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Web inventor says Australian law could make internet ‘unworkable’
Warning comes amid rising tensions between Australian law makers, news publishers and tech giants
"They" being who, exactly? The Australian government? Have they given any indication they want to do this and, if they have, how would they go about enforcing it?They could very well try to extend their law to every little site basically putting all the sites like VVO in Australia out of existence and just make the internet essentially just a bunch of TV channels run by the Murdochs and friends.
Seriously, the internet is now a vast chaotic system outside anyone's control.Oh my sweet summer child.
[picture of Rupert Murdoch]
I’m sure you’re familiar with this man. His media empire is vast. The Wall Street Journal. Fox News. The New York Post. Dow Jones. The Sun. The Times. The Australian. The Daily Telegraph.
These new laws in Australia— these were dreamt into being by this man. The Australian Government is just aiding and abetting him. Their purpose is simple: take money out of the pockets of Facebook and Google — and without the Australian taxpayer seeing a single dime of this money, which really, they should absolutely be entitled to — those dollars are being deposited directly into the pockets of Rupert Murdoch and a few of his big media buddies.
In terms of creating a corporate hand-out, this one is unmatched.
Australia is just about to create a Fox News tax.
Only the dodgy and outright criminal parts of it.Seriously, the internet is now a vast chaotic system outside anyone's control.
If Facebook is copying the whole story to their site, they are already violating international copyright law, and should be sued for every penny they make. They don't need *new* laws to prevent actual copying, they just need to enforce the ones they already have.In this particular case, the Australian government has identified a particular problem of which governments worldwide are very aware -- social media syphoning off advertising revenue from more traditional news sources, especially local newspapers, which are pretty dying off in the US, as I understand it.
Well, erm, yes, but the point is that Google and Facebook are syphoning off ad revenue from news organisations, no matter by whom owned, by presenting those organisations' content on Google and Facebook's sites, so people see the stories there and not on the news pages of the The Australian or whatever, and they get the revenue and not the newspapers and sites that have to pay people to investigate and report the news.This author outlines how this is basically a way of funnelling money from Google and Facebook to Rupert Murdoch and friends' corporations.
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Australia’s Proposed “Fox News Tax”
“Google’s threat to withdraw its search engine from Australia is chilling to anyone who cares about democracy.”jamesallworth.medium.com
Again, this is a separate problem from linking.Well, erm, yes, but the point is that Google and Facebook are syphoning off ad revenue from news organisations, no matter by whom owned, by presenting those organisations' content on Google and Facebook's sites, so people see the stories there and not on the news pages of the The Australian or whatever, and they get the revenue and not the newspapers and sites that have to pay people to investigate and report the news.
Sorry, you've lost me. What is special about linking in this context? What does the proposed Australian law mandate that is so objectionable to anyone other than Google and Facebook, and how could the Australian law be amended to remedy this defect, whatever it is?Again, this is a separate problem from linking.
The Australian law requires payment for links to news stories.Sorry, you've lost me. What is special about linking in this context? What does the proposed Australian law mandate that is so objectionable to anyone other than Google and Facebook, and how could the Australian law be amended to remedy this defect, whatever it is?
If Facebook is copying the whole story to their site, they are already violating international copyright law, and should be sued for every penny they make. They don't need *new* laws to prevent actual copying, they just need to enforce the ones they already have.
Where they link to the source story, on the source site, the originating site gets the ad revenue for the story, not Facebook. Ad revenue, *and* direct subscription fees, because upselling with a paywall actually works. Which is why they don't block search engines (using robots.txt, which they know will be honored), because they know it's a net income source.
So I gather, but why does this matter to anyone but Facebook, Google and whoever it is to whom they pay the money (who is that, exactly, anyway, and what sort of sums are in question?).The Australian law requires payment for links to news stories.
I have already answered this twice.So I gather, but why does this matter to anyone but Facebook, Google and whoever it is to whom they pay the money (who is that, exactly, anyway, and what sort of sums are in question?).
Sorry, I don't understand how a law passed in one country can be "a precedent" for anything, still less "a precedent" for something that happens in another country.I have already answered this twice.
Let me try again, using more words, because you seem to have missed the ones I've already used.
1. A link is not a news story. It's a reference. It's no different than "Strunk and White, Elements of Style, Page 23." or "1060 W Addison St, Chicago, IL 60613", or "Innula Zenovka, post: 152407, member: 81". It's not a news story or "stealing clicks". It doesn't redirect a penny of ad revenue, you still have to go to the original source to read the story and once you're there it doesn't matter whether you started at Google or the Times home page. Now that you have to pay to reference a source, then where does it stop?
2. This is a precedent that you can be forced to pay just to refer to a news story. This will be copied and made broader. Because that how laws work.
3. This will be used to force payment for reference to basically any content, as that content is reframed as "news". Bad actors are already abusing overly broad laws like this to silence critics and extort money, and they are already licking their lips at the opportunities these new laws will provide.
In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet’s most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened.
Jones had gained infamy for claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a “giant hoax,” and that the teenage survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting were “crisis actors.” But Facebook had found that he was also relentlessly spreading hate against various groups, including Muslims and trans people. That behavior qualified him for expulsion from the social network under the company's policies for "dangerous individuals and organizations," which required Facebook to also remove any content that expressed “praise or support” for them.
But Zuckerberg didn’t consider the Infowars founder to be a hate figure, according to a person familiar with the decision, so he overruled his own internal experts and opened a gaping loophole: Facebook would permanently ban Jones and his company — but would not touch posts of praise and support for them from other Facebook users. This meant that Jones’ legions of followers could continue to share his lies across the world’s largest social network.
OK, that affects Facebook and Google's bottom line, I see that, though since I work for neither company nor have shares in them, that doesn't worry me too much.The absurd part of the law is that (no matter how much one might dislike Facebook or Google...) those companies are now supposed to pay Murdoch's companies in order to *direct people to the pages of those companies*.
It's the equivalent of people having to pay a newspaper company in order to be allowed to tell people 'Hey, have you heard about news XYZ, read about it in this newspaper'.
Yes, of course Google and Facebook profit from being able to attract users to their pages through saying 'Hey, those news exist, read about it there', but in the end they have to pay to essentially advertise and direct users to those other companies. And they have to pay *those* companies for doing so. Which is...absurd.
It normalizes bad law, makes it easier to pass bad laws in other countries.Sorry, I don't understand how a law passed in one country can be "a precedent" for anything, still less "a precedent" for something that happens in another country.
The main problem is, that laws like these are usually used as gateways of sorts.Who else does it affect other than Google and Facebook (Google appear to have reached a mutually satisfactory arrangement with both Murdoch and with companies that are nothing to do with him, like Guardian Australia, and it seems to working for them or their customers so far)?
I've been trying (admittedly not particularly hard, and I don't really know where to start looking) for an interview with someone in Australia running a community or interest group site saying how they'll be adversely affected by this.