
Facebook, Google to be forced to share ad revenue with Australian media - docdeek
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/apr/19/facebook-and-google-to-be-forced-to-share-advertising-revenue-with-australian-media-companies
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jasonlfunk
What if Google and Facebook just said “No, thank you.”? I think Google and
Facebook have more power in this relationship, which might say something about
the tech giants. The only possible thing the Aussies could do is block the
websites, and that sounds like political suicide to me. I’m guessing the
companies will decide to play ball, but if other countries start to follow
suit, it might be interesting to see what happens if they start pushing back.

~~~
luckylion
> The only possible thing the Aussies could do is block the websites, and that
> sounds like political suicide to me.

The first thing they could do is fine them. Google and FB might say "ha! but
we don't have bank accounts in Australia!" and the government will simply
collect from companies in Australia that have outstanding bills from Google
for e.g. Adwords or Google Cloud.

Google can still run their websites to be reachable from Australia, but they
wouldn't be able to do business in Australia. And what's the point of running
an ad tech empire if you can't make money off of it?

~~~
RareSoft
Could Australian ISPs be instructed to just blacklist Google's and Facebook's
Ad servers nationally?

~~~
shakna
There are currently several sites banned in Australia, and the blacklisting
took the form of ISPs hijacking the DNS lookup. Which means it is totally
ineffective. Our government is not well known for mandating the right tool for
the right job, when it comes to tech.

~~~
batiudrami
Sure but custom DNS is not something everyone can or will do, and businesses
certainly won't allow it.

~~~
shakna
Sure, but there are a few caveats to that:

\+ Firefox doesn't use the system DNS by default anymore (Defaults to the DoH
provider, usually Cloudflare)

\+ Chrome doesn't use the system DNS by default anymore (Defaults to Google's)

\+ Businesses often set the default DNS to use Google's, not their ISPs.

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adamiscool8
_The code was to require the companies to negotiate in good faith on how to
pay news media for use of their content, advise news media in advance of
algorithm changes that would affect content rankings, favour original source
news content in search page results, and share data with media companies._

This seems...confused. At that point why wouldn't Facebook, Google, et al just
ban the media company links from their platforms and avoid the hassle?

~~~
save_ferris
Because news media represents one of their largest channels of legitimate
traffic and engagement. It’s why Google put so many resources into AMP,
Facebook on their curated news feeds, etc.

Removing news links would probably eventually kill social media platforms in
the long run, or at least accept a new path with much less growth.

~~~
myrandomcomment
Spain tried this and Google just dropped all the Spanish news sites from
Google News in Spain.

"We regret that due to the Spanish law, Spanish publishers aren't featured in
Google News and Google News is closed in Spain."

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
I suspect there's a decent chance the same thing will happen in France, if the
appeals process doesn't reach some kind of more reasonable solution.

------
csunbird
Because of the SEO, most of the news sites are already clickbaits with junk
information in them, it seems like this will grow a new industry: Link-tax-
optimization.

~~~
choward
Prime example: I opened up cnn.com which some people consider to be a news web
site. The main headline is "Experts say grocery stores may need to keep
customers out" ([https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/19/business/grocery-stores-
coron...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/19/business/grocery-stores-coronavirus-
pickup-delivery/index.html)). The real story is that grocery store workers are
dying but a title based on that isn't clickbaity enough. It has to make you
think the article actually affects you so you click it. I probably wouldn't
have clicked the link if it was about grocery store workers getting covid-19.

And of course their "experts" are just random people who said some things. And
they mention that even if they do keep customers out they while still have
pickup and possibly delivery. So who cares about that part of the story then?
Apparently it's not going to affect me.

The media has done nothing to prevent panic buying and everything to encourage
it with these click bait headlines. There is no reason stores should be
running out of anything but PPE and other things where demand naturally shot
up because covid-19 like PPE and disinfectant. Demand for toilet paper only
went up because of the media (and government). The other thing the media has
been doing is shaming people but I'm not going to go there.

~~~
argomo
Stores run out of toilet paper because we're no longer popping at work:
[https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-
about...](https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-the-
toilet-paper-shortage-c812e1358fe0)

The lockdowns have precipitated a huge shift in how we eat and what/where we
purchase things. The supply chain is responding, but pivoting is expensive and
groceries are a low margin business... the shortages could have been a lot
worse. Going forward we may see shortages in imported foods/produce due to
pandemic impacts in other countries and/or regulatory/logistics problems
getting that food to market.

I'm not saying that the media has been responsible, just don't discount the
bigger picture of changes in consumer behaviour.

~~~
gaius_baltar
Stores were running out of toilet paper because people antecipated they would
run out of toilet paper. Just a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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raz32dust
Even though the specifics are not clear, we will (and should) be having more
and more of these kinds of discussions going forward to avoid the monopoly
created by the distribution reach of tech giants. It is in the interest of the
tech companies themselves to come up with something reasonable, because the
governments won't be able to, and whatever they come up with will likely be
too complicated, mired in politics and too specific to each country. It is
better if the tech companies can nip this in the bud even before it becomes
too politicized.

Google, Facebook and Amazon owe their power to being great at content
distribution. And I believe that if they take care to compensate content
creators fairly, these sorts of upheavals will be greatly reduced. I think
YouTube does a fair job of this. Not perfect, but a better balance, and I
believe even that is enough.

~~~
mehrdada
How you dragged Amazon in the mix at the end is perplexing to me.

