Tim is so right. In addition, for friends and family a post on FB about my cat is just as news worthy as a NYT article. It is not for governments to decide what is news or not.
Keep the web free. Avoid imposing rules and taxes.
Ultimately a news organization is an internet citizen like you or me. They should not have different privileges.
> Ultimately a news organization is an internet citizen like you or me. They should not have different privileges.
This is the right take. If news organizations get paid whenever someone @mentions them (metaphorically speaking), why shouldn't I get paid as well whenever someone @mentions me?
In other words, if someone links to my website, I should get paid too!
Very true, the master's words. But do they really apply? I see the story rather like two giants trying to strong-arm each other: social media trying to have everything under their control as always (and not pay for said control), and old media habits trying to have everything under their control as always (and get paid for said control). Either way I lose, because they aren't fighting about the content per se, just about how to handle it.
Why should a business be treated like you and me? A business is clearly different, and when we create laws preventing employee abuse, or when we even recognize an employer employee relationship exists or is useful to talk about, we are acknowledging the most important difference — power.
My ability to argue about drugs shouldn’t be on the same footing as DuPont. Companies should be held to a higher standard of speech, as pretending that parties are the same despite lopsided power is going to play out very badly for the weak.
> Could it possible be the case that the old media actually wants the burglars inside?
We see this in Germany, too.
On the one hand, "old media" is eager to take any traffic that Google et al. send to them, but on the other hand they don't like aggregration and ask Google et al. to pay for text snippets.
This has already led to bizzare laws, driven by old media and conversative politicians.
They do want to show up on google, they just don't want the small page summary, as in a lot of cases, most people are happy with the title and a 2 line summary, never actually visiting the article.
That’s possible for a site to do, as far as I’m aware (in webmaster tools?) - I’ve seen results with a title and link and “this website doesn’t allow us to show a preview before).
This ‘debate’ in Australia is not actually about that - most people supporting the bill haven’t been able to make an argument with enough complexity to distinguish between the sentence or so summary and displaying the whole article, and they generally try to make it sound like the latter is happening!
That’s a point I’ve been making in Australia too. And now the media orgs are freaking out about losing the referrals from Facebook, but still trying to go on the false narrative that Google and Facebook make huge amounts of money “stealing news content”.
Just before, I saw one reporter try to claim that social media sites allow users to bypass paywalls, but they never have! Facebook never showed actual article content here, just link, title and maybe a thumbnail...
The laws might be bizarre or poorly thought-out but the concern isn't. A news landscape controlled by American tech companies doesn't sound like a rosy future.
Nothing is stopping them from building their own aggregation sites and disallowing Google/Facebook to index their sites.
They are literally giving their content to Google and then demand they get paid. (Technically Google is taking the content via indexing, but I'm sure they can figure out a way to stop that)
I am aware. Why do these news corporations not just write an appropriate robots.txt so Google can't take their content? Is it maybe because they want their cake AND eat it too?
On one hand, it's true that they are making odd demands and are linked to Murdoch. On the other, it's disturbing that you pretty much have to play ball with Google and Facebook to survive as a media institution. Yeah, they could create their own competing service I suppose but in practice that sounds more like a non-sequitur than a workable suggestion.
In Australia, 70% of our commercial media is owned by a foreign multinational (News Corp) and most of the rest is one other company (Nine/Fairfax).
Luckily we have two fairly good public broadcasters (ABC and SBS), but the Murdoch media hate them and the conservative party in power are white-anting them away (budget freezes and things all the time which after inflation effectively mean cuts every year), and the quality has dropped considerably over the last few years with editorial interference (technically they’re independent, but reporters there who break big stories of Government corruption, or showing big problems in Government policy just happen to be hounded out, even though the stories were true).
In the case of Australia, FB and Twitter are actually injecting a lot of competition and diversity of thought into the market, since their news ecosystem is incredibly oligopolistic.
That's a good point but FAANGs are oligopolistic on a global scale. It's come to the point where anything that could possibly weaken them or get the ball rolling towards their fragmentation sounds like a good idea, even if it's half-baked and negative in its own local context.
To be clear, I’d like to see some of the FAANG companies broken up. But worrying about their global oligopoly when the alternative in this situation is News Corp, another global oligopoly, seems misguided to me.
> This has already led to bizzare laws, driven by old media and conversative politicians.
