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?
I think the point is, if somebody shares a link to an article of Sydney Morning Herald on Facebook, and Facebook runs an ad along side the article, that the SMH should get some of profit from the ad.
It's a super dumb idea that will never go anywhere.
I know you're not defending it, but even this steelman doesn't make sense. They don't run an ad alongside the article; They run it alongside the _link_ to the article, and the Sydney Morning-Herald runs an ad alongside the article. Facebook is providing aggregation and sharing of the link, and advertising alongside that aggregation and sharing. Does the Aus gov't think that telecoms or smartphone manufacturers should be paying extortion money to media companies too?
I can't back any of this up, but I think this is the logic.
Facebook is essentially a link distribution platform. It only continues to get visitors because media companies keep providing, like spooky magic, new links to be shared on there every day. Many of their visitors would drop away immediately without news. The news is the basis for a ton of engagement once the visitors arrive (39.2K likes, etc.). If that were all true you'd think it would be enough to get Facebook to pay to keep news companies afloat, but it isn't: they don't care which news organisations survive, only that there are still new links every day. Importantly, because nobody reads articles, only headlines, news orgs get nothing without the click. So "link aggregation" without ad revenue or subscription revenue is worth zero in the usual case. Fb doesn't have a problem letting good journalism die out as long as there are enough Breitbarts going around producing engagement on Fb. It takes a lot less $ per link to produce fake news than real news with facts in it, and those headlines are pretty damn engaging, so those places will die out last or more likely never die out because the margins are still fine and their competitors have died out.
I think that means they have to pay fake news places as well, otherwise promoting quality news (Fb can control how much attention a link gets) costs more tax and is disincentivised.
Facebook will display a link preview in the news feed, which will generally select some thumbnail and show the article headline and some text snippet, maybe the first sentence or two. The argument goes that by doing this, Facebook is monetizing the content of the link owner, and if people only read the headlines and text snippets and never click the link (frequently true), Facebook ends up with all of the ad revenue.
At least, this is the argument used by Spain against Google News, causing Google to stop linking to Spanish news sites.
> if people only read the headlines and text snippets and never click the link (frequently true), Facebook ends up with all of the ad revenue.
No, you have this backwards; snippets don't leech revenue away from news orgs, they enhance their revenue. There have been cases in the past where Google was ordered to stop displaying snippets of certain sites without paying, and media companies immediately started whining about the sharp traffic declines. Complaints about the copyright of snippets is a fig leaf for protection money of the sort they're demanding once again.
Because "old media companies" are Rupert Murdoch, who does in real life what George Soros is accused of doing by media outlets controlled by... Rupert Murdoch.
Frankly, it's just another case of the non-US developed world deciding that demanding extortion money is better than trying to innovate and create value for the world. The US economy has plenty of pathologies and plenty of things to learn from the rest of the OECD, but stuff like this is the flipside. I thought this was mostly Europe's wheelhouse, but apparently it's broader than that.
Tariffs and such have been used to even the playing field though. When scalability and network effects are strong how would a company in Australia compete with the existing players who can structure themselves to pay extremely little tax.
If US tech companies want to generate profit from EU and other OECD countries why shouldn't they be taxed in the countries they generate that money from?
I'm not a big fan of tariffs in general, and think there are usually better policy tools to achieve the same objective, but they have their place: there are sound reasons to want to retain domestic production capacity in certain industries, while still taking advantage of the efficiency that full nationalization often precludes. It's not entirely unreasonable to include domestic media in this category either.
But this set of demands goes far beyond what's required to protect critical domestic production, by explicitly laying out specifics for how the market should be structured:
> 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.
On top of that, the doublespeak about the purpose of demands like these rankle me:
> Frydenberg said it was only fair that media companies that created the content got paid for it. “This will help to create a level playing field,” he said.
Paywalls have existed for ages. The notion that "it's only fair" that a business that chooses a business model based on ad revenue also get a government-coerced payout from a third-party is lunatic on its face. Aggregators and referrers like Google and Facebook don't create content[0] and thus aren't eating media companies' lunch; competitors like blogs are. If it's "not fair" that they're paid, why not fund them directly out of the government?
> If US tech companies want to generate profit from EU and other OECD countries why shouldn't they be taxed in the countries they generate that money from?
Are you under the impression that their profits within the country aren't already taxed? The difference here is that the tax receipts are going directly to media companies instead of to the gov't (and the fact that implicit taxes generally don't manage to capture the attention of the uninformed voter, who'd probably be put off by the idea that a tax should be have such narrowly-targeted payers and recipients without being explicitly Pigovian (Eg cigarettes)).
[0] Except to the extent that individual posts on Facebook have reduced news consumption, but I'm not sure if that's true
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.
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.
Because politicians believe, probably correctly, that journalists decide elections. When journalists come knocking for favours they get them.
It's the same story in Germany, France, Spain etc. Less so in the UK where newspapers are more diverse and have mostly either gone paywalled and stabilised, or have such huge popularity and reach (e.g. Daily Mail) that they can be profitable off of traffic and ads. But most countries have a lot of newspapers all hard to differentiate from each other due to journalistic groupthink. They can't/won't compete by altering the way they report news, so they are reduced to calling in favours in capital cities.
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.
> 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?
plus, it'll be easier for them to obfuscate the data somehow and share some specific piece of information that's technically correct but is useless.
They can also just drag this out in court for a long time until everyone forgets, they restructure how their money works, and then they'll share the useless info freely.
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.
Couldn't Google just remove sites demanding special treatment from their search results? It would be right in line with their current behavior, ethically and mechanically; a media company whining to the Australian government for protectionism is just a high-overhead way of disallowing all crawler traffic in robots.txt.
Less pithily: Google crawls the web, offering a standard set of terms on which it does so. No website is compelled to accept these terms and have their links displayed on google.com, even if they're public-facing. The mechanism by which you can opt out, fully or partially, is a robots.txt file specifying to the crawler what it can and can't crawl and display. Australian media companies are saying that they don't accept Google's linking terms; they proposed counter-terms of licensing fees for linking, and Google can refuse them. As the two sides have failed to agree to terms on which the media sites can be linked to by Google, they fall neatly into the category of a website blocking robots.txt
Fine them for what though? they don't seem to be breaking any regulations, they just have a lot of money and the local media companies want some of it.
> they don't seem to be breaking any regulations, they just have a lot of money and the local media companies want some of it.
That's a great way to get a law passed ;)
I'm not saying that I believe the Australian government has a legitimate case or anything, just that between "Google can do whatever it likes" and "all of Google's websites are blocked at ISP levels", there are a few levels of escalation that they can pick.
True, but the escalation goes in both directions. Google and Facebook are American companies, Australia and the US have existing free-trade agreements. Imposing fines on foreign businesses to force them to roll over for the benefit of local businesses is exactly the sort of thing that free-trade agreements forbid in no unclear terms. There are a lot of factors at play. Trump dislikes Google because the conservative hive mind has turned against it, but favors Facebook because it's supposedly essential to his campaign operations. Plus he's got a protectionist bent and loves trade sanctions.
I doubt that anything will happen, really. It's a negotiation, the Australian government says "give us all your money", Google says "you're not getting one cent" and in the end Google will favor traditional media companies' sites a bit more ("fighting fake news with real information"), donate to a few journalism programs and possibly start creator-ad-share on news.
feel like we discussed this here before and it was a different country (france?)
so the issues is using content in google news or in snippets shown in google search results. i commented before that i seldom leave news or the main search anymore because of these snippets.
why isn't it fair that the ads revenue is shared with these news publishers if their content is taken?
i don't believe that publicly funded journalism is a bad thing, or that taxes are a bad thing. i just think a sneaky end-run around the normal systems of taxation and subsidy are a bad thing. Google and Facebook should be subject to heavy taxation, and local journalism should be supported through public funding. What these countries are trying to do is good, in spirit.
i just think the government should not be in the business of deciding how much one independent private company pays another independent private company, and i don't think governments should be passing laws just for the purpose of being able to issue fines. if the government wants to redistribute wealth, they should do it through taxation, and they should be honest about what they're doing.
Google has office space and server farms in Australia. Also Australia has treaties with the us that allow the Australian government to fine US corporations.
The Aussie government’s dilemma is to avoid having to build their own services to fill a US tech gap. Politicians have stated they would prefer not to build their own services from the ground up.
I think there’s an element of Australian politics that would push for homegrown stuff over google/fb.