~~~
SanchoPanda
Amazon's ad network is growing incredibly quickly, and op may be referring to
the content against which these ads are placed.

------
np_tedious
I don't understand. If they wanted to tax it for the government / social
programs it would sort of make sense. But why distribute it to old media
companies?

Is there any merit to this at all?

~~~
tensor
The old media companies business model collapsed (newspapers). So they are
essentially turning the old media companies into public companies, but instead
of using tax dollars they are arbitrarily punishing Google and Facebook
because they have a lot of money.

~~~
Nasrudith
It is far worse than that. If they did a 'bailout and buy up' of failing
companies. Instead it is still for private profit and receiving an arbitrary
punishment to try to enrich private parties. Which is so damn very corrupt by
definition.

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satori99
It is worth noting that "The Australian Media" in this case refers almost
entirely to Rupert Murdoch.

~~~
BLKNSLVR
That's the heart of the matter here, or at least where my interest lies.
Protection of the independence of "The Australian Media" has been chipped away
at for a long time, with the media ownership laws being watered down more and
more, allowing for greater concentration of ownership.

What makes me suspicious is that protectionist action such as this is only
coming now, at a time where the already-concentrated landscape is threatened,
and because it's already concentrated there are a lot of powerful people with
their fingers in the pie - much more-so than when it was less concentrated
(almost by definition).

Therefore, my take on this is that it's protectionist for News Corp / Rupert
Murdoch more-so than any reasons of the "social good". Very much a case a of
"when elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled".

------
KCUOJJQJ
Sounds bad. The government could tax Google and Facebook and decide to
subsidize the media. Subsidizing the media would look weird probably but it
would be more honest. Or am I wrong?

~~~
buboard
neither solution is attacking the root of the issue: the monopolization of the
ad market which has made news reporting/blogging unsustainable. If the aussies
want to have a body of independent sustainable journalism, government
subsidies are dangerous.

This ruling makes more sense, it's like attaching a VAT on google's pipeline.

------
zarriak
This seems like a bad idea in that it doesn't address the actual issue: most
people just read headlines now. The question that leads from that is asking
whether that is a result of the design of Facebook.

Google is a different problem and it looks like they recognized the problem
more with them and wanted to deal with the algorithms but I still think that
people have accepted too readily the problem is that people just scan
headlines and not that Facebook and Google to a lesser extent have an
incentive for people not to click links too frequently.

~~~
buboard
clickbaity headlines are a result of websites desperately trying to get
attention through clicks. If they don't need the clicks to remain profitable,
the problem will go away

~~~
zarriak
I mean it in more the sense that Facebook only serves your content to a very
small amount of people who like your page to test it before they send it to
more and more people, and that if I was trying to resolve the issues the
companies were having with Facebook I would address that issue first.

------
buboard
the primary issue is the ad market capture by G+FB. Instead of forcing them to
pay up, force them to provide evidence that their advertising works, and that
the market capture is not just capture-by-marketing or regulatory-capture of
the entire advertising pie.

Also, break up their monopolizing tactics, like not sharing search queries
with target sites (removal of referral) and monopolizing the browser search
bars. Maybe G should share the search term instead of revenue.

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ketzo
This is one of those things that seems to me, on a very superficial level, to
be "fair" \-- online advertising companies have DECIMATED traditional media --
but I can't help but feel there are some really strange second- or third-
order effects coming down the line.

This is just such an unnatural? forced? solution, and in my very limited
experience, that leads to weird incentives later down the line.

It sort of feels like Google and Facebook are being incentivized to NOT
display the content of traditional media institutions. That... doesn't seem
like the intent.

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Causality1
The article doesn't really make it clear exactly which ads Australia is trying
to get a piece of. If Google is taking article content from publishers and
combining it with ads before sending it to the user, I get why they'd want
that money. If however, they're trying to get ads from Google search results,
how does that make any sense at all? That's like every business in town trying
to get ad revenue from the Yellow Pages.

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ocdtrekkie
France and Spain have both led in this already, the ideal scenario is other
governments taking the opportunity to jump on board. Google is more powerful
than any given government, and can simply withhold service. ...Unless enough
countries band together and demand this and leave Google no choice but to
comply.

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freediver
This is indeed a landmark decision and I hope it will snowball into what it
should really become: Google sharing revenue with all sites that it takes
content from (hello Wikipedia and every blogger out there) not just media
sites. Otherwise this measure is strongly biased in an unproductive way.

~~~
dehrmann
> Wikipedia

Most Wikipedia content is licensed under a Creative Commons license, so, _by
intent_ , Google's free to use it as long as there's attribution. I'm not sure
what would happen if a law forced Wikimedia to take money for something it's
intentionally giving away.

~~~
freediver
The fact that they give it away, should not prevent/stop the receiving party
to pay a fair share for it, if they extract value from it (and in Google's
case monetize it). Also I am giving away my comment here, but I am sure happy
if someone upvotes it (although that is not implicit in the transaction).

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tareqak
Same news from the Associated Press:
[https://apnews.com/8ca7559d39b89d097a158043ca8f44bc](https://apnews.com/8ca7559d39b89d097a158043ca8f44bc)
.

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mohankumar246
I believe this move should be followed by governments worldwide, you are
accessing worlwide data by providing services to citizens of different
countries. You are also generating $ by ad services generated by this
data(i.e. access to news portals), and it goes to profit only one country. Are
the ads from only local companies?(I don't think so). How fair is that? In a
world where trade deals are done to benefit both nations in case of
commodities, why not do the same for bits and bytes of information?

