Facebook can remove news and it will minimally effect engagement. I wonder what happens to the publishers when they lose 2.3BN clicks.
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.
You normally have to pay someone for advertising. Facebook (and Google) give it away for free.
That's not the question, the question is who has more market power and squeezes who.
? 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.