Tim is so right. In addition, for friends and family a post on FB about my cat is just as news worthy as a NYT article. It is not for governments to decide what is news or not.<p>Keep the web free. Avoid imposing rules and taxes.<p>Ultimately a news organization is an internet citizen like you or me. They should not have different privileges.
As non-australian this debate sounds very incomprehensible to me.<p>I understand that old media is complaining that tech is making money with their content while the authors get nothing.<p>To me that is the equivalent of complaining that someone else is using your house because you left the door open.<p>So what is the problem with locks, pay-walls, creating accounts or blocking links?<p>Could it possible be the case that the old media actually wants the burglars inside?
Just imagine if you create any platform where people link some post, then you need to pay to the author some royalties.<p>Because someone else engaged in some content.
Unbelievable.
Easily the worst part of this for me is that Australia has put me in the position of supporting Facebook/Google - which I almost never would do otherwise. The control over what if anything Facebook/Google can parse automatically/display as a preview is defined by open standards that are well documented putting it wholly in the control of the media organizations. Additionally content being posted to Facebook by users comes from the media companies own customers… Ben Thompson and others have documented this well:<p>If you want to tax the social media companies and redirect that revenue to journalism - write that law and make it happen (assuming your constitution allows for it). But trying to frame this as redressing an imbalance in power is ridiculous, and the binding arbitration process defined is ludicrous as well.
Canada is also trying to push for the same law.
<a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/internet-link-fee-canada_ca_5fb06552c5b6d05e86e785f7" rel="nofollow">https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/internet-link-fee-canada...</a><p>This is an attempt to keep news orgs relevant despite their continuing drop in readership.<p>Canada has already been paying news orgs $600M a year in addition to the $1.3B or so that they pay the CBC to remain afloat.
Tim's perspective here is disappointingly narrow. The line he's drawing in the sand has already been crossed in all sorts of ways in many different jurisdictions and commercial/legal contexts.<p>This is a complex (and tiring) debate where all of the key players (largely News Corp and the Australian Commonwealth Government on one side and Facebook and Google on the other) have shown themselves to be untrustworthy, user-hostile and utterly flippant with regard to the public good provided by news. They have all been dishonest to the public through this process and the best outcome would be one where all the major parties to this issue lose out.<p>There's a strong argument to be made that Google and Facebook should be made to cough something up. They've essentially done an attention economy land grab and the state exists to regulate such disruptive practices in order to preserve certain public goods.<p>But of course the actual facts of this law are that it's a blatant opportunistic maneuver to get wads of cash out of one set of corrupt peoples' pockets into those of another group who happen to be mates with the people who hold legislative power.
Questions:<p>1. If we send the links to Australian news in instant messengers, is it required for the platform to pay the publisher?<p>2. If 1 is yes, who would pay them if we use email?
Could Facebook simply say "We will only allow links from sites that do not charge"? If someone tries to post a new article from News Corp, Facebook displays a message suggesting alternative links from "free" news sources.<p>The differentiation from free or paid could be a variable in the HTML code of the news source. If you want to allow links, specify cost=free.
It's a fact that Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and others are free-loading by extracting information from content creators and posting it on their platform.<p>However, if just linking to content could be considered as somehow using the content - it would be a blatant power grab by publishers facilitated by the government.<p>How would wikipedia function if linking to content cost them money?
If Facebook complied with this law, wouldn't they be incentivized to suppress viral sharing of news articles since the more viral a news story being shared is, the more they have to pay out? And would that mean news companies would be doing everything they can to "go viral" since it means a big payday? These incentives are all misaligned.
We now know who this guy is a mouth-puppet for.<p>This past election cycle has shown Big Tech's true colors. They censor information to the world, tweak their algorithms to misrepresent situations, hide trending hashtags, etc based on California's preferred politics. They literally just got finished pooling their power to silence an entire political party (i.e. Parlor), and people still for some reason think they <i>deserve</i> the right to be gatekeepers of all information.<p>I don't say this because I feel bad for big media, I say it because big media content is certainly not made <i>better</i> by being pre-filtered through facebook's algorithms (or whatever big tech company). The current state of big media content is a fucking dumpster fire...at least more money to them might result in improved quality.
Web != Internet. The internet is fine. You can tell because you can can route around any of these problems. This attack is at a completely different level of the stack.
While I disagree with the legislation I think it’s good that governments are experimenting and learning. Regulating tech is a hard problem and there will be mistakes. If this turns out to be a big one I imagine it will be rolled back but lessons learned along the way will stay in our memory.
This is the same person who created HTTP 402 Payment Required, in the HTTP 1.1 RFC in 1999, right?<p><a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-10.4.3" rel="nofollow">https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-10.4.3</a>
TBL sold out a while ago, with DRM/EME only a recent example. Also not sure anything he says on this matter can be unbiased when both Facebook and Google pay membership fees to the W3C.