No, on the political side it's not driven by conservative politics. It has bipartisan support. In fact is has the the support of Australian's left most party too: the Greens. As far as I can tell, it has every politicians support.
It may be true the conservative's are supporting it to get favourable publicity from Murdock - sounds plausible. That could be Labor's reason too, but it may be the journalists union is putting a fair amount of pressure on them. A lot of journalists are going to lose their jobs. The world doesn't need 100 people re-writing the same story. Sadly for them will lose their hobs regardless of what Labor champions politically.
It's harder to understand the Greens position as they don't count Murdock among their friends. At best they are don't actually understand what's driving all this and how inevitable it all is (oh, how I pine for Scott Ludlam). At worst they are following their "all giant overseas corporates are bad" instincts. Whether that's true or not, it nothing to do with what's happening to the newspapers. Their fate was sealed when the internet became a thing, and anybody could publish a news story. Extending the dinosaurs death throes with forced cross subsidies helps no-one
Don't underestimate the weakness of the tech giants political position here, or the fight they have ahead of them. If they come out of this with their bank accounts mostly intact, it will be ample demonstration of the truth of how much "hard" power they actually wield. They will have squashed the entire Australian political establishment.
Back in the day when I was only hearing of this thing called the Internet, people mentioned how they can read the New York Times online or another famous paper. Coming from a small town in Eastern Europe that was amazing.
But I also wondered why they were able to read it for free. I wonder what made the newspapers post their content online for free - probably because the internet was a fringe curiosity and they only realized it's becoming important when it was too late.
It's still an open question because you're confusing what they are saying with what is going on, and not looking at what they are doing first as a source of truth.
News that no one pays for doesn't help them. But also, news no one knows they have first is also news no one will pay for - or tell any of their friends to go to them for!
They're in a catch 22 re: their business model - they need visibility, they need people to be able to see them and know they have something insightful to add or they're dead in the water. Now that means the search engines and aggregators, as that is where most people are looking.
Most people also won't pay for random links sent by friends, or even an insightful article if they can get it somewhere else (even at a lower quality).
It's an even more brutal version of what the music and movie industry deal with around streaming (and will again in movies due to the proliferation of half baked streaming services).
It’s pretty simple if you understand the political landscape. The old media have massive power in our politics, especially with the conservative party that is in power federally. They are losing subscribers though and have generally failed to keep up with technology. I’m not sure if it’s a symptom or part of the cause, but the quality of reporting in this country has also massively gone downhill with both companies in the oligopoly (Murdoch’s News Ltd one one side, Nine/Fairfax on the other).
So they see that Google and Facebook have a lot of money, no have lobbied hard to get these laws made. Unfortunately the ACCC (competition watchdog) seems to be complicit, having done a big research study into anticompetitive behaviour in ad tech etc., which is used to justify the law even though the law doesn’t actually go any way towards actually solving any of the problems with any of that, and only serves to try and funnel money from Google and Facebook to a few big media companies.
It’s pretty frustrating, because the waters are being muddied and reporters writing a lot of falsehoods about Facebook and Google apparently using or ‘stealing’ content, but they don’t - we’re literally talking about just links here!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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?
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?
Easily the worst part of this for me is that Australia has put me in the position of supporting Facebook/Google - which I almost never would do otherwise. The control over what if anything Facebook/Google can parse automatically/display as a preview is defined by open standards that are well documented putting it wholly in the control of the media organizations. Additionally content being posted to Facebook by users comes from the media companies own customers… Ben Thompson and others have documented this well:
If you want to tax the social media companies and redirect that revenue to journalism - write that law and make it happen (assuming your constitution allows for it). But trying to frame this as redressing an imbalance in power is ridiculous, and the binding arbitration process defined is ludicrous as well.
Yeah, I mean you don’t need to say Facebook and Google are entirely good to say the law is bad. The law is terrible, and Facebook has done the right thing in this case at least.
Tim's perspective here is disappointingly narrow. The line he's drawing in the sand has already been crossed in all sorts of ways in many different jurisdictions and commercial/legal contexts.
This is a complex (and tiring) debate where all of the key players (largely News Corp and the Australian Commonwealth Government on one side and Facebook and Google on the other) have shown themselves to be untrustworthy, user-hostile and utterly flippant with regard to the public good provided by news. They have all been dishonest to the public through this process and the best outcome would be one where all the major parties to this issue lose out.
There's a strong argument to be made that Google and Facebook should be made to cough something up. They've essentially done an attention economy land grab and the state exists to regulate such disruptive practices in order to preserve certain public goods.
