Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

I haven't followed this debate too closely but this seems pretty disingenuous.

>The ACCC presumes that Facebook benefits most in its relationship with publishers, when in fact the reverse is true. News represents a fraction of what people see in their News Feed and is not a significant source of revenue for us

News may not directly contribute much ad revenue but it surely is a huge driver of engagement on the website, which in turn indirectly keeps people engaged with the facebook ecosystem at large. Political commentary involving news pieces certainly seems to be a feature on Facebook's most popular pages.

Also I haven't figured out yet what part of the law actually would imply that Facebook needs to blackout news wholesale. As I read it the law merely requires that Facebook negotiate with each publisher.

View on HN

> Also I haven't figured out yet what part of the law actually would imply that Facebook needs to blackout news wholesale. As I read it the law merely requires that Facebook negotiate with each publisher.

A negotiation is something that ends up with mutually agreeable terms, or no deal.

That's not the case here. The news companies do not need to negotiate in good faith, they are allowed to force the tech companies into binding arbitration. The arbitration will of course be done by people in the pockets of the news companies. It's legally mandated that what is considered is the cost of producing news and the benefit that the tech companies get from news. The inverse of the benefit for the news companies and the costs for the tech companies are not to be considered.

Oh, and that no deal option you'd usually have? Not in this "negotation". If the tech companies serve any news from any source, including non-Australian sources, they're at the mercy of any qualifying news org that wants to fleece them in this kangaroo arbitration.

It's funny this is happening to Google and Facebook, two companies who have forced their take-it-or-leave-it "negotiations" on over a billion users each. They're monopolies, and the amount of power and leverage they have and exploit is insane. Their EULAs are literally a non-negotiable "agree if you want to exist on the Internet".

Do not try to make us feel bad for these companies that someone is also going to do it to them too.

Have Facebook or Google compelled you to use their services? If not, then there is no parallel. It is not about "feeling bad" for companies or not. It's about whether the policy is sound.

I have certainly been compelled to use both, Facebook for vital student groups during my time in university (it's also in many developing countries the only digital place to run a business), and Google for similar reasons, including a work account. There's DDG now for search I suppose but Google used to be the only player in town.

Technically if I had to avoid Google I couldn't use Uber because it depends on Google maps, I couldn't use websites using Google cloud, etc..

In terms of function they certainly compel people to use them because they've been so integrated into infrastructure. You cannot avoid them.

Facebook for vital student groups during my time in university

I.e. your colleagues compelled you to use Facebook.

(it's also in many developing countries the only digital place to run a business),

I doubt very much there is any such country, but even if so, it's not a compulsion.

and Google for similar reasons, including a work account

Your workplace compelled you to use Google.

There's DDG now for search I suppose

Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu . . .

but Google used to be the only player in town.

There was never any such time.

Technically if I had to avoid Google I couldn't use Uber because it depends on Google maps

It is still your choice to use Uber or not. You could use Lyft, hail a cab, drive yourself, walk, ride a bike . . .

Google Cloud

I don't see this as you using Google, but rather you using someone who uses Google. This just isn't something you have any reasonable expectation of control over. There is nothing wrong with Google providing a service that some businesses choose to use, who you happen to also do business with.

It says they must negotiate, and crucially, that if they can't come to an agreement they must enter binding arbitration. Currently publishers can go to Facebook and say, "Pay us for linking to our pages." And Facebook can say, "No, we don't derive benefit from links to your pages; we're not paying you for them." Under this law, the publisher could then force FB into binding arbitration where, presumably, their $0 offer wouldn't be accepted.

I suppose in theory FB could only block those news outlets that attempted to negotiate, but somehow I expect the government would take a dim view of that.

The draft law explicitly prevents Facebook from blocking only news outlets that attempted to negotiate [1]:

> The draft code would prohibit digital platforms discriminating against the news content of news media businesses on the basis of their participation in the code.

This is crucial. A negotiation that you cannot genuinely back out from is not a negotiation at all, it is effectively extortion. If Facebook cannot back out of a negotiation with an individual news outlet, I think it will choose to back out of news altogether. If Facebook is being honest that news is not much of a commercial interest for them, this is the rational choice.

