That's not how the publishers see it.
The publishers see it as people just read the headlines and summary on Facebook, then never ever go to the actual web site to read the story.
It's similar to the way web site owners are unhappy with the way Google scrapes microdata from web sites and presents the information as its own content in those search side panels. It removes an incentive for people to visit the web site that actually created the content.
Facebook and the rest of the doomscrolling industry have trained people to think that "Reading the news" is just scrolling scrolling scrolling, rather than actually going to a publisher's web site to see what's on offer.
This is going to be a hot take but maybe it's because people have been conditioned to think that the articles themselves are often low quality clickbait offering little beyond the headline and stuffed with more ads than content. Quality of journalism and consumer trust in media has been declining for years.
But the web sites didn't get to be the way they are because people were visiting them. They got to be the way they are because people stopped visiting them.
People turn to specific sources because those sources provide coverage over hot issues, but what people are interested in are the hot issues, not Axios or Buzzfeed. Google and Apple's content aggregation is giving customers what they want.
Says who?
People have been picking their brands for hundreds of years. Some people would watch CBS News. Some would watch NBC News. Some would read the Houston Chronicle. Some would read the Houston Post.
Then when they wanted to drill down into something more specific, they'd look at Gardener's World, Birdwatching, Sky & Telescope, etc...
The all-you-can-eat buffet of information is a recent invention promoted as the be-all and end-all of "choice" by the people who make money off of low-quality information gluttony.
Drinking from a firehose is not the best way to slake a thirst.
I'm not sure people appreciate the balkanization of TV content either. The problem isn't that HBO does or doesn't make great hits, the problem is that the hot original content can randomly pop up in another content kingdom, and HBO doesn't have a stranglehold on relevance or hotness. The same is true with all these news outlets wanting individual subscriptions and "brand loyalty".
I think what people want is one Apple TV to rule them all.
Note, I’m not saying this is a good thing, just using myself as an example. And I am guilty of just skimming headlines most days.
But this is the problem publishers face. Facebook and Google, et al, provide news from publishers in a format that is good enough for most people. I don’t think they’re wrong for doing this. In fact, I think the onus is on publishers to be compelling enough to draw people in further. They may have one or two good writers, but they’re hidden in a pile of manure and ads.
FB is not entirely to blame for the position publishers find themselves in, but saying FB gives them free traffic is too generous of a take IMO. FB and others have worked hard to shape the internet as we have it today, where most traffic is centralized in a few “portals” to the rest of the web. Publishers need FB traffic because there’s few other ways to get it, and that dependency on FB is not unintentional.
Anecdotal, but what I see a lot of time is that people don't even read the news being posted - only the title, the preview and the text it was shared with and then jump into commenting. (Pretty much like what I'm doing here now :) ). Actually, I may have even seen a piece of research on this.
So at the end it doesn't seem like it's such a great business for the publishers.
Nobody is denying that it was in publishers' own interest to be linked to on Facebook. Indeed, the law only makes sense that way. Where economics or physics makes something impossible, no law is needed to stop it.
At issue is the power imbalance between Facebook and publishers. the latter is a group of many, who cannot coordinate because of prisoner's dilemma mechanics and maybe even antitrust reasons. The law is supposed to rectify this perceived power imbalance by external enforcement.
What is ridiculous is using Facebooks presence in Australia to tax an american sharing a link to another american based on the links destination.