Facebook to let Aussies post links to news sites again

boing
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From the document you linked:

1.95   A digital platform service can make available covered news
content in a number of ways, and the Code does not exhaustively detail all
of these. However, the following are listed in the Code as ways a service
makes content available:

  • the service allows for covered news content to be reproduced,
    or otherwise placed on the digital platform service, in whole
    or in part (including in the form of snippets); or
  • the service allows for links to covered news content to be
    placed on the service.

That second bullet does sound a bit like a link tax.

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You’re right-- and we see something similar here on Boing Boing and Twitter, Facebook, etc. When someone posts a link – instead of just a link, there appears an image from the site, the headline, and often the whole first few sentences. All of the sites that do that are monetizing that content to some extent when they show ads on the same page as the link blurb.

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It is very specifically targeted at companies like Facebook and Google

And, if it is successfully, there’s no doubt Murdoch will agitate for Australia to extend it to other sites. Already big media companies in other countries are looking at how they can convince THEIR governments to do the same.

In Google’s case, there’s a strong case to be made here for scraping and rehosting other people’s content. That’s not the case for Facebook. Facebook hosted what the news agencies themselves posted, or their users posted links to. At best, those are small excerpts and a picture, with a link back to the article. They didn’t scrape the news site and then republish a story.

But the law, as written, taxed links. Not just a story scraped and reposted, but a simple link to that story. That’s absolutely wrong and stupid and dumb.

It is not. There was no intention to end Facebook or Google’s monopolies. Instead, the law was designed to leverage those monopolies for the benefit of one news agency: Murdoch. It would REINFORCE the power of Facebook and Google, boost the power of Murdoch, and small news agencies would be shut out completely because they don’t have the ability to negotiate with the bigger companies. Their links would simply be banned.

We all are. This is not the solution you think it is.

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Others have pointed out most of what I wanted to say so I’ll leave that bit, but c’mon man:

You’re putting words in our mouths then railing against those. No one is saying the power Google and Facebook have is a good thing. We’re saying the way this is being done is inconsistent with a free and open Internet. This law will do nothing to reign in the big platforms, unless you count them leaving the country as solving the problem. And maybe that’s good enough for you, but I’d rather the issue be dealt with properly.

If you’re looking for an anti-monopoly law, maybe start with that rather than merely transferring money from one megacorp to another.

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I’ve been paying attention to this issue for a bit. My opinion is that nations such as Australia whose antitrust and anti-monopoly powers only extend so far, need to be able to use outside-the-box methods of curbing the types of market distortions that occur when American-But-Now-Global-And-Abusing-Tax-Loopholes corporations do their thing. I’m in favor of laws that target Big Tech Corps like Google and Facebook in this way, and am frustrated with how these laws are being reduced to a “link tax” that supposedly harms the “free and open Internet”.

Let me link something real quick, off-topic, to show an example:

This kind of rich embed, which @killick brought up in their comment, is something that provides content in a way that one may not want to, or feel the need to, actually go to the source page in question. I don’t use Facebook, but I assume that Facebook posts use similar tech.

So, for example: Someone on a Facebook Group posts a link to a news story. It has a thumbnail, the title, and an extra blurb. The site owners have control over what’s in that blurb, I believe. Okay, so, a small percentage of people actually go to the page of the news story in question. Others simply use the rich embed as the whole story and stay on Facebook, scrolling down to have it out with others in the comments, which creates more engagement on Facebook, more content for Facebook to serve its ads against, and more data for advertisers.

With regards to Google: Something that I’ve been all-too-guilty of in recent times is going to Google to search for an article with a headline and blurb that looks to be in support of my argument. When I go to the “News” section of Google when I search something, this is an example of what I see. I copy and paste the URL of the article to wherever I need to put it. It’s been slow-going, but I’m trying to get into the habit of actually Reading The Fine Article.

And as @eccentriccog pointed out, Google has a “People Also Ask” section on the main search results page which takes information, including information from news articles, and plops it right there so that people don’t even go to those sites. The “People Also Ask” section also seems to continually populate with as many new questions as possible when you click to open them. This is a problem.

The issue at hand is like… The news sites don’t see any money if the person looking for news and not necessarily to share it just gets what they need from the blurb and the picture. If Google’s “People Also Ask” section gives them what they need from the news sites. If the person decides to share it and just copy + pastes the link to where they want to use it without clicking through and reading the article. If the people on the site the person shared it to look at the embedded blurb and picture, and don’t bother to click through to the actual article. If the person includes screenshots of paragraphs of the linked article to where going to that link wouldn’t give that much more relevant information. If the person has an ad blocker that stops the ads on the site from appearing and giving the news sites revenue. If the person sees that the site is paywalled and then they go to a webpage archiving site to just archive the entirety of the article so that they can read it there and can share the archive URL with everyone else.

I could go on, but my point is this: A lot of journalism is being consumed or “consumed” via headlines and blurbs for free. Sites such as Facebook and Google, who have an effective duopoly in advertising on the Internet, are profiting off of the work of these journalists and news sites for free. This isn’t something that these news sites can simply innovate harder to fix, especially as the expectation that news should be as free and convenient as possible to obtain has become heavily ingrained in the way that people use the Internet over the last decade/decade and a half.

Australia’s course of action to try and level the playing field was to craft this legislation which targets the major players such as Google and Facebook. This legislation would provide revenue not just to the news orgs that Murdoch controls (the way that all the focus has been on Murdoch’s news orgs as if they would truly be the only beneficiaries of the law has been disconcerting, IMO), but also to other news orgs, such as The Guardian’s Australian branch to name just one. These other news orgs will receive funds they can use to stay afloat and compete with Murdoch’s news orgs which are major players in the Australian news landscape.

I firmly believe that this legislation, given what it does and the Big Tech corps that it targets, is not a “threat to the free and open Internet” that others have made it out to be. Facebook and Google on their own have done much more harm to the open Internet over the years than this law ever will.

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