Tim Berners-Lee says Australian media pay law would make internet unworkable
dailymail.co.uk
dailymail.co.uk
Keep the web free. Avoid imposing rules and taxes.
Ultimately a news organization is an internet citizen like you or me. They should not have different privileges.
I really don't mind social media being so big and growing. You don't have to live on their platforms.
::insert doubt meme::
Make them write a blog post, please. If it's inside Facebook, it's useless; it can't be added to archive.org, can't be read without Facebook.
My ability to argue about drugs shouldn’t be on the same footing as DuPont. Companies should be held to a higher standard of speech, as pretending that parties are the same despite lopsided power is going to play out very badly for the weak.
Here is the info if one wants to update their robots.txt to tell the FB bot to go away: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/craw...
This is the right take. If news organizations get paid whenever someone @mentions them (metaphorically speaking), why shouldn't I get paid as well whenever someone @mentions me?
In other words, if someone links to my website, I should get paid too!
I understand that old media is complaining that tech is making money with their content while the authors get nothing.
To me that is the equivalent of complaining that someone else is using your house because you left the door open.
So what is the problem with locks, pay-walls, creating accounts or blocking links?
Could it possible be the case that the old media actually wants the burglars inside?
Back in the day when I was only hearing of this thing called the Internet, people mentioned how they can read the New York Times online or another famous paper. Coming from a small town in Eastern Europe that was amazing.
But I also wondered why they were able to read it for free. I wonder what made the newspapers post their content online for free - probably because the internet was a fringe curiosity and they only realized it's becoming important when it was too late.
News that no one pays for doesn't help them. But also, news no one knows they have first is also news no one will pay for - or tell any of their friends to go to them for!
They're in a catch 22 re: their business model - they need visibility, they need people to be able to see them and know they have something insightful to add or they're dead in the water. Now that means the search engines and aggregators, as that is where most people are looking.
Most people also won't pay for random links sent by friends, or even an insightful article if they can get it somewhere else (even at a lower quality).
It's an even more brutal version of what the music and movie industry deal with around streaming (and will again in movies due to the proliferation of half baked streaming services).
We see this in Germany, too.
On the one hand, "old media" is eager to take any traffic that Google et al. send to them, but on the other hand they don't like aggregration and ask Google et al. to pay for text snippets.
This has already led to bizzare laws, driven by old media and conversative politicians.
Not that I completely understand why exactly they don't want to show up on google.
This ‘debate’ in Australia is not actually about that - most people supporting the bill haven’t been able to make an argument with enough complexity to distinguish between the sentence or so summary and displaying the whole article, and they generally try to make it sound like the latter is happening!
https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_t...
Just before, I saw one reporter try to claim that social media sites allow users to bypass paywalls, but they never have! Facebook never showed actual article content here, just link, title and maybe a thumbnail...
Luckily we have two fairly good public broadcasters (ABC and SBS), but the Murdoch media hate them and the conservative party in power are white-anting them away (budget freezes and things all the time which after inflation effectively mean cuts every year), and the quality has dropped considerably over the last few years with editorial interference (technically they’re independent, but reporters there who break big stories of Government corruption, or showing big problems in Government policy just happen to be hounded out, even though the stories were true).
No, on the political side it's not driven by conservative politics. It has bipartisan support. In fact is has the the support of Australian's left most party too: the Greens. As far as I can tell, it has every politicians support.
It may be true the conservative's are supporting it to get favourable publicity from Murdock - sounds plausible. That could be Labor's reason too, but it may be the journalists union is putting a fair amount of pressure on them. A lot of journalists are going to lose their jobs. The world doesn't need 100 people re-writing the same story. Sadly for them will lose their hobs regardless of what Labor champions politically.
It's harder to understand the Greens position as they don't count Murdock among their friends. At best they are don't actually understand what's driving all this and how inevitable it all is (oh, how I pine for Scott Ludlam). At worst they are following their "all giant overseas corporates are bad" instincts. Whether that's true or not, it nothing to do with what's happening to the newspapers. Their fate was sealed when the internet became a thing, and anybody could publish a news story. Extending the dinosaurs death throes with forced cross subsidies helps no-one
Don't underestimate the weakness of the tech giants political position here, or the fight they have ahead of them. If they come out of this with their bank accounts mostly intact, it will be ample demonstration of the truth of how much "hard" power they actually wield. They will have squashed the entire Australian political establishment.
So they see that Google and Facebook have a lot of money, no have lobbied hard to get these laws made. Unfortunately the ACCC (competition watchdog) seems to be complicit, having done a big research study into anticompetitive behaviour in ad tech etc., which is used to justify the law even though the law doesn’t actually go any way towards actually solving any of the problems with any of that, and only serves to try and funnel money from Google and Facebook to a few big media companies.
It’s pretty frustrating, because the waters are being muddied and reporters writing a lot of falsehoods about Facebook and Google apparently using or ‘stealing’ content, but they don’t - we’re literally talking about just links here!
That's because what it really is is a fairly unnuanced shake-down by the government on behalf of Murdoch media[1][2].
[1] https://youtu.be/2BPLBIgKjN8
[2] https://buzzmachine.com/2021/02/18/murdochs-law-and-the-net/
Because someone else engaged in some content. Unbelievable.
All joking aside, if the law required payment be made to someone when users link to a post, you either build that functionality into the platform or don't build the platform. Taking the opposite of your argument, why you do you believe a platform creator is entitled to the value of a link aggregator without compensating those creating the content?