I'd say all of them, particularly the state media which have journalistic policies that allow them to skirt the issuing of retractions for months (ABC) or not at all (SBS). At least the private sector media will retract and correct in a reasonable period of time, in my experience both Fairfax and News Corp, although they're also generally rags at this point.
Interesting point, do you have any examples? I’m generally left swinging but find the general style used by sbs and abc are generally less click baity and manipulative but are at times pretty left swinging themselves.
Context: left = progressive, right = conservative. I think those terms switch in some countries so figured id mention.
After requesting a retraction for some false news on SBS' website, I was informed after a very lengthy delay that they did not issue retractions to articles unless there is a complaint received within an arbitrary period of time. There's that, then there's the fact ACMA has zero oversight over SBS' online operations because they can only regulate their television content.
For the ABC, on two separate occasions I reported some pretty egregious incorrect reporting and both times retractions occurred over a month later.
Contrast this to the retractions I've gotten from the private sector. A reporter on a News Corp website replied to my email in under 10 minutes (!!) and issued a retraction. A reported for Fairfax similarly retracted a point in an article the following day after a complaint.
So, the contrast is stark and revealing. ABC and SBS will lie to you with impunity and zero oversight, while the private sector at least has the decency to correct themselves in a reasonable period of time.
China has home-grown tech for both certainly, but I don't know if the fact that everyone uses a flavor of search engine and social media proves that they're nonessential.
I guess you could say search engines are nonessential like music and entertainment are nonessential. Somehow people end up wanting both anyways.
They’re simply not capable of such things. The government fails to grasp technology entirely, passes technically impossible bills and destroys even the good things it creates (ftth is now fttn).
While there’s some precedents with piracy website DNS entries removed from ISP dns, I doubt the gov would want to pick a fight with a multi billion (trillion?) dollar company who would actually fight back.
Google and Facebook are not cutting edge technologies. They are in the position of IBM in the 80s and Microsoft in the 90s, a legacy technology with huge market share being able to charge monopoly prices. A home grown alternative to google search is not beyond any university with a 100m budget.
I admit I hardly visit pirate sites, but I didn't even notice that happen. I just checked and the Pirate Bay is still available so I don't know what they're even blocking.
Tpb is definitely blocked, I didn’t notice for ages but turns out I was always overriding my ISP DNS and using google dns which for some reason doesn’t block it, I’ve since moved to cloudflare who are in the same boat.
e.g. 1337x.to, limetorrents.cc and torrentking.eu bring up an "access blocked" page. "Access to this site has been blocked by an order of the Federal Court of Australia" etc.
https://thepiratebay.org is working fine for me today, although I'm sure that address hadn't worked for a while until very recently, and it wasn't the same sort of blocking as those above.
I have a new computer. On my old one I changed to Google DNS when a lot of torrent sites were being blocked a few years ago, and suddenly they all worked again. Kind of silly saying access is blocked when changing one number on the computer unblocks them all.
Those 3 all work for me (well the 3rd one gives a Cloudflare error at https://torrentrex.com/, not a DNS black hole). I am based in Sydney with my ISP's own DNS (Aussie BB).
I think I read somewhere that smaller ISPs aren’t required to implement the restrictions, Presumably they might choose to not manage their own dns servers thus significant overhead. but I could be wrong.
It doesn’t need to replace fb or google, only the functions it uses and provide an extensible set of tech for locals to develop solutions as needed. Still a massive undertaking but more reasonable.
It would be crazy for G/FB to play that kind of hardball. For Google, it would be an existential and permanent loss of business.
Imagine if you woke up and G was not available in your country?
You switch to an alternative: Bing, DDG etc..
Alternatives that many Aussies may not have really been aware of.
And now, 100% of G's user base is being 'conditioned' on competitors' products - their default behavior, the icons they click, the default search engine for browsers changing over.
And for most people - DDG/Bing is probably just as good as Google.
A month later, G comes back to Australia, how many people bother to switch back? How many people have come to 'be fine' with something else? How many people resent G?
Does the Aussie Gov, which will realize that 'search' is an essential aspect of operating ability, will even allow government workers to use a service from someone who will drop it instantly, and sign a service contract with Bing? Corporations who see it as an existential flaw and require everyone to have 3 search solutions 'at the ready'.
For FB obviously it's a different story, however, a smart politician would paint FB as a 'foreign enemy' and turn the tide of populism against them as well. Because Aussie didn't 'ban' them, FB/G pulled out themselves, denying people their service, most people would 'blame them'.
FB has some seemingly essential aspects in terms of communication, but I think that people would soon discover that it's not essential at all.
It would be a disaster for both of them.
The other risk is that this disaster becomes contagious.
If G 'shuts down' in Australia - what does the UK government do? The EU gov? If they are smart they react with legislation forcing more 'choice' in search on every level.
This doesn't seem implausible to me, based on the different competitive positions that Google and Bing hold. I can imagine a scenario in which Google doesn't want to pay this tax to avoid a ripple effect across their business in other countries, while Bing opportunistically decides that paying protection money is worth establishing a foothold as the primary search engine in a developed, Anglophone country.
There is zero chance that Google 'pulls out' to avoid a 'ripple effect' - because this would cause a much more existential 'ripple effect' in other ways.
Google pulling out of any regular nation would be existentially damaging.
MS/Bing would weaponize this to the nth degree - they already have service contracts with businesses and corporations around the world and they'd be in a global push to 'drop Google' for the inherent risk of pullout they just witnesses.
This would be the #1 talking point for their massive global salesforce.
> There is zero chance that Google 'pulls out' to avoid a 'ripple effect'
Why are you quoting the words "pulls out" next to an actual quote from my comment? I didn't use it in my comment, and neither did anyone else in the comment thread. Google refusing to play ball here could take any number of forms, from the extreme hardball of simply refusing and tying it up in the courts (and getting fined and perhaps blocked), to just blacklisting links to the companies that the government is extorting them on behalf of. The latter wouldn't even be "hardball"; companies that are explicitly disagreeing with Google's terms for inclusion aren't included in their results, in the same way that robots.txt allows for.
> Google pulling out of any regular nation would be existentially damaging.
There's plenty of precedent for this level of targeted reduction in service as a response to gov't demands. They shut down Google News in Spain, removed French news links under very-similar demands, etc etc. None of this has had the ripple effect you're describing, and is evidence in favor of the fact that Google is concerned about a broader ripple effect: Why else would they give up all the revenue from referral to these sites instead of paying a portion of the revenue in protection money?
+ If they don't want to pay the tax, they would have to leave ... I didn't mean to imply that's what you implied although I see how one could read it that way.
+ " They shut down Google News in Spain, removed French news links under very-similar demands, etc etc. None of this has had the ripple effect you're describing"
The 'ripple effect' is happening right now in Australia.
These laws are being brought in due to the news aggregation, not due to the search engine. If the search engine forwarded you on to the news site, and didn't clutter up their UI with all the extra information, it wouldn't be as legally exposed. Which was, you know, Google's original business model.
"Playing hardball" does not require Google to abandon Australian customers, it just requires Google to have special treatment for Australian media sites - not providing any snippets from these sites, prioritizing all other sites when possible (so Australian sites only show up in searches for local news, and not on e.g. lifestyle articles) and of course they can simply not show any ads on the (very small portion) of the searches linking to Australian news sites, so that they get a percentage of $0.
I think the media conglomerates overestimate their importance to Australian customers - for countries like France there's a language barrier, but the vast, vast majority of searches by Australians can be served well without needing any content from the Australian news companies. If linking to your content is expensive, and linking to other content is cheap, then it's perfectly reasonable and generally legal to prefer cheap sources whenever possible.
What makes you think Bing or DDG wants to pay news companies to share their link and drive traffic to these companies? If anything, forcing revenue sharing would cause a small search engine like DDG out of business as it tries to scale up. If you wanted to start up a search engine today, imagine what these extra costs would do?
> If they are smart they react with legislation forcing more 'choice' in search on every level.
In your anti-google crusade, you are missing the point. It makes no sense for search engines to pay news or any company to drive traffic to those companies. If anything, the news companies/etc should be paying search engines if you really think about it. It isn't a Goolge vs Bing/DDG/etc issue. It's a Google/Bing/DDG/etc vs news/media companies issue.
If these news websites don't want to be part of google search, then they can easily exclude themselves via robots.txt.
There would be no political suicide there. It's so easy to make Google/Facebook look evil in this case if they don't comply. Just say they are not paying taxes and getting our money abroad etc.
But there is 0% chance of Google/Facebook not complying.
