Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402

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.

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The usual model for creating awareness and providing access to a product is for the vendor of the product to pay for that service. If I have a media service such as a TV channel, Youtube channel or podcast, I charge vendors to use my channel to reach that audience. Promoting content is a valuable service, why should publishers get it for free?

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.

> So congratulations, you've convinced me. I think Facebook and Google should charge Australian news sites to put 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.

It really is incredible to me that you think that's an actual solution.

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.

> It really is incredible to me that you think that's an actual solution.

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).

That's an interesting shift, giving up on defending this law since it's clearly not justifiable, to saying oh well these people deserve it anyway. That's not how laws are supposed to work in a democracy.

If you don't live in Australia, these aren't your laws to vote for. If you do, your representatives enacted these laws. If you support these laws, congratulations, if you do not, call your representatives or run for office. There are large deltas in electorate sentiment across the world; different democracies will advocate for and legislate different laws.

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.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=regulate+big+tech

If the media orgs in Australia were able to convert their Facebook traffic into newsletter subscribers as easily as this there would be little fury in the media. After all, they would have stopped Facebook profiting off the back of their content AND kept their readers.

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 those news sources were going to be fine, why are they so desperate to prop up their failing business model by shaking down competition?

I would agree if the content was being copied over. But links ? What would HN look like ?

Like it does now? With some content paywalled and some not, and perhaps some links rejected from the submission form if the link has attributes indicating a payment is required. I will concede that adaption would be required, but I disagree with the idea that this model is entirely unreasonable.

When Hacker News users link to paywalled content, some of us consume it without issue because we pay those sites (Bloomberg, WSJ, Economist, etc).

No, it would not exist because ycombinator makes no revenue and can't pay anyone.

Yeah Hacker News would likely have to shut down if targeted by bills like these.

Mozilla Corp. should sent you a bill for their content that you linked, because now you are taking a free ride.

> 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?

If it is not copyright infringement why would you need to pay someone?

App stores are link aggregators. They charge people to put a link to their own stuff in there and even take a cut of sales they make after that.

The problem isn't so much the financial cost to link aggregators, it's the regulatory burden. All this bill does is entrench the existing biggest companies in the space and prevent competition, because smaller entrants will be unable to e.g. negotiate contracts with all media providers.

This is just legacy media using their quasi monopoly and regulatory capture to squash competition.

What is the difference between the user discovering the URL from the news organization webpage/news feed, and from Facebook/Google? What would the news organization lose from this instead of gaining more viewers?

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