarre about it?

I found it bizarre that the Treasurer gets to (arbitrarily?) pick which platforms this applies to and that only 2 platforms, Facebook and Google, were chosen. Maybe I'm just missing the information, but why isn't there just a definition of a platform this should apply to? I'm pretty far removed from this issues, but it smells like some large news organization decided they wanted to get some free money from Facebook and Google so they lobbied for this law.

To me it sounds like they went after the symptoms and not the root cause. Which doesn't sound too bad to me.

The law is not bizarre in essence (there are details that are bizarre though): You are free to ask money for your content. On the other hand, Facebook is free to not buy your it.

No, with this law Facebook is not free to not buy the content. They are specifically forbidden from excluding those media companies from results, and lets not forget the cherry on top of the shit sandwich which is being forced to share their algorithm with the media companies, and even having to give advance notice of changes to their algorithm, something which is probably not even possible.

On top of all this, the definition of "core news" in the bill is ridiculously broad.

It's completely untenable, and IMO Facebook would surely (and predictably) have to leave the Australian market under those conditions.

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