> I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship
In the long term the issue with this is that it pushes Google and Facebook into your politics. If you use political measures to screw with them, then they'll start getting involved in the politics more and more to protect themselves. And these two companies could have a lot of influence in ways that are hard to notice.
I do not work for them. This is something I noticed over the years: as Google ran into more and more obstacles in the US that are political the more they seem to have started to meddle. Maybe it's because this is easier, but maybe it's to protect themselves.
These companies don't push themselves into politics everywhere (yet), but I'm sure that the more governments squeeze them the more they'll get involved.
I cynically thought that was corruption by design, politicians - trying to get them into a 'contribute to both sides so they shut up' with shakedowns. They were trying to cast Google as sexist well before anything else happened to harm their image.
It's based on learning from what happened to Microsoft.
I used to work at Google. It wasn't often discussed, but when lobbying came up (including in formal contexts) the general attitude was "you can try to ignore Washington but Washington won't ignore you". The perception was very much that Microsoft had gone through the anti-trust trial not so much because of what they'd done but because for years under the Clinton administration they didn't grease the right wheels, in fact they barely had any presence in Washington, which left them politically exposed. The combination of no powerful friends, extremely vague laws and extremely empowered and political regulators was seen as a very toxic one. And that's especially remarkable because Google was (at that time) a company whose executives really didn't like Microsoft, they feared them and treated them as the biggest threat to their business. A lot had come out of the Linux/open source world, academia, UNIX vendors etc and they were really the last people who would give Gates a break, but nonetheless their conclusion was that lobbying was basically a requirement of doing business in the USA.
I'm going back here - eventually that changed and they came to fear Facebook more. But for instance the Google Toolbar was basically an anti-Microsoft play, as was Chrome.
The pay-per-click model has already forced news organizations towards producing click-bait content. I’m not sure why regulators would want to deepen that influence by making newspapers more dependent on Google and Facebook.
Don't the French and Spanish examples indicate otherwise? Spain's link tax in 2014 led to the shutting-down of Google News Spain, and France's attempt to charge for Google News snippets led to the removal of those snippets for French sites (followed by a dip in traffic for pubs that hurt them far more than it hurt Google). What makes you think that FB/G don't have the power here?
>What makes you think that FB/G don't have the power here?
They also risk losing that entire market as well. Let's be honest, nobody loves F or G. If a decent competitor stands up people will gladly switch, even more if they market it as "by Australians for Australians".
SV companies are big and great and all that, but to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.
A lot of people have invested a lot of effort in creating the narrative of a techlash, that people are fed up with big tech's abuses and would be glad to see the big companies go. But it's simply not true. Polls of the general public consistently show that Facebook and Google are well-loved.
I read a similar one in the last 6 months tying it to politics. One was that Trump is ironically more tech-friendly than Sanders or Warren (~Nov 2019), despite tech workers generally not supporting Trump. The other oddity was that polls don't really show that there's a techlash, so why are Democratic frontrunners making it a talking point?
For the same reason that Elizabeth Warren says "Latinx" despite a tiny fraction of Latino citizens identifying with the term: many of them are running for what's been described as "President of Twitter", where Twitter is a metonymy for old-economy institutional elites, lashing out pathetically at the democratizing forces weakening their hold on power. I assume the reason politicians do this is partially drinking the Kool-Aid from their bubble, and partly intentional pandering to journalists who are also in that bubble.
Companies are in a sense above the state jurisdictions of everywhere but where they are headquartered. Companies regularly withdraw from markets because the regulatory environment is inhospitable.
They risk losing the entire Austrian market. But paying this tax also risks emboldening other countries to follow suit. Exiting the market has the short term loss of Austrian revenue, but signals that legislation like this will not work.
Refusing to do business in a country due to regulation isn't acting above the law. These companies have no requirement to conduct business in any given country.
> They also risk losing that entire market as well. Let's be honest, nobody loves F or G. If a decent competitor stands up people will gladly switch, even more if they market it as "by Australians for Australians".
Are Australians really so nationalistic? I thought they would mostly choose whatever tool allows them to do what they want as quick as possible.
> SV companies are big and great and all that, but to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.
Google can follow the law by simply not indexing Australians sites anymore, or they don't have to service Australians. If they are told to share revenue, they can choose to simply shut down the revenue source instead, especially if the cost of revenue sharing exceeds the revenue they are generating. FB/G aren't charities.
When GDRP came online, many web sites in the states found that blocking out EU viewers was cheaper than complying. That isn't going against EU law.
What you're imagining is that if Google shuts down Google News in Australia, the government will threaten to shut down all their other unrelated business ventures, unless they put it back up?
The concept of forcing a foreign business to run a business it doesn't want to is a bit bizarre, and I doubt a court would support the concept, let alone the idea of holding the rest of the company hostage.
I think this is probably just your HN bubble; lots of the criticism of Google here is tinged with irrational bitterness, along with the classic tech culture distrust centralization and the power structures around control of data. I happen to align fairly strongly with the latter view, but neither of these have much purchase in the wider population, where Google remains wildly more popular than most institutions that you think of as benign or popular.
> to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.
How do you explain the situations as they played out in Spain (in 2014) and France? It seems a lot more delusional to me to ignore precedent and forecast based on wishful thinking about the power dynamic between these companies and states.
I love both Google, and Facebook. I'm constantly blown away that something like Youtube exists, I love my Oculus Quest and use it daily, I keep in touch with friends on WhatsApp, and use Google Search more than any other website.
I'm not trying to imply they are above jurisdiction, I am quite tired of hearing the "No one likes these guys" narrative though.
This is the ironic part of the policy. You're right about the glut, and there was a glut in print 20 years ago, too. Google's definitely hurt businesses, but it's usually though disintermediating them (think Yelp). Google News and search don't really do that for news--snippets and headlines aren't the same as an article. I find it hard to believe that ABC's brand isn't strong enough for them to pull their content from Google and expect people to go to abc.net.au; I just don't think than can sell enough ads to give the content away.
By hurt, do you mean competed with by effectively utilizing technology to help people find information about the world from multiple sources.
There are very many news aggregators and most do serve ads next to the headlines they index. I assume that people typically link out from news aggregation sites more than into vertically-integrated services.
Perhaps the content producers / information service providers could develop additional revenue streams in order to subsidize a news aggregation public service. Micropayments (BAT, Web Monetization (ILP)), ads, paywalls, and public and private grants are sources of revenue for content producers.
I think it's disingenuous to blame news aggregation sites for the unprofitability of extremely redundant journalism. What happened to journalism? Internet. Excessive ads. Aren't we all writers these days.
Unfortunately they killed the "most cited" and was it "most in-depth" source analysis functions of Google News; and now we're stuck with regurgitated news wires and press releases and all of these eyewitness mobile phone videos with two-bit banal commentary and also punditry. How the world has changed.
So, as far as scientific experiments are concerned, it might be interesting to see what the impact of de-listing from free time sites X, Y, and Z is.
Do the papers in Australia and France now intend to compensate journal ScholarlyArticle authors whose work they summarize and hopefully at least cite the titles and URLs of, or the journals themselves?
Yup, Australian media companies are just resorting to the high-overhead alternative of passing a law equivalent to specifying the robots.txt of a handful of companies. And for some reason the Aus govt is dumb enough to do it for them.
>Just say they are not paying taxes and getting our money abroad etc.
This is said pretty regularly in the media in Australia, and honestly no one cares. Even big mining companies like BHP pay little corporate tax on shore, and after years of it being 'exposed', honestly the general public don't seem to care.
I think it's more accurate to say the public cares somewhat, and consequently politicians do too (they sometimes roll out accusations of "un-Australian" tax minimization to suit their agenda).
But politicians don't dare to move against the big companies because they know they'll lose. Both in campaign/party donations and in being targeted at the next election if their policies are going to impact those companies (see what happened with the mining companies and the Carbon tax).
This same thing could happen with these "internet" companies who would only need to devote a little of their local advertising to a campaign against the change and against the party proposing it to have any public support cancelled out and politicians quickly reversing their position.
>interesting to see what happens if they start pushing back.
Nothing. Google isn't going to forego the entire Australian market or even an economy as large as the Eurozone. They'd just pay their x% tax and suck it up and consider it cost of doing business.
Google is a company, not a nation state and governments ought to stop kowtowing in front of companies. Reminds me of the story about the elephants and the rope
>They'd just pay their x% tax and suck it up and consider it cost of doing business.
And then after that the companies will get involved in politics in those places so that it never happens again. This in turn increases the chance of regulatory capture and corruption.
Also, don't forget that increasing the cost of doing business will discourage others from trying. Oh, and there's also the US government too. They might just end up siding with Google and Facebook.
