Comment by brzezmac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brzezmac | Hacker News Reader

I'm on the fence with this one.

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.

What service in their right mind would link to any content that requires payment? Do media organisation think their content is so great that people will pay just to link to it? Links drive SEO, charging for them is the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot.

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.

I think the issue is that in many cases it does not bring traffic to the news outlet : people read the title/summary which is shown by google/Facebook, and don't click on the link.

News outlet therefore assume that it's unfair, since they don't get the corresponding advertising revenues, and Facebook does instead.

Isn't this the same problem of people glancing at the front page of a paper and not buying it? Yet apparently newspaper companies put that clear plastic in there so that the front page could be read, the assumption being that seeing the front page headline is more likely to make you buy the paper than not seeing it.

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.

The issue with this law is that there only opt out is the one that Facebook have taken. If they allow links to any news providers, then they must allow links to all news providers, and pay for them. And if they cannot reach a fair agreement, the arbitration is compulsory - ignore the value Facebook gives to News Corp, consider the value News Corp gives to Facebook.

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.)

HN links to articles in 99% of its posts. If HN had to pay a link tax, would it survive?

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.

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