Bizarre Reaction to Facebook's Decision to Leave News Business in Australia
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
In EU we had a discussion about link tax and some related areas regarding remuneration for content providers by content distribution platforms (search engines - prominently Google and social media sites like FB, Twitter, etc.). Back then I was strongly against this new laws as some of the newly proposed regulations bundled with link tax I considered potentially harmful for e.g. opensource software managed in GitHub repos.
When I think of the link tax now and after reading this rant defending FB, I lean towards the link tax.
Quotes like make me shiver: "First is the link tax. This is fundamentally against the principles of an open internet. The government saying that you can't link to a news site unless you pay a tax should be seen as inherently problematic for a long list of reasons."
I don't think we should put FB and open internet in the same sentence. Sharing the news is available all the time, through e-mail, slack, SMS or any other mean of electronic communication. It has just stopped being available through FB (a private, global corporation) who will STOP benefiting from it.
This can only work if governments force companies to display selected media links and then charge them for it. It can only work if governments force search engines to alter their algorithms to preference media organisations and charge the search engine in the process.
It is the worst piece of tech related legislation conceived in a so called democratic country, the fact that its even progressed to this stage is mind boggling.
News outlet therefore assume that it's unfair, since they don't get the corresponding advertising revenues, and Facebook does instead.
So too, the point of "clickbait" is that they are doing everything in their power to make you click. So the assumption that there is a much larger audience that would click if only they didn't have access to the link from Facebook is, well, difficult to believe.
It's possible to come up with decent regulation/law that does what this one is nominally advertised as doing. But this one is unreasonable.
(Also, the way we got to this point is worth considering. Murdoch spent a decade kicking out prime ministers and destroying democratic oversight. Once he'd finally abolished any expectation that democracy serves the people, he wrote a law and gave it to the parliament to move wealth from his successful advertising companies to his own less successful advertising companies.)
I hate FB too, and avoid their products, but Australia's new law is Mafia style extortion, and we need to separate our feelings about FB when judging this law.
Everybody benefits from the link traffic , Australia is just in the pocketbook of Rupert Murdoch.
You have to remember that Facebook is not just linking the content, they are pulling the entire thing into their walled garden, reducing the value of the content producers adds and increasing the value of their own adds.
Paying for something leads to that thing gaining value and the producer having incentives to produce more and higher quality products.
The idea that Facebook paying the news providers that deliver content to its add network would suddenly lead to news providers stopping to produce content is just plain silly.
Oh yeah
Almost makes me want to go recover my Facebook account. shrug
The weak link is the legal entity of the corporation.