Royalties are a well established compensation mechanism in the intellectual property sphere, and platforms shouldn't be allowed to free ride.
When Hacker News users link to paywalled content, some of us consume it without issue because we pay those sites (Bloomberg, WSJ, Economist, etc).
So congratulations, you've convinced me. I think Facebook and Google should charge Australian news sites to carry their links in their feeds. These are after all little more than adverts.
Anecdotally (n=1), my Australian friends have already signed up directly with email newsletters and apps of the news sources they previously would've consumed through Facebook's feed (when Facebook started blacklisting links to media websites by domain). Those news sources are going to be just fine without Facebook, and existed before Facebook was a thing.
The main value Facebook and Google have to news sites isn't access from established readers, they will find the content anyway because they already know they want it. The problem is discovery and by and acquisition of new readers. That's the primary value and service social media and search platforms like facebook and google offer in this area. It's why they are primarily adverting platforms, and get most of their revenue from advertising in the first place. News organisations have been free-riding off this for years but are so desperate and entitled they want to charge their advertisers for promoting their content.
Likewise regarding your position. I fall firmly on the side that Big Tech should be heavily regulated, and in some cases broken up. This is simply an extension of that, shifting monetary rewards to those creating content versus platforms extracting all of the financial rewards, throwing scraps to the content (which has a real cost, versus the zero marginal cost advantage platforms have).
Google and Facebook have a combined market cap of almost $2.2 trillion dollars and collectively generate over $260 billion a year in revenue. Am I supposed to feel bad for them? I pay for my news content (listed in another comment), and I think they should too (disclaimer: I am not a trillion dollar adtech platform).
I support the spirit of this legislation (content being compensated for its value on platforms), but also believe these specific corporations deserve it based on their exploitative actions & intent, and resources available to them [1]. My apologies if that wasn't properly communicated throughout my comments.
The fact that The Australian media is steaming about the policy change, running negative stories about Facebook across almost all mainstream sources, and urging/willing the government to somehow crack down on Facebook for making the choice they did suggests that maybe they are hurting quite a bit more than they might be letting on with their newsletter/app pushes.
If it is not copyright infringement why would you need to pay someone?
This is just legacy media using their quasi monopoly and regulatory capture to squash competition.
If you want to tax the social media companies and redirect that revenue to journalism - write that law and make it happen (assuming your constitution allows for it). But trying to frame this as redressing an imbalance in power is ridiculous, and the binding arbitration process defined is ludicrous as well.
This is an attempt to keep news orgs relevant despite their continuing drop in readership.
Canada has already been paying news orgs $600M a year in addition to the $1.3B or so that they pay the CBC to remain afloat.
This is a complex (and tiring) debate where all of the key players (largely News Corp and the Australian Commonwealth Government on one side and Facebook and Google on the other) have shown themselves to be untrustworthy, user-hostile and utterly flippant with regard to the public good provided by news. They have all been dishonest to the public through this process and the best outcome would be one where all the major parties to this issue lose out.
There's a strong argument to be made that Google and Facebook should be made to cough something up. They've essentially done an attention economy land grab and the state exists to regulate such disruptive practices in order to preserve certain public goods.
But of course the actual facts of this law are that it's a blatant opportunistic maneuver to get wads of cash out of one set of corrupt peoples' pockets into those of another group who happen to be mates with the people who hold legislative power.
The state doesn't exist to protect an industry from competitors, even ones that are "disruptive".
1. If we send the links to Australian news in instant messengers, is it required for the platform to pay the publisher?
2. If 1 is yes, who would pay them if we use email?
And this is just one in a whole string of bad tech legislation (like the one that the Government can force you to secretly break your app’s encryption for any users they want to surveil, without them requiring a warrant!)
Today is it Facebook and Google (though likely not Google after some recent moves by that company) but it could be any digital platform should the Minister designate it as covered by the law in the future.
1: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....
The differentiation from free or paid could be a variable in the HTML code of the news source. If you want to allow links, specify cost=free.
So, yeah, it’s bad legislation.
However, if just linking to content could be considered as somehow using the content - it would be a blatant power grab by publishers facilitated by the government.
How would wikipedia function if linking to content cost them money?
But the crazy thing is, if they decided to let any ‘news content’ through - say, block the big Aussie media players but allow overseas news and local independent news from small orgs that aren’t eligible for payments (because it was the big players that lobbied for these laws), then they would still be forced into arbitration and be forced to pay the big orgs, despite not having any of their content on the platform!
The law doesn’t actually really distinguish between what is actually “used” or not, or the difference between full article content or just links. If the media companies don’t like any proposed deal, everybody is forced into arbitration and then it’s judged on criteria that specifically exclude factors like the value of the traffic referral from Google or Facebook to the news site.
This past election cycle has shown Big Tech's true colors. They censor information to the world, tweak their algorithms to misrepresent situations, hide trending hashtags, etc based on California's preferred politics. They literally just got finished pooling their power to silence an entire political party (i.e. Parlor), and people still for some reason think they deserve the right to be gatekeepers of all information.
I don't say this because I feel bad for big media, I say it because big media content is certainly not made better by being pre-filtered through facebook's algorithms (or whatever big tech company). The current state of big media content is a fucking dumpster fire...at least more money to them might result in improved quality.