[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/DPB%20-%20Draft%20news%...

Ah, there you go; thanks for pointing that out.

Facebook can remove news and it will minimally effect engagement. I wonder what happens to the publishers when they lose 2.3BN clicks.

Which would indirectly prove the point of the legislation right? That Facebook has immense market power in the social media / ad space with no competitor in sight, which would mean expanding bargaining power for news orgs is legitimate.

Because switching to a competitor would actually be the answer to your question in a functioning market.

> Because switching to a competitor would actually be the answer to your question in a functioning market.

What do you mean by "switching to a competitor"?

Me posting an article on Facebook does not create a business relationship between Facebook and CNN.

No, because the argument being made is that facebook is paying the news orgs less than they're owed. But the reality is that facebook is providing a free service to the news sites.

You normally have to pay someone for advertising. Facebook (and Google) give it away for free.

This seems to miss the point because normally platforms also have to pay for content. Facebook is a platform that hosts user/business produced content. No content, no reason to go to facebook. Likewise, Facebook brings attention to content owners. All of this is 'free' nominally.

That's not the question, the question is who has more market power and squeezes who.

Are you saying that Google should pay me to include my website in it's search results?

If they're stripping your information to hand out to users via their scraping mechanics, absolutely. That's what news companies, and plenty of other sites, have been subject to for years: "Google would like to scrape your content and serve it on their own site. Agree or delist yourself from search."

https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...

Google's monopoly position gives them complete negotiating power, because you can't survive on the Internet without them. What Australia is doing here seems extreme, but only because you aren't accounting for how extreme Google and Facebook's existing negotiating power is. If you don't understand how abusive Google and Facebook are, you'll think this deal is unfair. It's not.

Right but we're talking about news, where that isn't the case. I open Google news and I see a list of headlines. I click one one and go to the full article.

I mean, if you're arguing that news provides zero value beyond a headline, that's certainly an indictment, but not of Google and facebook.

Extending this, any aggregator would need to pay to link to things. Hackernews included. It's the link-tax all over again.

Realistically? What percentage of news do you read the in-depth article, versus the headline, picture, and two-sentence-blurb that tells you the main point? And the front page of a news site, say, cnn.com, is it monetized with ads? (It is. Even with all my blockers I see a LendingTree ad right now.)

Is Google News ripping off the monetizeable property of every news site's homepage for zero cost? Yes. Sure, it may not present the full text of every article, but you've stolen the front page of every newspaper, at minimum.

It is the link-tax "all over again"... because it's still what needs to happen. (It's not really a link tax, but branding from lobbyists paid by Google's public policy team were very successful branding it as such. It's a scraper site tax.) The problem is Google is so immense, and so powerful, it is able to obliterate any one nation's attempts to do this.

We actually need a unified front of governments stating that Google and Facebook need to pay for the content they scrape, or go out of business. And it probably won't be successful until a large enough contingent of governments can do it at once. (This is why the EU as a whole has generally been successful whereas attempts at regulation from France or Spain independently have failed.)

> Realistically? What percentage of news do you read the in-depth article, versus the headline, picture, and two-sentence-blurb that tells you the main point? And the front page of a news site, say, cnn.com, is it monetized with ads? (It is. Even with all my blockers I see a LendingTree ad right now.)

For me the answer is, either I get a headline that I don't care about, or I read at least some of the article.

> (It's not really a link tax, but branding from lobbyists paid by Google's public policy team were very successful branding it as such. It's a scraper site tax.)

It's absolutely a link tax and not a scraping tax. A scraping tax would apply to anyone scraping the site. But the link tax proposals don't apply to people scraping the site, they only apply to sites linking. Why? Because if I go and scrape CNN.com, they just block me. But if Google does it, they don't want to block the scraping, because the net value of the scraping is nonzero, but they want to be paid anyway.

You can't have it both ways. "Pay me for this." "No." "I'll make you pay me!" "Ok then I'll stop." "No don't stop that's even worse. Pay me and keep doing the thing!" That's the conversation happening, and it makes zero sense.

