
Facebook rejects calls to share advertising revenue with Australian media - gscott
https://asiatimes.com/2020/06/facebook-refuses-to-pay-revenue-to-australian-media/
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asdfasgasdgasdg
_Australia’s competition regulator, the ACCC, has estimated that Google and
Facebook together earn some A$6 billion (US$4 billion) a year from advertising
in the country.

Leading news publishers have demanded the two companies pay at least 10% of
that money each year to local news organizations._

News organizations want ten percent of FB and Goog's advertising revenue? I
guess I do too but this concept is facially absurd.

~~~
moksly
From an American perspective, sure, but in a lot of countries we ask ourselves
if letting these companies operate freely is a benefit for our society.

I can see why moving money from Facebook to local news media would benefit
Australia, and let’s not pretend we can’t force Google or Facebook to comply.
Just look at what they are willing to do for China.

~~~
toast0
Even if I try to imagine an Australian perspective, demanding Google and
Facebook pay the newspapers 10% of revenue seems pretty bizarre.

It would seem better to just charge a 10% tax on advertising, put that in the
general fund, and then subsidise newspapers however you see fit, which may or
may not amount to the same AUD but can more easily change over time.

~~~
rutthenut
Yes, would think surely this ought to be managed by a tax that keeps some of
the money in-country, whether or not it gets shared with the press (which
brings a lot of issues about subsidies, free speech and more). Wondering, do
FB/Google pay any substantial corporate tax bills in Australia?

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dannyw
Australian here. We really are the testing ground for draconian laws to be
tested and proven out before it makes its way to the west.

~~~
mrath
I hope something good is implemented to favor local news agencies. I don't use
facebook but I see how google get benefits of the other news channels. I
mostly go to abc, news.com.au directly for news headlines. But I know lot of
my friends use facebook for the latest news. This does not benefit the
original content creator.

~~~
perilunar
Why? I have no sympathy at all News Corp and Nine Entertainment. No one is
forcing them to share content on Facebook if they don't like the deal. This is
pretty clearly old media trying to shake down new media.

(And tell your friends to stop using Facebook for news and go to a real news
site.)

~~~
Closi
I think one argument is that the news papers do the recording, then if you
share a link Facebook scrapes it, takes the image and puts it on their site
(regardless of copyright/licensing status) and takes the news headline.

Most users then don’t click through, but the content is stolen to fill up
facebooks timeline.

~~~
dmortin
You can stop Facebook scraping your site via robots.txt, so the control is at
the publisher. If FB crawler is blocked then it can't scrape anything and only
the link is posted.

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remotists
This just feels like the old gatekeepers are envious of the new gatekeepers.
Neither of them deserve sympathy for the actions, however NewsCorp and Nine
Entertainment might the first ones to buckle under this.

~~~
ehnto
Here's hoping. NewsCorp have had a tangibly negative impact on my country, and
likely everywhere they operate. If only all they wanted was profit, you could
at least understand them. But they seem to want division and violence too.
Someone needs to tell Rupert that he can't spend his money in a country that
has fallen apart.

~~~
remotists
They want profit. Everything else is a by-product. If I as businessman want to
put money on a media venture, I will choose the conservative side too.

~~~
octodog
That's just wrong. News Corp has for years allowed its newspapers and
editorial divisions to lose money or operate inefficiently while it can cross-
subsidise them from cash cows such as Foxtel. It is quite clear that Murdoch
highly values the influence that his media conglomerate can give him.

Yes, money is important too, but it is not the only thing that matters to the
shareholders (a.k.a. Rupert Murdoch).

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thundergolfer
> The initiative has been strongly pushed by Australia’s two biggest media
> companies, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Nine Entertainment.

These two companies are scum, and the fact that this proposal was taken
seriously by the Australian government is embarrassing. Murdoch's News Corp
already interfered with the country's internet infrastructure plans in order
to protect its profits from cable television; this is just another attempt to
stem the bleeding.

If Facebook wasn't so effective a platform for Fox News, The Daily Wire, and
Breitbart, I'd genuinely celebrate their role in strangling News Corp.

~~~
nugget
This law would establish de facto unit economics for some to-be-defined unit
of news/content consumption. Clever entrepreneurs could then scale up new
properties focused on the optimization of whatever that unit is, with much
lower overhead/content production costs than traditional media companies. An
unintended and potentially quite painful consequence follows for the two named
incumbents: tremendous amounts of new, nimble, well-funded competition. Be
careful what you wish for.

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forgingahead
So the other shoe has finally dropped: If it hasn't been apparent to everyone
yet, the vast majority of "anti-tech"/anti-FB articles has been the dying
gasps of attempted relevance from an antiquated media ecosystem.

Old media is upset and angry that they no longer have a monopoly on
controlling the narrative. They're scared that their business model is no
longer viable. They're worried about their loss of credibility (of their own
making).

This is just the latest attempt (as blatant as it may be) to wrangle the state
to help them survive. Let's see if it'll work.

