Facebook Threatens To Cut Off Australians From Sharing News (bloomberg.com) 52
Facebook plans to block people and publishers in Australia from sharing news, a move that pushes back against a proposed law forcing the company to pay media firms for their articles. From a report: The threat escalates an antitrust battle between Facebook and the Australian government, which wants the social-media giant and Alphabet's Google to compensate publishers for the value they provide to their platforms. The legislation still needs to be approved by Australia's parliament. Under the proposal, an arbitration panel would decide how much the technology companies must pay publishers if the two sides can't agree. Facebook said in a blog posting Monday that the proposal is unfair and would allow publishers to charge any price they want. If the legislation becomes law, the company says it will take the unprecedented step of preventing Australians from sharing news on Facebook and Instagram.
and when fox news pulls out? (Score:2)
and when fox news pulls out?
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Stopping news forwarding sounds good (Score:5, Insightful)
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yeah all social media should disallow all sharing of news and political speech, that would just solve a host of problems including all that pesky foreign interference
seems reasonable (Score:3)
If there is a fee to link or use articles, then avoid the fee by not sharing the articles. Why would facebook be under any obligation to allow sharing when nobody is going to pay for it?
As an alternative, have some microtransaction on the facebook user that marks up what the publisher required as payment, say by 20%. I wonder if anyone would actually share but that's not anti-competive.
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If there are ads on the page where news stories are displayed, it seems reasonable to me that some of the revenue those ads make should be shared with publishers. Anybody know what Facebook's revenue split is like?
Fake news is free. Journalism is expensive. In the long run I think Facebook doing more to support journalism would be good for Facebook and good for our society. Behaving like a leech just isn't sustainable or healthy.
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it seems reasonable to me that some of the revenue those ads make should be shared with publishers
A lot of things can be reasonable if there is a contract and both parties have considerations in said contract. Without prior agreement, well nothing is really reasonable other than walking away.
Fake news is free. Journalism is expensive.
Cheaper. Gets more views. And serves political and ideological ends. We used to call it propaganda, but it's the same noxious shit, and people still fall for it.
Behaving like a leech just isn't sustainable or healthy.
If fair use doesn't apply in sharing snippets and links to an article. Then some copyright clearing house is necessary for this to work. The music rights mo
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If you are distributing someone else's content with your advertising, well, that is going to be reasonably considered as something quite naughty. The revenue from those advertisers should go to the content, unless you should the advertisings from the content in lieu of your own advertisements or pay for the content.
That they will cut off news content from Australia, meh. Nobody cares. That they think as Americans corporations they can force stuff on government of Australians, well, that is going to go down
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Actually, if I heard correctly, they are required to include those articles in order not to run afoul of anti-trust laws.
This creates a really weird situation: they are required to include the articles, and they are required to pay for them?!
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That's the weirdest bit. Why just their business, why doesn't every website in the world have to show Aussie news articles now? (I know why, but pointing out how this seems weird)
I think once there is a fee the arrangement starts to smell more like a contract between equal parties. If I am required to include the articles, then paying for them gets me what? Nothing new, No considerations, therefor it's not a contract (I defeated my own argument, oops). So now does that mean I don't have to pay? Well the spe
Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
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You are sleeping on the job.
They are talking about Facebook. People only go there if they want junk news.
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Here too please! (Score:1)
It won't even stop news sharing (Score:4, Insightful)
Facebook knows their users, and they know damn well that people will just share around screenshots of news articles, of which precisely zero will link back to the original news site.
Charge the poster? (Score:2)
Me: Tries to post news link.
Facebook: We see you are in Australia. The website requires a fee of $0.10 to post this on Facebook. Can we charge this to your credit card?
Me: No
Facebook: Link not posted.
Why would you pay for the shit called journalism (Score:2)
Good on Facebook!
Why would you pay for the horse shit journalism we have to put up with in Australia?
Hope Google does the same.
On the plus side, as others have said, hopefully less people use Facebook.
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Indeed, it sounds like a win-win to me. Hopefully this will go global. Facebook algorithms don't care about level of truth, they are more interested in sensationalist crap to keep people sharing and using the site.
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Good on Facebook!
Why would you pay for the horse shit journalism we have to put up with in Australia?
Hope Google does the same.
On the plus side, as others have said, hopefully less people use Facebook.
Would be interesting if this meant only ABC news ended on Facebook.
*Australians collectively shrug* (Score:3)
So effing what? Go ahead. Literally no one cares, in- or outside of Australia.
I hope Australia stands firm (Score:2)
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But is everyone a net-negative to society? Australia's proposed new law isn't going to be specific to Facebook, is it? It looks like anyone who links to news articles would have to pay. Facebook and Google merely have the most to lose, since they're the biggest sites, but it appears the mechanism is intended to disincentivize all websites linking to one another.
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Will this apply to political 'candidates', political 'parties', PACs, and elected and appointed government positions? Not sure why something that claims to be political should be exempted and treated differently.