And "scraping" doesn't even apply at all to Facebook's case, where if I post a link to CNN on facebook, now Facebook owes CNN money. WHAT?!? It's literally a cost on links. It's antithetical to the internet. But you're right, it's not a link tax. It's more akin to link-licensing. Which should sound even scarier.

> You can't have it both ways. "Pay me for this." "No." "I'll make you pay me!" "Ok then I'll stop." "No don't stop that's even worse. Pay me and keep doing the thing!" That's the conversation happening, and it makes zero sense.

But that is the level of craziness we are under in the Google regime: Accept Google's terms or go out of business. That's the whole problem. Google has infinite negotiating power. The counter to that does indeed sound insane, because where we already are is insane.

Yes, Australia is giving news companies a loaded gun, but it's because Google already has a boot to their neck, and they're barely still conscious. Where we are right now is really, really bad. Tech companies are bleeding journalism dry.

And frankly, Google and Facebook can afford this. Tech companies have so much spare cash they don't know what to do with it, while everyone else is struggling to survive. Expect laws to feel one-sided against you for a long time. Let's call it a wealth redistribution. Imagine how much quality investigative journalism could've been funded with just the money Google spent developing messaging apps.

You can dislike google and facebook, and feel that they need to be regulated, and still not support objectively bad laws.

> Imagine how much quality investigative journalism could've been funded with just the money Google spent developing messaging apps.

If you want to tax big tech companies because you feel the end result of doing so is good, then do that. Tax them. Don't create some hairbrained scheme to allow a media conglomerate to extort them. Especially when it won't actually help investigative journalism. The law is crafted to support an entrenched tabloid, not local and investigative journalism, which is what's suffering the most. This law funnels money from tech companies to rupert murdoch. That's not a win. The fox news guy doesn't need a bailout, he's doing okay on his own.

> Accept Google's terms or go out of business.

What are these "terms"? Aa far as I can tell they're "get traffic for free". What am I missing? Your counter seems to be that Google posts the headline so that, you know, you can pick what to click, and that somehow having the headline means that I won't click on the link. I don't get it.

> What are these "terms"?

Let me highlight some history from the article above:

> In 2014, Warner got an email from Google asking if he would be interested in giving the company access to his data in order to scrape it for Knowledge Graph, for free.

> At the end of it, we just said ‘look, we’re not comfortable with this.’”

> “But then they went ahead and took the data anyway.”

The sole way to opt out that Google offered was to delist the site from Google Search, which is effectively deleting your site from the Internet.

So the terms of your employer are basically "let Google do what it wants or else". And that's what they've been doing to news companies for years. There's nothing "objectively bad" about forcing a bad actor to finally pay up for it's conduct. Allowing Google or Facebook to decline to participate would be simply allowing the robbers to leave with all of the loot.

To better explain: Google and Facebook are monopolies. One common monopoly practice is called predatory pricing: Where you price so low, you are losing money, temporarily, in order to kill competing businesses. For Google and Facebook, refusing to negotiate here, removing service from a given country, is similar: They're aware if they decline to participate, a given country's news organizations will suffer, and eventually relent.

Google and Facebook, as global monopolies, are large enough and profitable enough that this doesn't hurt them much, so they have no reason to negotiate fairly and honestly. Hence why Google and Facebook argue the price they should pay is $0: They currently don't bear a significant enough loss from simply refusing to play. They must be forced to participate so that honest negotiation can happen. Realistically, the long term answer is to break these companies up, but in the interim, we need to use regulation to force them to pay up in areas where they would have to if they weren't monopolies.

Again: I'm talking about news. You keep bringing up a thing that isn't news. What are the terms for news sites?

> There's nothing "objectively bad" about forcing a bad actor to finally pay up for it's conduct.

Correct. That's why I said, essentially, "if you want them to pay up, tax them". I'm not saying any law that forces tech companies to pay money must be objectively bad. I am saying that this law is. You understand the difference.

> Realistically, the long term answer is to break these companies up, but in the interim, we need to use regulation to force them to pay up in areas where they would have to if they weren't monopolies.