> And then after that the companies will get involved in politics in those places so that it never happens again. This in turn increases the chance of regulatory capture and corruption.
Sounds like a great reason to change the distribution of wealth and systematically reduce the power and influence of corporations.
That's a nice idea, but it seems to not really lead to better outcomes. Socialism and communism have these same kinds of power struggles. It seems to simply be part of human nature.
car manufacturers leave expensive countries because there's an opportunity cost. If they can move their infrastructure from Australia to Thailand they make more money. Google already is everywhere. When they leave a country they just lose money. The marginal cost of production for large tech companies is close to zero so leaving a market virtually never makes any sense. Which is of course why all of the tech companies would personally grovel in front of the CCP if they let them in regardless under which conditions.
>GM and Ford had no problem extracting itself from Australia,
The only thing they extracted were their manufacturing operations, GM and Ford still sell vehicles in Australia. They even have the Focus which Ford dropped for the American market! Unless Google and Facebook are going to close their offices but still provide service to Australia, that seems like an entirely different scenario.
They can certainly do that. It would mean Australian firms would need to buy ads through a foreign broker or sibling company, but many Australian advertisers would have those sorts of firms in existence already.
Funny how this suggestion comes up every time Google or Facebook are subject of some minor regulation outside the US.
Yet suggest they should give up their participation in military or US border security, two areas that are unlikely to be larger than their business in Australia (or, other times, the EU), and there’s no shortage of people explaining what a stupid trade-off that would be.
I guess the tech crowds’ priorities are clear: drone targeting? So what? This is strictly business!
A bit of taxation to maybe rescue the journalism a democracy depends on? To the barricades! We will gladly give up 100% of earnings to take a stand against the injustice that is...taking 5% of earnings.
"democracy", broadly defined, does not "depend" on journalism. This narrative seems to have been invented recently as traditional outlets lost the trust of their viewers after getting things continually and fantastically wrong for at least 2 decades while a new medium (the internet) exposed how little they actually know.
I'm slightly more bullish on journalism and its importance than you are, but I broadly agree. It's been embarrassing watching the death throes (or transition period) of journalism, seeing people used to being treated as high-status pathetically lash out at every possible entity involved in exposing their inadequacy.
I do think that journalism plays a role in a healthy democracy. I assume that at some point, journalism will settle into a new equilibrium and play the role that it's always played, without the messianic complex that journalism as a whole is currently afflicted with (and so dramatically fails to live up to).
Democracy definitely depends on citizens being informed enough to collectively make intelligent choices, but whether infotainment is serving that right now is debatable.
In real life that happens through peer networks as much as the news.
Voting without information is like air conditioning without a thermometer, or self-driving cars without LIDAR, or regular cars with a blind driver: It just doesn't work. Because the information flow needs to be circular to allow the actuator (voter) to react to the results of previous actions.
There used to be this fantasy that hobbyist bloggers would fill in where professional journalism fails. Here's a map "news deserts" where the latter has happened: https://www.usnewsdeserts.com. There is no map of the former, because bloggers tend to get up too late to attend boring 9am meetings of the residential refuse working group.
You might be under the impression that relevant news will somehow "diffuse" to get to you. That's a common idea among what's called "low-information voters", who tend to never read any news themselves and extrapolate from there.
It's wrong because they miss that the information that gets to them is simply second-hand journalism: It's full of holes and sometimes has (brown) stains. But the parts of it that are accurate almost invariably originate from professional news sources.
So voting "didn't work" until very very recently? The idea that there was this golden age where people all knew what they were talking about, and the citizens of a democracy dutifully read their newspaper and carefully considered their options, went to the polls etc, is a fantasy. The map of "news deserts" is really a map of "population density" - it tells me nothing about information consumption (or retention) in those areas.
>You might be under the impression that relevant news will somehow "diffuse" to get to you.
I am under no such impression. I am challenging the idea that "journalism" is "critical" for a democracy to function. It only seems critical to me insofar as "function" is defined as "people vote in the way journalists expect them to".
> So voting "didn't work" until very very recently?
The time from about 1740 to 1800 was for newspapers what the 2000s was for the internet.
1787: US Constitution (first democracy)
1789: French Revolution (2nd)
1832 (to 192x): British Reform Act (expanding right to vote)
> I am under no such impression.
Then how does information about, say, laws being passed, or viruses going around, or wars being lost or won get to you? And if it doesn't get to you, how do you decide whom to vote for?
> It only seems critical to me insofar as "function" is defined as "people vote in the way journalists expect them to".
This is just superficial, cynical, contrarian ignorance. Power in the US has been flipping between the parties quite freely, so the press either changes their opinion just as often as the electorate, or their influence is rather limited.
Unless you watch C-SPAN all day and read every law yourself, you'll neither not be informed, or you'll get your information from people who do some of that reading for you (and, if you're lucky, also ask questions, send & litigate FOIA requests, call experts, speak foreign languages etc). Professional journalism is the closest you can get to the source of information unless you do it all yourself. Your 4chan pals or that YouTube bro yelling at his webcam can't and won't do that legwork, either. So what you like about them isn't that they are better informed––they add one step of transmission and can therefore only decrease information content, never increase. What you like is their capability to pre-digest the news, remove anything that might challenge you, and regurgitate the rest in a form that doesn't conflict with your conspiratorial mindset.
I'm not sure what those three events have to do with my question, which is related to how critical journalism is to the functioning of a democracy. Is your belief that "the news" was widely read and, perhaps more importantly, accurate during those periods? This requires a certain suspension of disbelief I'm not willing to grant the professional journalist class, because it implies that only recently have they been bad at what they do and this period is, somehow, unique.
>This is just superficial, cynical, contrarian ignorance. Power in the US has been flipping between the parties quite freely, so the press either changes their opinion just as often as the electorate, or their influence is rather limited.
No, I'm merely pointing out that when one party wins professional journalism recoils into a state of utter confusion. Recall the famous quote from a writer for The New Yorker about knowing only one person who voted for Richard Nixon in 1972.
>What you like is their capability to pre-digest the news, remove anything that might challenge you, and regurgitate the rest in a form that doesn't conflict with your conspiratorial mindset.
I actually very much dislike the journalist who tries to tell me what to think about a certain topic or event, though I see that you're attempting to attribute this behavior only to the "4chan youtube bro", which is a little strange since most journalists today - especially, it seems, mainstream ones - have explicit online personae that reflect a certain worldview and work for news orgs who attempt to "explain" the news to you. This isn't reporting - it's advocacy and opinion journalism where they attempt to inoculate "opinion" by claiming they're just "explaining".
It wasn't intentionally, and it happened two decades ago.
I'm pretty sure, for example, that the Times gets criticised for this at least ten times as often as the Republican Party does, even though the latter was not only the origin of the lie the NYT fell for, but the actual group of people making the decision to go to war.
Only Google shutting down Reader has a worse <magnitude of mistake>/<longevity of criticism> ratio.
there's already a way for megacorps to have to share some of their wealth - it's called taxes and subsidies, and it's a well-established system.
what australia, france, spain, and anybody else who is trying to enforce revenue transfers from facebook and google to their local media companies is trying to do is called a state-funded media, but that's apparently a bad look. so instead of collecting taxes and then distributing that tax revenue to the companies they want to subsidize, they're trying to pretend this is still some sort of free-market, independently funded media. a newspaper that's staying afloat because of government-mandated payments from big tech companies isn't any more independent than one being funded directly by the state.
You might as well say "what any government who is trying to enforce revenue transfers from spotify and youtube to their local musicians is trying to do is called a state-funded music". "What anybody who is trying to enforce revenue transfers from cinemas to local movie studios is trying to do is called a state funded film industry". "What any government who is trying to enforce revenue transfers from carbon emitting power generators to renewable generators in the form of a carbon credit is trying to do is called a state funded clean energy system."
Oftentimes governments seek to redress one party whose work is being taken advantage of by another party whether that's from a principle of fairness, a desire to maintain the health of both parties, more mercenary reasons, etc. Doing this outside of the narrow regime of taxes and subsidies is not only not uncommon. It's entirely normal.
Also, it's worth mentioning that the most trusted media organisation in Australia is state funded so it can't be that much of a bad look.
Is it truly the only thing they could do? They could force phones to use different defaults. They could ban preinstallation of their apps. They could force preinstallation of competing apps. They could throttle them so their services get slow. They could force providers to show a large banner in addition to the site when showing it. They could I suppose add an additional tax on android phones to hurt Google, or even through the providers tax Facebook and Google usage until compliance. They could ban their apps and app stores. They could freeze bank accounts. They could send the army to destroy their hq. Banning their websites is merely the most sensible action in this situation.