What specifically counts as 'sharing news'? Just posting the URL would seem to be still allowed.
Sounds good (Score:2)
Support your local reporters in a more direct way. It's important.
Please do that everywhere, Facebook! (Score:2)
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China hides it by preventing you from even going to the news website. Facebook just plans on doing it for their walled garden platform. Facebook can't stop anyone from going to another website to get news. China activity prevents people from going to websites it doesn't agree with.
See the difference?
Been there (Score:3)
Google has had similar cases, lost and taken similar action. (I forget where, France, Spain, Portugal?).
The problem was that the newspapers failed to realize that Google sends substantial traffic their way. So when the article snippets were gone, the users were too, and so the ad revenue. They all came back crying that "no, that's not what we meant". Yet, it's a bit hard to feel pity by then.
Be careful with what you wish for - you might just get it.
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If they do that in Australia the Federal Government will steal 10% of the gross revenue, if they discriminate against Australian media companies the Government will steal 10% of their gross revenue. Which is why they will exit news entirely, instead of just local news, as they did in France and Spain. People will still be able to read news, they just won't have articles sorted by topic and relevance.
The internet allows for targeted advertising which has benefited businesses and consumers. However, it relie
The media companies' reactions are telling (Score:2)
The reaction of the media companies is telling here. They say Facebook and Google are "free-riding" on their content. If so, then they should be happy when Facebook and Google remove those links and the ability for users to post those links because it ends the "free-riding". The fact that the immediate response is instead to accuse Facebook and Google of unfair tactics and of threatening the media companies tells us that far from being "free-riding" those links are in fact really valuable to those media com
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The mom-and-pop sites should take advantage of the legislation to one-up the big boys. Just offer an agreement to Facebook and Google that the royalty for links to their site will be $0.000001 per distinct URL path per year with the royalty being waived if the total for the year comes to less than $1000. Translation: Facebook/Google don't have to pay a penny for fewer than 1,000,000,000 distinct URLs (minus query strings) from the site posted during any given year. The site likely doesn't carry a billion st
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The Australian government realised something like this might happen... which is why they added a provision that if Facebook and Google carry any news sites there at all, they have to carry the big Australian ones covered by this law and have to pay them money. It really is an astoundingly blatant shakedown aimed at transferring money to big media corporations that helped the current government get elected (or at least one big media corporation).
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Exactly. The links are mutually beneficial for all companies involved, and the news sites make their profits from ads and subscriptions on their own sites. Why they feel they should get a cut of the other guys' business simply because they are partnered in the form of links makes no sense when it's obvious who is helping who more. If FB and Google weren't rolling in so much cash to begin with, they'd probably even be able to negotiate a cut of the news site's profits for themselves.
I don't use facebook (Score:2)
and don't see why other people do either, but if Facebook decides to stop letting people link to news sites, I don't see the issue. It's their platform and if the Aussy government says you must pay to link to news websites, then they are just exercising their right by not posting links to news sites.
What's the problem here?
It will be fun to watch the news sites cry when their traffic goes down and they get even less revenue, but newspapers hate the Internet anyway. Pretty sure it was Spain that tried this a
Corrupt business model revealed (Score:3)
Both organisations are butthurt because they're now being told to pay for a natural resource that they've been taking for granted.
For me, the bigger question is whether pure aggregation sites (eg like
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Google has twice tried to build social media sites around user content and failed. So they don't do that. They are just providing a targeted advertising service which has revolutionised advertising, plus a search engine to drive traffic to websites.
Facebook do what you are saying, but why should News Corp and Nine get paid for viewing photos of their friends lunches? I the media don't want people reading their articles for free, all they have to is paywall them, as English papers and News Corp do.
Slashdot
I never thought I would actually support Facebook (Score:2)
I never thought I would actually support Facebook but as much as I hate them (and don't have an account) I hate Rupert Murdoch (who stands to gain the most from these changes here in Australia) even more.
This is all about Rupert hoodwinking his mates in the government to bring in measures designed to make sure his news empire is front and centre when people see news on sites like Google and Facebook and YouTube and etc rather than, say, international media organizations.
News is paywalled here (Score:2)
In Australia, the vast majority of commercial news is paywalled. I cannot read a Murdoch article, it simply tells me to pay. If I click a shared link, I am taken to a page that asks for my credit card. For what used to be known as the Fairfax news, currently owned by Channel Nine, I get five free articles a month. Then they want payment.
This is all most odd. Someone sharing a link on Facebook or Google to these publications is essentially sharing an advertisement. This is free for the news organisatio
This is an economic problem (Score:2)
The problem is that, for the most part, people have historically not directly paid as much for news as it costs to produce it. What happened was that the advertising industry found a source of eyeballs, and paid to have their promoted content featured beside the actual content that people wanted.
This is why you can literally have free newspapers, i.e. newspapers that you don't don't pay a penny for.
However, this was and still is largely a marriage of convenience. It turns out that in 2020 there are other so