~~~
baryphonic
I sometimes thought I was a singleton set of people who believed this. I'd add
that the old media is also in a vicious cycle wherein they can only attempt to
gain dwindling share of attention by reducing their credibility. At the micro
level, (e.g. on Twitter, where a pan-outlet collection of journalists
"mutually discover" the preferred narrative) this sometimes looks a bit like
fixed point iteration about a circular firing squad.

I would predict that in this case, Facebook is probably right that news
content could be excised from Australia without much cost to the company. It
may hasten the demise of the old media in Australia.

~~~
ehnto
While I will celebrate the fall of NewsCorp, old media does include a swath of
local television and print media that are doing good work for the communities
they're part of.

I often hear that concern met with unsympathetic calls to get with the times,
but making a media company purely out of social media isn't profitable either.
We'll be left with nothing but social media if we're not careful.

~~~
baryphonic
I somewhat agree (though I do think local TV news often makes _Anchorman_ look
more like a documentary than a farce), but some of the local papers really are
more of a community institution. In my experience, most of their problems
involve inability to have reliable operations, e.g. setting up billing
accurately or delivering the paper accurately and on time, which angers
subscribers.

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laingc
If I had been trying unsuccessfully to monetise my uninformed, poorly
researched, and barely coherent opinions, I too would pivot to a strategy of
blaming platforms that peddle similarly poor content for free and demand 10%
of their advertising revenue.

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Fiveplus
Which begs me to question the eternal ambiguity about Facebook trying to
position itself as a self publishing platform or that with a news
arregator/personal communication hybrid model.

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readams
Suggesting that Google pay 10% of revenue to news organizations is frankly
risible.

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rrdharan
Won’t this just play out the same way it did in Germany and Spain?

~~~
foepys
For the uninitiated:

Germany passed legislation that requires websites to pay a fee even to show
headlines. Google said they won't pay and will pull the plug on Google News in
Germany if they need to pay a single cent. The media organizations then
granted an exclusion to Google News, giving Google News a competitive
advantage.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_publishers#Comparisons_with_other_countries)

~~~
Mirioron
To note: one company tried going without Google, saw the number of visitors
drop, and went back to Google for the deal.

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MattGaiser
What is it that causes news companies to lose money because of Google and
Facebook? I am still visiting their site to read the article.

If you only read the headline, you aren't a serious consumer of news anyway.

~~~
yung0
On mobile, for example, some news sites are hosted via Google's AMP service. I
think that's at least one of the avenues for this supposed 'misuse'.

~~~
Kiro
That makes no sense. The news sites implement AMP themselves. There's no way
your site can become AMP'd automatically or accidentally.

~~~
yung0
Which is why this is merely a political stunt in order to save the revenues of
failing Australian conservative press organisations (News Corp, etc.)

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sjy
It’s unfortunate that the actual submission by Facebook hasn’t been published
and the linked article provides little background on the “mandatory code of
conduct” proposal Facebook is responding to. This relates to a concepts paper
the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission released on 19 May [1],
following the government’s announcement on 20 April [2] that it had “directed
the ACCC to develop a mandatory code of conduct to address bargaining power
imbalances between digital platforms and media companies.”

[1] [https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-
platforms/news-m...](https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-
platforms/news-media-bargaining-code/concepts-paper)

[2] [https://ministers.treasury.gov.au/ministers/josh-
frydenberg-...](https://ministers.treasury.gov.au/ministers/josh-
frydenberg-2018/media-releases/accc-mandatory-code-conduct-govern-commercial)

The concepts paper seeks feedback on several alternative proposals and says
nothing about appropriating 10% of Google and Facebook’s revenue (this
suggestion appears to come from another unpublished submission from a news
outlet). The ACCC paper highlights a range of problems faced by news
publishers seeking to negotiate with digital platforms, including the
difficulty of estimating the value to Facebook and Google of linked and
embedded news content (especially without access to Facebook and Google’s
internal data), the lack of transparency in the algorithms Facebook and Google
use to rank and display content, and the inability of small publishers to
meaningfully communicate with these companies through automated support
systems. The paper also points out that the threat of government intervention
appears to have triggered a response from Facebook and Google on some of these
issues.

Addressing information asymmetry and other market imperfections is part of the
ACCC’s purpose of “enhancing the welfare of Australians through the promotion
of competition and fair trading” [3]. Let’s not immediately write this off as
an anti-competitive attempt to entrench “old media.”

[3]
[https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/caca20102...](https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/caca2010265/s2.html)

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freakynit
Just stop these social/tech giants from including anything more than a
headline and a link from their platforms. If they don't want to include that
either, even better.