But of course the actual facts of this law are that it's a blatant opportunistic maneuver to get wads of cash out of one set of corrupt peoples' pockets into those of another group who happen to be mates with the people who hold legislative power.
> "They've essentially done an attention economy land grab and the state exists to regulate such disruptive practices in order to preserve certain public goods"
The state doesn't exist to protect an industry from competitors, even ones that are "disruptive".
The answer to both is 'it depends on what The Australian Government says'. The law will apply to platforms at the discretion of the Minister - it's why we are talking Facebook and Google and not Twitter and iMessage.
Yep, it’s super arbitrary. Super bad legislation and introduces huge sovereign risk. There will be companies who choose not to do business here or not to do business with our companies when the Government has shown they’ll happily target random successful foreign companies to be extorted by local failing industries...
And this is just one in a whole string of bad tech legislation (like the one that the Government can force you to secretly break your app’s encryption for any users they want to surveil, without them requiring a warrant!)
The text of the (soon to be) law is online [1] and at Division 2.52E it states the Minister alone decides which digital platforms it applies to.
Today is it Facebook and Google (though likely not Google after some recent moves by that company) but it could be any digital platform should the Minister designate it as covered by the law in the future.
Could Facebook simply say "We will only allow links from sites that do not charge"? If someone tries to post a new article from News Corp, Facebook displays a message suggesting alternative links from "free" news sources.
The differentiation from free or paid could be a variable in the HTML code of the news source. If you want to allow links, specify cost=free.
No, the laws don’t allow that. Payments are only made to the big players, but if Facebook or Google block the big players and show any other news content they still have to pay the big players. Despite not having any content/links on their site.
It's a fact that Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and others are free-loading by extracting information from content creators and posting it on their platform.
However, if just linking to content could be considered as somehow using the content - it would be a blatant power grab by publishers facilitated by the government.
How would wikipedia function if linking to content cost them money?
Im not sure about facebook. The article refers to how FB grabs "snippets" of content from websites. But I was under the impression that what FB does is grab certain info in META tags in order to create previews. As a content creator you need to explicitly write that html to allow sites like facebook to render a preview.
If Facebook complied with this law, wouldn't they be incentivized to suppress viral sharing of news articles since the more viral a news story being shared is, the more they have to pay out? And would that mean news companies would be doing everything they can to "go viral" since it means a big payday? These incentives are all misaligned.
Facebook are complying with the law, by removing news content so they don’t have to participate in the scheme.
But the crazy thing is, if they decided to let any ‘news content’ through - say, block the big Aussie media players but allow overseas news and local independent news from small orgs that aren’t eligible for payments (because it was the big players that lobbied for these laws), then they would still be forced into arbitration and be forced to pay the big orgs, despite not having any of their content on the platform!
The law doesn’t actually really distinguish between what is actually “used” or not, or the difference between full article content or just links. If the media companies don’t like any proposed deal, everybody is forced into arbitration and then it’s judged on criteria that specifically exclude factors like the value of the traffic referral from Google or Facebook to the news site.
This past election cycle has shown Big Tech's true colors. They censor information to the world, tweak their algorithms to misrepresent situations, hide trending hashtags, etc based on California's preferred politics. They literally just got finished pooling their power to silence an entire political party (i.e. Parlor), and people still for some reason think they deserve the right to be gatekeepers of all information.
I don't say this because I feel bad for big media, I say it because big media content is certainly not made better by being pre-filtered through facebook's algorithms (or whatever big tech company). The current state of big media content is a fucking dumpster fire...at least more money to them might result in improved quality.
Web != Internet. The internet is fine. You can tell because you can can route around any of these problems. This attack is at a completely different level of the stack.
While I disagree with the legislation I think it’s good that governments are experimenting and learning. Regulating tech is a hard problem and there will be mistakes. If this turns out to be a big one I imagine it will be rolled back but lessons learned along the way will stay in our memory.
Unfortunately our Government here in Australia has an extremely bad record for tech policy, and in this case have basically written a law based entirely on only what an extremely powerful lobby group wanted...
TBL sold out a while ago, with DRM/EME only a recent example. Also not sure anything he says on this matter can be unbiased when both Facebook and Google pay membership fees to the W3C.
Keep the web free. Avoid imposing rules and taxes.
Ultimately a news organization is an internet citizen like you or me. They should not have different privileges.