i still can’t believe facebook and alphabet folded when it came to news in australia. they should have stayed the course. and predictably they opened up a can of worms: <a href="https://www.euronews.com/2022/03/03/neighbouring-rights-google-agrees-new-deal-to-pay-french-publishers-for-news-content" rel="nofollow">https://www.euronews.com/2022/03/03/neighbouring-rights-goog...</a><p>the best way forward is to go back and ban news orgs from google, facebook, etc in countries where governments are captured by these media conglomerates. if the laws forbid this course of action then these companies should close down their local offices. google/fb can afford to make less money, and in this case they should.
> A similar Australian law, which took effect in March 2021 after talks with the big tech firms led to a brief shutdown of Facebook news feeds in the country, has largely worked, a government report said.
They are bluffing. Despite fake metrics to the contrary, news drives vast amount of secondary engagement on their platform and removing the news tab would not remove the regulatory effect (news still happen in feed)<p>Worse for them it would harm republicans who rely on the radicalization engine and will respond to it in a hostile way. they are bluffing.
Google and Facebook have incrementally destryed the fourth estate for decades so that's quite the flex claiming newspapers actually are grateful for Meta's "beneficence."