Google isn't doing anything particularly special. I think banning them would be silly, but it isn't like they offer an irreplaceable or even particularly complicated set of services.
> What if Google and Facebook just said “No, thank you.”?
We'll get anti-google/facebook/tech propaganda campaign like in the past. Remember the months/years of neverending anti-google "news"? Remember the months/years of neverending anti-facebook "news"? Followed by congressional hearings/etc. Notice how it all seemed to have stopped when google/youtube/facebook/etc decided to give state-backed "news" companies preferential treatment on their platforms?
> I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship
In purely business/financial terms, sure. But not in the media/political terms. You think these tech companies have more power than state backed news companies?
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?
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.
I think you overestimate the market pull for the product legacy media companies produce. Removing legacy news from Facebook and Google would certainly hasten the death of legacy news and have no effect on tech companies, who's users would just replace legacy news with reddit posts, blog spam, etc.
Where would Snapchat be without their trending (garbage) screen that nobody looks at? All emerging social media totally ignores news. Instagram? Almost zero news. Tik Tok? No news. Snapchat? Garbage clickbait nobody looks at.
Facebook is the antiquated ugly stepchild of social media. What's their engagement like for people <18?
I don't really understand how you can "negotiate in good faith" how to pay when the government is holding a gun to the head of one side saying that they will have to pay. If the government wants to tax internet giants to pay for traditional news media, it should just do that.
IMO, news media is basically a public good, in the sense that it's non-rival and basically non-excludable. Unfortunately, it's also a relatively low personal value public good. What I mean is that the typical person cannot make decisions that benefit themselves based on the news, and the news provides little entertainment value compared to e.g. video games or television. That is not to say it has no value, just that the value it produces is low compared to what it costs to make.
In the past, news media was more valuable, because there was less other media around. Now there are so many media channels (videogames, cable, broadcast, music, social, YouTube, etc.) that even if they were all equally entertaining to the news, news' share of the whole pie would be smaller. But they're not equally entertaining, they're more entertaining. So news loses out.
Despite its low entertainment value, on a social level, there is definitely some value to having an informed public. So maybe the government should subsidize the creation of informative content, as it does with the BBC in the UK. And maybe funding for this should be partially derived from taxes on internet companies. But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the government would basically mandate a transfer of wealth from internet companies directly to the wallets of news media owners.
G and FB could keep removing people from their index until at some point individuals will start asking them to pay them for any content they upload. This tax is just the beginning of this process.
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.
It is true that mass media is plenty of clickbaits with junk information in them. It is also true that these clickbaits are driving profits to Google.
I don't know what is the "ethical" business solution to this problem but I know that Google, at least, is favoring clickbaits and text spinning over quality. If you write a good blog with a single article per week it will be in the tail of searchers below text spinning content that has a higher frequency of updates.
Why not? They should have plenty of practice at it from Supermarket Tabloids. If they can't it is a general matter of mental decline and a claim that the elderly are even a population proportionate driver of clickbait is dubious.
Detecting 'quality'? Why not request that Google create a Research AI that cures all cancers? That task would be simpler as it is actually something which can be objectively defined and worked towards unlike general purpose detection of 'quality'. Plus if they were to actually achieve such an unrealistic goal it is one and done as opposed to a system which would be gamed constantly by those seeking to maximize their profits.
The problem is fundamentally systemic. It is a price/reward ratio dependent upon users and the satisfaction of the advertising clients.
> I frequent the web sites of a two publications that block both crawlers and social media referrers, and they're quite civilized.
I'd guess the causal arrow flows in the other direction. Publications that are explicitly targeting a smaller, more specific market can afford to avoid courting the kind of person who get their news from Facebook. But pubs that are going for a broader audience can't ignore this channel.
I know someone's going to respond "maybe they shouldn't be targeting that audience then" but....why? If CNN stops pandering to the average dimbulb and said dimbulb's Facebook feed becomes even more dominated by Macedonian (actual) fake news sites, is that _better_, for either the reader or for society? The irreducible reality is that most people like the kind of crap that mainstream news sites put out, and those people need to get their news from somewhere. (By the way, this doesn't exclude mainstream "prestige" publications like the NYT that pretend they're going for high-minded audiences; their drivel just has one layer extra of tidying up than CNN's does).
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...). 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.
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.
I'm not totally buying that for the initial surge. Stores were running out of toilet paper a week or two before any kind of orders were issued. All businesses were still open.
I don't disagree that the media is causing a huge amount of problems but demand is actually up because most people are working/layed off at home and they're definitely using more supplies than they would if they were at work. And before you say companies are using less supplies, corporate supply chains and home supply chains are COMPLETELY different and often use different farmers/gatherers, etc.
I was thinking the other direction. I'm sure companies will start insisting they are not news organizations if laws like this keep popping up, because people won't want to pay the costs involved in linking to news.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The problem here is a different one than people think it is.
Once upon a time if you wanted to advertise you had to go to somebody with a centralized distribution operation. They had to have a printing press or a radio station. Then they would charge you a large pile of money and put your ad in front of thousands of people. This revenue was used to pay for news reporting.
Today there are cat videos with millions of views. Advertisers who want to reach people in a particular demographic don't have to pay a premium to advertise in a publication whose readership skews towards that demographic, they can just advertise to the subset of the cat video viewers who happen to be in that demographic. There are more than enough cat videos and hot girls eating bananas on the internet to drive the cost of putting your ad in front of a person way down from where it was when you had to pay a newspaper or a TV station to do it.
Meanwhile Google makes a lot of money because the cat owner doesn't have an ad network, but if they put Google ads on their cat video channel they can make $72/month, and then Google gets a cut, times a billion people.
The news media assume that because they used to make a lot of money and now Google makes a lot of money, the money Google makes is mostly attributable to the work they do, but it isn't. It's mostly attributable to all the people posting videos of their cats and home improvement projects and college track meets and movie parodies and whatever else.
Their problem is that the value of an ad impression has fallen dramatically because there is so much more competition. But that wasn't caused by Google and they can't solve it. Even if you took all the money Google makes from ads related to news reporting and gave it to the companies doing news reporting, it wouldn't be as much as they used to make when they had a de facto monopoly on advertising.
And if you really want more of the money to go to the content creators, the best thing you could do is break up the ad networks (and prohibit them from ever buying each other again), so they would have more competition and move more of the margins to creators. But it still wouldn't be as much as they used to get.
This is true. The monopoly IS the root cause. Everything else is just governments and people trying to interpret it in ways that benefit them and trying to fight it off in whatever way they can. If the tech companies want to maintain their monopolies, they will have to pay a social tax in some way or another - one of the good ways I think is to compensate creators very well. That way, they are still helping a lot of local businesses and people and will continue to have a lot of support. If they don't come up with something to generate a lot of goodwill, then governments will force them to pay in other way, and what governments will come up with will be a lot more complex and inefficient.
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.
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
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.
This appears to be theft by political power. I hope Google and Facebook unite here and with the help of American government thwart such nonsensical efforts to steal their revenue.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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".
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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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] threadIs there any merit to this at all?
It's a super dumb idea that will never go anywhere.
Facebook is essentially a link distribution platform. It only continues to get visitors because media companies keep providing, like spooky magic, new links to be shared on there every day. Many of their visitors would drop away immediately without news. The news is the basis for a ton of engagement once the visitors arrive (39.2K likes, etc.). If that were all true you'd think it would be enough to get Facebook to pay to keep news companies afloat, but it isn't: they don't care which news organisations survive, only that there are still new links every day. Importantly, because nobody reads articles, only headlines, news orgs get nothing without the click. So "link aggregation" without ad revenue or subscription revenue is worth zero in the usual case. Fb doesn't have a problem letting good journalism die out as long as there are enough Breitbarts going around producing engagement on Fb. It takes a lot less $ per link to produce fake news than real news with facts in it, and those headlines are pretty damn engaging, so those places will die out last or more likely never die out because the margins are still fine and their competitors have died out.
I think that means they have to pay fake news places as well, otherwise promoting quality news (Fb can control how much attention a link gets) costs more tax and is disincentivised.
At least, this is the argument used by Spain against Google News, causing Google to stop linking to Spanish news sites.
https://louisem.com/3838/facebook-link-thumbnail-image-sizes
No, you have this backwards; snippets don't leech revenue away from news orgs, they enhance their revenue. There have been cases in the past where Google was ordered to stop displaying snippets of certain sites without paying, and media companies immediately started whining about the sharp traffic declines. Complaints about the copyright of snippets is a fig leaf for protection money of the sort they're demanding once again.
