Can anybody explain to me what the problem is with Facebook et el driving traffic to news sites?
Most of the times I visit newspapers websites I was sent there from social media.
Most of the times I visit newspapers websites I was sent there from social media.
So while this approach with news media is a strange one, I think there is an argument to be made for taxing things differently. Make Facebook/Google pay a fair tax in all countries they're active in. Then each country can decide how they want to use that, if a democratically elected government in Australia wants to subsidize news using taxes they should be able to do so.
So indeed there is no clear simple implementation strategy for this yet.
An analogy might be to minimum wage laws: a laissez-faire market would result in an unfair distribution of benefits, so the government steps in.
There is the argument that showing news snippets next to the link is what you bare paying for. But otherwise it's a pure media money grab backed by the government.
They complain that big tech gets the reward (content that drives user engagement) and further, it detracts from the potential traffic they would otherwise receive.
Have you reference for that?
That is the first coherent argument, IMO, for their position. Coherent, but so wrong I think.