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Comment by hienyimba | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting how CNN falls in line with the “Australia News Law” is good and “Facebook not paying” is bad. Talk about incentives. CNN (and by extension Western Media) needs the Australian News Law to work so they can extract their own share of the pie back home.

Maybe, somewhere in their reporting, they should mention that turning up the heat on Facebook will benefit them too.

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That fact that everyone around me except for readers of HN think Facebook is evil for doing this, just shows how public opinion is still 100% formed by mainstream media (who have an incentive to portray this as some journalist saving legislation, not a direct payment from Google and FB to News corp).

As an anecdote, those around me (here in Australia) are huge fans of Facebook without news because its the least polluted it's been in years.

Have you considered that maybe everyone is not stupid and you are the one being wrong?

Maybe people realize that the relationship between relatively small and disparate local media companies and the giant foreign tech companies aggregating them and making money from their content doesn't allow negotiation on an equal footing and that preserving healthy journalism justify a state intervention.

France did it well. Australia is trying. Apparently Facebook is more scared of France than Australia.

> relationship between relatively small and disparate local media companies and the giant foreign tech companies

Are you referring to Nine Entertainment Co. and News Corp. as "relatively small and disparate local media companies"??

Agreed completely. One should avoid media reporting about media, and consider the reframing as an issue about Facebook rather than two local media monopolies having the legislative power to shake down Facebook and Google.

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