If US tech companies want to generate profit from EU and other OECD countries why shouldn't they be taxed in the countries they generate that money from?
But this set of demands goes far beyond what's required to protect critical domestic production, by explicitly laying out specifics for how the market should be structured:
> 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.
On top of that, the doublespeak about the purpose of demands like these rankle me:
> Frydenberg said it was only fair that media companies that created the content got paid for it. “This will help to create a level playing field,” he said.
Paywalls have existed for ages. The notion that "it's only fair" that a business that chooses a business model based on ad revenue also get a government-coerced payout from a third-party is lunatic on its face. Aggregators and referrers like Google and Facebook don't create content[0] and thus aren't eating media companies' lunch; competitors like blogs are. If it's "not fair" that they're paid, why not fund them directly out of the government?
> If US tech companies want to generate profit from EU and other OECD countries why shouldn't they be taxed in the countries they generate that money from?
Are you under the impression that their profits within the country aren't already taxed? The difference here is that the tax receipts are going directly to media companies instead of to the gov't (and the fact that implicit taxes generally don't manage to capture the attention of the uninformed voter, who'd probably be put off by the idea that a tax should be have such narrowly-targeted payers and recipients without being explicitly Pigovian (Eg cigarettes)).
[0] Except to the extent that individual posts on Facebook have reduced news consumption, but I'm not sure if that's true
It's the same story in Germany, France, Spain etc. Less so in the UK where newspapers are more diverse and have mostly either gone paywalled and stabilised, or have such huge popularity and reach (e.g. Daily Mail) that they can be profitable off of traffic and ads. But most countries have a lot of newspapers all hard to differentiate from each other due to journalistic groupthink. They can't/won't compete by altering the way they report news, so they are reduced to calling in favours in capital cities.
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?
They can also just drag this out in court for a long time until everyone forgets, they restructure how their money works, and then they'll share the useless info freely.
Just my take on the situation.
+ 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.
Less pithily: Google crawls the web, offering a standard set of terms on which it does so. No website is compelled to accept these terms and have their links displayed on google.com, even if they're public-facing. The mechanism by which you can opt out, fully or partially, is a robots.txt file specifying to the crawler what it can and can't crawl and display. Australian media companies are saying that they don't accept Google's linking terms; they proposed counter-terms of licensing fees for linking, and Google can refuse them. As the two sides have failed to agree to terms on which the media sites can be linked to by Google, they fall neatly into the category of a website blocking robots.txt
that's not a fine.
That's a great way to get a law passed ;)
I'm not saying that I believe the Australian government has a legitimate case or anything, just that between "Google can do whatever it likes" and "all of Google's websites are blocked at ISP levels", there are a few levels of escalation that they can pick.
so the issues is using content in google news or in snippets shown in google search results. i commented before that i seldom leave news or the main search anymore because of these snippets.
why isn't it fair that the ads revenue is shared with these news publishers if their content is taken?
i don't believe that publicly funded journalism is a bad thing, or that taxes are a bad thing. i just think a sneaky end-run around the normal systems of taxation and subsidy are a bad thing. Google and Facebook should be subject to heavy taxation, and local journalism should be supported through public funding. What these countries are trying to do is good, in spirit.
i just think the government should not be in the business of deciding how much one independent private company pays another independent private company, and i don't think governments should be passing laws just for the purpose of being able to issue fines. if the government wants to redistribute wealth, they should do it through taxation, and they should be honest about what they're doing.
2. Google could just stop showing them. See Spain where this killed the newspapers.
This is entirely a case of publishers wanting their cake and Google's too.
I think there’s an element of Australian politics that would push for homegrown stuff over google/fb.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but alternatives already exist for both.
Context: left = progressive, right = conservative. I think those terms switch in some countries so figured id mention.
For the ABC, on two separate occasions I reported some pretty egregious incorrect reporting and both times retractions occurred over a month later.
Contrast this to the retractions I've gotten from the private sector. A reporter on a News Corp website replied to my email in under 10 minutes (!!) and issued a retraction. A reported for Fairfax similarly retracted a point in an article the following day after a complaint.
So, the contrast is stark and revealing. ABC and SBS will lie to you with impunity and zero oversight, while the private sector at least has the decency to correct themselves in a reasonable period of time.
I guess you could say search engines are nonessential like music and entertainment are nonessential. Somehow people end up wanting both anyways.
While there’s some precedents with piracy website DNS entries removed from ISP dns, I doubt the gov would want to pick a fight with a multi billion (trillion?) dollar company who would actually fight back.
Google and Facebook are not cutting edge technologies. They are in the position of IBM in the 80s and Microsoft in the 90s, a legacy technology with huge market share being able to charge monopoly prices. A home grown alternative to google search is not beyond any university with a 100m budget.
I admit I hardly visit pirate sites, but I didn't even notice that happen. I just checked and the Pirate Bay is still available so I don't know what they're even blocking.
https://thepiratebay.org is working fine for me today, although I'm sure that address hadn't worked for a while until very recently, and it wasn't the same sort of blocking as those above.
I have a new computer. On my old one I changed to Google DNS when a lot of torrent sites were being blocked a few years ago, and suddenly they all worked again. Kind of silly saying access is blocked when changing one number on the computer unblocks them all.
Imagine if you woke up and G was not available in your country?
You switch to an alternative: Bing, DDG etc..
Alternatives that many Aussies may not have really been aware of.
And now, 100% of G's user base is being 'conditioned' on competitors' products - their default behavior, the icons they click, the default search engine for browsers changing over.
And for most people - DDG/Bing is probably just as good as Google.
A month later, G comes back to Australia, how many people bother to switch back? How many people have come to 'be fine' with something else? How many people resent G?
Does the Aussie Gov, which will realize that 'search' is an essential aspect of operating ability, will even allow government workers to use a service from someone who will drop it instantly, and sign a service contract with Bing? Corporations who see it as an existential flaw and require everyone to have 3 search solutions 'at the ready'.
For FB obviously it's a different story, however, a smart politician would paint FB as a 'foreign enemy' and turn the tide of populism against them as well. Because Aussie didn't 'ban' them, FB/G pulled out themselves, denying people their service, most people would 'blame them'.
FB has some seemingly essential aspects in terms of communication, but I think that people would soon discover that it's not essential at all.
It would be a disaster for both of them.
The other risk is that this disaster becomes contagious.
If G 'shuts down' in Australia - what does the UK government do? The EU gov? If they are smart they react with legislation forcing more 'choice' in search on every level.
Google pulling out of any regular nation would be existentially damaging.
MS/Bing would weaponize this to the nth degree - they already have service contracts with businesses and corporations around the world and they'd be in a global push to 'drop Google' for the inherent risk of pullout they just witnesses.
This would be the #1 talking point for their massive global salesforce.
Why are you quoting the words "pulls out" next to an actual quote from my comment? I didn't use it in my comment, and neither did anyone else in the comment thread. Google refusing to play ball here could take any number of forms, from the extreme hardball of simply refusing and tying it up in the courts (and getting fined and perhaps blocked), to just blacklisting links to the companies that the government is extorting them on behalf of. The latter wouldn't even be "hardball"; companies that are explicitly disagreeing with Google's terms for inclusion aren't included in their results, in the same way that robots.txt allows for.
> Google pulling out of any regular nation would be existentially damaging.
There's plenty of precedent for this level of targeted reduction in service as a response to gov't demands. They shut down Google News in Spain, removed French news links under very-similar demands, etc etc. None of this has had the ripple effect you're describing, and is evidence in favor of the fact that Google is concerned about a broader ripple effect: Why else would they give up all the revenue from referral to these sites instead of paying a portion of the revenue in protection money?
+ " They shut down Google News in Spain, removed French news links under very-similar demands, etc etc. None of this has had the ripple effect you're describing"
The 'ripple effect' is happening right now in Australia.
Second - it doesn't matter that much where the tit-for-tat is - it would be existentially disastrous for Google or FB in either sense.
If a corporation was 'out' of a major, regular western nation for any reason I think the CEO's job would be in serious trouble, even Zuck.
I think the media conglomerates overestimate their importance to Australian customers - for countries like France there's a language barrier, but the vast, vast majority of searches by Australians can be served well without needing any content from the Australian news companies. If linking to your content is expensive, and linking to other content is cheap, then it's perfectly reasonable and generally legal to prefer cheap sources whenever possible.