And to do this, you support a bit of regulatory capture that instead directs the funds to a media monopoly. Like I said, it's an objectively bad law.

> One common monopoly practice is called predatory pricing: Where you price so low, you are losing money, temporarily, in order to kill competing businesses

You're actually arguing that the price, free, which Google and Facebook charge is too high, and that they need to further decrease it (by subsidizing the content they aggregate). Is the price too high, or is it predatorily low? You can't argue both sides. If you were really concerned with predatory pricing, you'd be against this law, because it (if applied generally) prevents competitors to Google or Facebook from gaining marketshare, since they can't afford to pay media companies. So as long as the entrenched actors pay the tax, upstarts can't start.

> "if you want them to pay up, tax them"

Tried that. Your employer as of yesterday has... decided to make the little guys pay for that too: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-amazon-google-pass-cos...

Fundamentally, we're trying a lot of different strategies to fix this, but Google is greatly invested in dodging any sort of responsibility for it's externalities and actions. Perhaps the solution here is to both implement a tax and prohibit harmful over-trillion-dollar-monopolies from raising prices at the same time? But then, they'll say it's unfair that they can't set whatever prices they want.

I am not sure Australia's attempt will be any more successful, but it's increasingly becoming apparent we just need to ban these companies from operating, forcibly shut them down, and retire their user-hostile services.

I think there is an argument that they should for rich snippets at least. They go a bit beyond being an index then.

> normally platforms also have to pay for content

? This doesn't seem generically true to me. Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Instagram, Vine, FourSquare, Yelp, Pinterest, DeviantArt, LiveJournal, Xanga, Medium, etc. None of these platforms pay for user-generated content like link posting. When analyzing this issue you can't get away from considering what the platform is a platform for. If it's a platform for UGC, the general rule is that the sharing of the content is a service provided to users at no cost. The vast majority of users receive no monetary payment from these platforms. Some of them rev share if they advertise on content, but that's about as far as it goes. Facebook should rev share on any revenue from advertisements they place on news content ($0).

>If it's a platform for UGC, the general rule is that the sharing of the content is a service provided to users at no cost. The vast majority of users receive no monetary payment from these platforms

That is true (although Youtube actually does pay creators reasonably well), but I think you can make the case that they ought to, and that I think is what the central disagreement is about.

Facebook/Google and so on basically function as distributors. In the olden days publishers had integrated distribution, which is why they basically owned the market. Now tech firms have basically seized control of distribution, and because they compete for the same revenue source as the publishers (ads) the conflict is very apparent.

But I think the issue is general. User generated content isn't paid for because the marginal value added is so low per user, and users have no opportunity to bargain, and property rights for user content are non-existent.

Just imagine if there was a sort of data-stewardship, and users could easily collectively bargain for data they submit to facebook, quickly move it, and this was enabled across all regions. I think Google and Facebook would have to very quickly part with some of their economic rents.

That is true (although Youtube actually does pay creators reasonably well),

They pay a tiny, tiny fraction of creators that create most of the economic value. But by count the vast majority of uploaders do not get paid anything, because they produce nothing of economic value, or maybe even negative value. They also have no BATNA (no other site willing to pay them more for the worthless content they generate). I say this as an occasional uploader to YouTube of videos that get in the low thousands of views. My content likely has negative value to YouTube, but they host it because low friction is part of how they attract creators who someday grow big.

but I think you can make the case that they ought to . . .

You're welcome to.

Just imagine if ... users could easily collectively bargain ...

If they could, we'd live in a different world. I don't know what to take away from that. It's not the world we live in. Everyone has different standards for "ought," but this argument doesn't meet mine.

There are lots of arguments for regulation, but that's not really what this law does. It is pure rent seeking.

Isn’t that basically what Instagram is? It seems social networks are cutting 3rd party content and focusing solely on UGC.

Question is does it increase or decrease subscriptions to news sites. I can see reasons it going both ways. Lack of traffic to news sites from social decreases subscriptions. Lack of news on social forces people to seek alternatives which increase subscriptions.

Controversy is a double edged sword. It pulls people in, but also drives people away. It will be interesting to watch what happens for sure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com