Meta Has Had Enough of Australia's Link Tax Shakedown; Will Not Renew Any Deals

That's the issue I mean. I won't take out a monthly subscription to a newspaper to read one article.

Ehh, no, not really. Based on your username, I’m your age, so in your lifetime newspapers and magazines used to be something that was commonly found in every cafe and waiting room. As a voracious reader growing up I remember this pretty vividly. Waiting rooms meant I got to read different magazines or read the Wall Street Journal! You could have a single newspaper subscription for a whole multi-generation household. You could also pretty easily find discarded or thrown out newspapers if you went to public places or even ask a stranger for a section they weren’t interested in. I got tons of back dated magazines as gifts, and loved reading them. There were options.

> Money is a good and transparent indicator of what's worth your time.

This is a very privileged thing to say.

Back in the days when people bought newspapers, if they wanted to read today's paper, they bought one copy at their newsstand. They didn't buy a monthly or yearly subscription. But somehow you're equating the two.

Also, back in the newspaper days, newspapers weren't funded by selling copies. That money was only enough to pay for the physical paper and distribution (i.e., they were selling below cost, and the fee was only to keep people from taking papers for free and wasting them). The newspapers made all their money on advertisements. Now it's the other way around: the ads aren't worth enough any more, so they're trying to get people to subscribe to directly pay for most of the operations cost and profits. It's interesting that companies (plus those buying classified ads) back in the newspaper days were willing to pay enough to pay most of the costs of running a newspaper, when they didn't have targeted ads, tracking, etc., and were just hoping someone would see their ad next to an article.

Before the invention of computers and global networks. Now copying is trivial and the value of copies tends toward $0. It only has to be created once, then it's trivial to replicate.

That's what I said next, in other words. It's not even about their old business model, it's that the new one nets them more money which is what their shareholders want. Shareholders always trump principles in strict neoliberal states.

> that is the problem which Australia's laws are trying to fix....no doubt there is a better way, but I can't think of any.....can you?

More state media in my opinion. But I'm more socialist than the US or Australia so mentioning this option is like cursing there. But here in West Europe we've always had those and even multiple for different ideological directions.

The problem isn't really the news agencies themselves either. It's that they compete with social media that incite users to 'engage' them and they've come to actually like that. Which is why it worked in the first place.

Europe is becoming a lot stricter on social media filtering algorithms and I think this is really hitting the root cause too. Though not directly (or timely) saving the news industry.

> Why can't they make money printing the truth?

> Because their old business models have been nuked, and its just too expensive for them to hire those fact checkers and editors.

It looks like you have assumptions that Truth sells. Truth sells in the absence of entertainment, opinion and emotion.

Does that change your conclusion?

If I see an article in the NYT here for example I can't open it, and they want me to sign up for a subscription. Getting a monthly sub might make sense if I'd lived in NY and read it every day, but really for the 2-3 articles per month linked from elsewhere it really does not. It's a bit disingenious.

Meanwhile it's not just the NYT I see links from but also the WaPo, atlantic, medium etc etc. I can't subscribe to them all obviously. Yet they all want to. It feels like they are stuck in their old business model without considering how to move forward.

It is hard to fight an uphill battle against incentives. Truth doesn't sell anymore if the customer base has devolved into an angry, scared, self righteous, polarized, social media addicted mess. Funding non-profits like Wikipedia and public orgs like PBS, and taxing and regulating social media, could be a start. But funding Murdoch unconditionally so he can further contribute to the problem we're trying to solve, doesn't seem like a good path forward.