What makes you think Bing or DDG wants to pay news companies to share their link and drive traffic to these companies? If anything, forcing revenue sharing would cause a small search engine like DDG out of business as it tries to scale up. If you wanted to start up a search engine today, imagine what these extra costs would do?
> If they are smart they react with legislation forcing more 'choice' in search on every level.
In your anti-google crusade, you are missing the point. It makes no sense for search engines to pay news or any company to drive traffic to those companies. If anything, the news companies/etc should be paying search engines if you really think about it. It isn't a Goolge vs Bing/DDG/etc issue. It's a Google/Bing/DDG/etc vs news/media companies issue.
If these news websites don't want to be part of google search, then they can easily exclude themselves via robots.txt.
But there is 0% chance of Google/Facebook not complying.
> I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship
Not even close.
These companies don't push themselves into politics everywhere (yet), but I'm sure that the more governments squeeze them the more they'll get involved.
I used to work at Google. It wasn't often discussed, but when lobbying came up (including in formal contexts) the general attitude was "you can try to ignore Washington but Washington won't ignore you". The perception was very much that Microsoft had gone through the anti-trust trial not so much because of what they'd done but because for years under the Clinton administration they didn't grease the right wheels, in fact they barely had any presence in Washington, which left them politically exposed. The combination of no powerful friends, extremely vague laws and extremely empowered and political regulators was seen as a very toxic one. And that's especially remarkable because Google was (at that time) a company whose executives really didn't like Microsoft, they feared them and treated them as the biggest threat to their business. A lot had come out of the Linux/open source world, academia, UNIX vendors etc and they were really the last people who would give Gates a break, but nonetheless their conclusion was that lobbying was basically a requirement of doing business in the USA.
I'm going back here - eventually that changed and they came to fear Facebook more. But for instance the Google Toolbar was basically an anti-Microsoft play, as was Chrome.
Bill Gates kept politicians at arms length.
If Microsoft had given Washington a little attention, the antitrust lawsuit would never ever have happened.
Google has squelched antitrust investigations in US every single time through lobbying.
Even Apple would been in hot regulatory soup if they didn't buddy up to politicians.
Google is already the largest industry lobbyist stateside
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/09/google-is-techs-top-spender-...
They also risk losing that entire market as well. Let's be honest, nobody loves F or G. If a decent competitor stands up people will gladly switch, even more if they market it as "by Australians for Australians".
SV companies are big and great and all that, but to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.
For example: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/27/16550640/verge-tech-surv...
https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/amidst-techlash-m...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/opinion/tech-backlash.htm...
I read a similar one in the last 6 months tying it to politics. One was that Trump is ironically more tech-friendly than Sanders or Warren (~Nov 2019), despite tech workers generally not supporting Trump. The other oddity was that polls don't really show that there's a techlash, so why are Democratic frontrunners making it a talking point?
Refusing to do business in a country due to regulation isn't acting above the law. These companies have no requirement to conduct business in any given country.
Are Australians really so nationalistic? I thought they would mostly choose whatever tool allows them to do what they want as quick as possible.
> SV companies are big and great and all that, but to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.
Google can follow the law by simply not indexing Australians sites anymore, or they don't have to service Australians. If they are told to share revenue, they can choose to simply shut down the revenue source instead, especially if the cost of revenue sharing exceeds the revenue they are generating. FB/G aren't charities.
When GDRP came online, many web sites in the states found that blocking out EU viewers was cheaper than complying. That isn't going against EU law.
The concept of forcing a foreign business to run a business it doesn't want to is a bit bizarre, and I doubt a court would support the concept, let alone the idea of holding the rest of the company hostage.
Nobody loves the media either. Across every market I’m aware of trust and respect for the media has been falling for over a decade.
I think this is probably just your HN bubble; lots of the criticism of Google here is tinged with irrational bitterness, along with the classic tech culture distrust centralization and the power structures around control of data. I happen to align fairly strongly with the latter view, but neither of these have much purchase in the wider population, where Google remains wildly more popular than most institutions that you think of as benign or popular.
> to think they are above state jurisdictions is delusional.
How do you explain the situations as they played out in Spain (in 2014) and France? It seems a lot more delusional to me to ignore precedent and forecast based on wishful thinking about the power dynamic between these companies and states.
Like how I promote telegram to my friends but I'm "forced" to use WhatsApp for some "niche majority"
I'm not trying to imply they are above jurisdiction, I am quite tired of hearing the "No one likes these guys" narrative though.
There are no ads on Google News.
There is an apparent glut of online news: supply exceeds demand and so the price has fallen.
This is the ironic part of the policy. You're right about the glut, and there was a glut in print 20 years ago, too. Google's definitely hurt businesses, but it's usually though disintermediating them (think Yelp). Google News and search don't really do that for news--snippets and headlines aren't the same as an article. I find it hard to believe that ABC's brand isn't strong enough for them to pull their content from Google and expect people to go to abc.net.au; I just don't think than can sell enough ads to give the content away.
There are very many news aggregators and most do serve ads next to the headlines they index. I assume that people typically link out from news aggregation sites more than into vertically-integrated services.
Perhaps the content producers / information service providers could develop additional revenue streams in order to subsidize a news aggregation public service. Micropayments (BAT, Web Monetization (ILP)), ads, paywalls, and public and private grants are sources of revenue for content producers.
I think it's disingenuous to blame news aggregation sites for the unprofitability of extremely redundant journalism. What happened to journalism? Internet. Excessive ads. Aren't we all writers these days.
Unfortunately they killed the "most cited" and was it "most in-depth" source analysis functions of Google News; and now we're stuck with regurgitated news wires and press releases and all of these eyewitness mobile phone videos with two-bit banal commentary and also punditry. How the world has changed.
So, as far as scientific experiments are concerned, it might be interesting to see what the impact of de-listing from free time sites X, Y, and Z is.
Do the papers in Australia and France now intend to compensate journal ScholarlyArticle authors whose work they summarize and hopefully at least cite the titles and URLs of, or the journals themselves?
This is said pretty regularly in the media in Australia, and honestly no one cares. Even big mining companies like BHP pay little corporate tax on shore, and after years of it being 'exposed', honestly the general public don't seem to care.
Nothing. Google isn't going to forego the entire Australian market or even an economy as large as the Eurozone. They'd just pay their x% tax and suck it up and consider it cost of doing business.
Google is a company, not a nation state and governments ought to stop kowtowing in front of companies. Reminds me of the story about the elephants and the rope
And then after that the companies will get involved in politics in those places so that it never happens again. This in turn increases the chance of regulatory capture and corruption.
Also, don't forget that increasing the cost of doing business will discourage others from trying. Oh, and there's also the US government too. They might just end up siding with Google and Facebook.
Sounds like a great reason to change the distribution of wealth and systematically reduce the power and influence of corporations.
Australia has 25 million people.
That's about half the size of Spain. The GDP of Australia is roughly equal to the GDP of Spain.
The only thing they extracted were their manufacturing operations, GM and Ford still sell vehicles in Australia. They even have the Focus which Ford dropped for the American market! Unless Google and Facebook are going to close their offices but still provide service to Australia, that seems like an entirely different scenario.
https://www.goauto.com.au/news/cadillac/spied-cadillac-ct5-p...
https://www.goauto.com.au/news/holden/gm-has-lsquo-a-future-...
Yet suggest they should give up their participation in military or US border security, two areas that are unlikely to be larger than their business in Australia (or, other times, the EU), and there’s no shortage of people explaining what a stupid trade-off that would be.
I guess the tech crowds’ priorities are clear: drone targeting? So what? This is strictly business!
A bit of taxation to maybe rescue the journalism a democracy depends on? To the barricades! We will gladly give up 100% of earnings to take a stand against the injustice that is...taking 5% of earnings.
I do think that journalism plays a role in a healthy democracy. I assume that at some point, journalism will settle into a new equilibrium and play the role that it's always played, without the messianic complex that journalism as a whole is currently afflicted with (and so dramatically fails to live up to).
In real life that happens through peer networks as much as the news.
There used to be this fantasy that hobbyist bloggers would fill in where professional journalism fails. Here's a map "news deserts" where the latter has happened: https://www.usnewsdeserts.com. There is no map of the former, because bloggers tend to get up too late to attend boring 9am meetings of the residential refuse working group.
You might be under the impression that relevant news will somehow "diffuse" to get to you. That's a common idea among what's called "low-information voters", who tend to never read any news themselves and extrapolate from there.
It's wrong because they miss that the information that gets to them is simply second-hand journalism: It's full of holes and sometimes has (brown) stains. But the parts of it that are accurate almost invariably originate from professional news sources.
>You might be under the impression that relevant news will somehow "diffuse" to get to you.
I am under no such impression. I am challenging the idea that "journalism" is "critical" for a democracy to function. It only seems critical to me insofar as "function" is defined as "people vote in the way journalists expect them to".
The time from about 1740 to 1800 was for newspapers what the 2000s was for the internet.
1787: US Constitution (first democracy)
1789: French Revolution (2nd)
1832 (to 192x): British Reform Act (expanding right to vote)
> I am under no such impression.
Then how does information about, say, laws being passed, or viruses going around, or wars being lost or won get to you? And if it doesn't get to you, how do you decide whom to vote for?
> It only seems critical to me insofar as "function" is defined as "people vote in the way journalists expect them to".
This is just superficial, cynical, contrarian ignorance. Power in the US has been flipping between the parties quite freely, so the press either changes their opinion just as often as the electorate, or their influence is rather limited.
Unless you watch C-SPAN all day and read every law yourself, you'll neither not be informed, or you'll get your information from people who do some of that reading for you (and, if you're lucky, also ask questions, send & litigate FOIA requests, call experts, speak foreign languages etc). Professional journalism is the closest you can get to the source of information unless you do it all yourself. Your 4chan pals or that YouTube bro yelling at his webcam can't and won't do that legwork, either. So what you like about them isn't that they are better informed––they add one step of transmission and can therefore only decrease information content, never increase. What you like is their capability to pre-digest the news, remove anything that might challenge you, and regurgitate the rest in a form that doesn't conflict with your conspiratorial mindset.
>This is just superficial, cynical, contrarian ignorance. Power in the US has been flipping between the parties quite freely, so the press either changes their opinion just as often as the electorate, or their influence is rather limited.
No, I'm merely pointing out that when one party wins professional journalism recoils into a state of utter confusion. Recall the famous quote from a writer for The New Yorker about knowing only one person who voted for Richard Nixon in 1972.
>What you like is their capability to pre-digest the news, remove anything that might challenge you, and regurgitate the rest in a form that doesn't conflict with your conspiratorial mindset.
I actually very much dislike the journalist who tries to tell me what to think about a certain topic or event, though I see that you're attempting to attribute this behavior only to the "4chan youtube bro", which is a little strange since most journalists today - especially, it seems, mainstream ones - have explicit online personae that reflect a certain worldview and work for news orgs who attempt to "explain" the news to you. This isn't reporting - it's advocacy and opinion journalism where they attempt to inoculate "opinion" by claiming they're just "explaining".
I'm pretty sure, for example, that the Times gets criticised for this at least ten times as often as the Republican Party does, even though the latter was not only the origin of the lie the NYT fell for, but the actual group of people making the decision to go to war.
Only Google shutting down Reader has a worse <magnitude of mistake>/<longevity of criticism> ratio.
what australia, france, spain, and anybody else who is trying to enforce revenue transfers from facebook and google to their local media companies is trying to do is called a state-funded media, but that's apparently a bad look. so instead of collecting taxes and then distributing that tax revenue to the companies they want to subsidize, they're trying to pretend this is still some sort of free-market, independently funded media. a newspaper that's staying afloat because of government-mandated payments from big tech companies isn't any more independent than one being funded directly by the state.
Oftentimes governments seek to redress one party whose work is being taken advantage of by another party whether that's from a principle of fairness, a desire to maintain the health of both parties, more mercenary reasons, etc. Doing this outside of the narrow regime of taxes and subsidies is not only not uncommon. It's entirely normal.
Also, it's worth mentioning that the most trusted media organisation in Australia is state funded so it can't be that much of a bad look.
IMO decisions like that require power to be concentrated in limited hands.
We'll get anti-google/facebook/tech propaganda campaign like in the past. Remember the months/years of neverending anti-google "news"? Remember the months/years of neverending anti-facebook "news"? Followed by congressional hearings/etc. Notice how it all seemed to have stopped when google/youtube/facebook/etc decided to give state-backed "news" companies preferential treatment on their platforms?
> I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship
In purely business/financial terms, sure. But not in the media/political terms. You think these tech companies have more power than state backed news 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?
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.
Honestly it might be nice for information to move a little slower.
"We regret that due to the Spanish law, Spanish publishers aren't featured in Google News and Google News is closed in Spain."
https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9609...
Facebook is the antiquated ugly stepchild of social media. What's their engagement like for people <18?
IMO, news media is basically a public good, in the sense that it's non-rival and basically non-excludable. Unfortunately, it's also a relatively low personal value public good. What I mean is that the typical person cannot make decisions that benefit themselves based on the news, and the news provides little entertainment value compared to e.g. video games or television. That is not to say it has no value, just that the value it produces is low compared to what it costs to make.
In the past, news media was more valuable, because there was less other media around. Now there are so many media channels (videogames, cable, broadcast, music, social, YouTube, etc.) that even if they were all equally entertaining to the news, news' share of the whole pie would be smaller. But they're not equally entertaining, they're more entertaining. So news loses out.
Despite its low entertainment value, on a social level, there is definitely some value to having an informed public. So maybe the government should subsidize the creation of informative content, as it does with the BBC in the UK. And maybe funding for this should be partially derived from taxes on internet companies. But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the government would basically mandate a transfer of wealth from internet companies directly to the wallets of news media owners.
I don't know what is the "ethical" business solution to this problem but I know that Google, at least, is favoring clickbaits and text spinning over quality. If you write a good blog with a single article per week it will be in the tail of searchers below text spinning content that has a higher frequency of updates.
Do you mean your grandma and grandpa can easily identify clickbaits?
The problem is fundamentally systemic. It is a price/reward ratio dependent upon users and the satisfaction of the advertising clients.
I frequent the web sites of a two publications that block both crawlers and social media referrers, and they're quite civilized.
Maybe if they news organizations weren't addicted to the tech companies, their sites wouldn't look like a meth addict's grin.
I'd guess the causal arrow flows in the other direction. Publications that are explicitly targeting a smaller, more specific market can afford to avoid courting the kind of person who get their news from Facebook. But pubs that are going for a broader audience can't ignore this channel.
I know someone's going to respond "maybe they shouldn't be targeting that audience then" but....why? If CNN stops pandering to the average dimbulb and said dimbulb's Facebook feed becomes even more dominated by Macedonian (actual) fake news sites, is that _better_, for either the reader or for society? The irreducible reality is that most people like the kind of crap that mainstream news sites put out, and those people need to get their news from somewhere. (By the way, this doesn't exclude mainstream "prestige" publications like the NYT that pretend they're going for high-minded audiences; their drivel just has one layer extra of tidying up than CNN's does).
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.
(IMO: both.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once upon a time if you wanted to advertise you had to go to somebody with a centralized distribution operation. They had to have a printing press or a radio station. Then they would charge you a large pile of money and put your ad in front of thousands of people. This revenue was used to pay for news reporting.
Today there are cat videos with millions of views. Advertisers who want to reach people in a particular demographic don't have to pay a premium to advertise in a publication whose readership skews towards that demographic, they can just advertise to the subset of the cat video viewers who happen to be in that demographic. There are more than enough cat videos and hot girls eating bananas on the internet to drive the cost of putting your ad in front of a person way down from where it was when you had to pay a newspaper or a TV station to do it.
Meanwhile Google makes a lot of money because the cat owner doesn't have an ad network, but if they put Google ads on their cat video channel they can make $72/month, and then Google gets a cut, times a billion people.
The news media assume that because they used to make a lot of money and now Google makes a lot of money, the money Google makes is mostly attributable to the work they do, but it isn't. It's mostly attributable to all the people posting videos of their cats and home improvement projects and college track meets and movie parodies and whatever else.
Their problem is that the value of an ad impression has fallen dramatically because there is so much more competition. But that wasn't caused by Google and they can't solve it. Even if you took all the money Google makes from ads related to news reporting and gave it to the companies doing news reporting, it wouldn't be as much as they used to make when they had a de facto monopoly on advertising.
And if you really want more of the money to go to the content creators, the best thing you could do is break up the ad networks (and prohibit them from ever buying each other again), so they would have more competition and move more of the margins to creators. But it still wouldn't be as much as they used to get.
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.
https://youtu.be/asQ8KFrZY84?t=1067
This ruling makes more sense, it's like attaching a VAT on google's pipeline.
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.
Publishers will not get a cent, nor should they (they don't block Google by choice).
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".