I, too, am Jackie.

John smith - don’t wield power but actually in charge.

Lolwut says I’m Jackie

So they banned news sites from Facebook all together in Oz? Was it due to misinformation being spread by news sites in there?

Sounds fair enough? Why did the government think they could charge a private company for the links??

Facebook and Google do both make a shitload of money from news, with very little going back to the companies that produce it.

I can see the logic behind this, even if it’s poorly designed as is.

Also, Facebook didn’t help itself with this by completely fucking up its removal of news and blocking government departments during a vaccine rollout.

I think it's just they turned off more than just news - eg the government, and themselves

acemuzzy wrote:

I think it's just they turned off more than just news - eg the government, and themselves

Exactly.

As for Facebook blocking news feeds -



It's a perfect opportunity for everyone there to just STOP FUCKING USING FACEBOOK.

GurtTractor wrote:

It's all fucking bollocks. It's just big evil industry A wanting money from big evil industry B. Google and others give the news companies free traffic and advertisement, and they want want a cut of their revenue for the privilege. It's just big new companies lobbying the Aus gov to get free shit from the behemoths rather than try and actually innovate or compete.

With its moves today, Google has now invited every other country to pursue a similar protection racket. Parliament members in Canada and the European Union have already endorsed measures similar to Australia’s. And a basic tenet of the open web — that hyperlinks can be freely displayed on any website — just took a body blow.

I’d feel better about this if publishers said a single word about how much of their new Google revenue they planned to spend on journalists’ salaries or news gathering.

They didn’t, though, and why would they? Australia’s bargaining code doesn’t say one word about requiring that any of this money be spent on journalism, either.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/18/22288510/google-facebook-australia-news-media-bargaining-code

The traffic is worth pretty much fuck all, certainly nothing like enough to sustain a media which can do things like investigative reporting.

Yossarian wrote:

The traffic is worth pretty much fuck all

Is it? -

Easton says that in the past year, Facebook sent more than 5 billion clicks to Australian publishers, whose value he estimated at AU$407 million. If the current situation holds, Facebook will send those same publishers zero clicks — a move that, I imagine, may force publishers to recalibrate in their minds the relative value that Facebook and publishers provide one another.

That's from a Facebook guy, so not sure how accurate that would be. Have you seen other figures? And has there been word of what these publishers plan to spend the money on, will it actually go to improving journalism or will it just line Murdoch's pockets?

I wish Australia would take Facebook’s rejection as a sign it should rethink its approach to media regulation entirely. It could just tax companies based on their revenues, for example. It could earmark those revenues to support journalism — nonprofit public media, even, which has consistently been shown to have powerful civic benefits. Or it could pursue a bargaining code that requires big media conglomerates to create and support jobs in journalism, rather than simply accept tens of millions of dollars and spend them however they like — or just return it to shareholders.

In reality, though, none of that seems likely to happen. Google’s capitulation means that Australian crony capitalism is now likely to be exported worldwide. Legacy media outlets will become richer — and also more dependent on the tech giants that they excoriate daily for having too much power over them. All the while, the media industry will continue to consolidate, and it will be harder to get or keep a job in journalism.

A bargaining code that truly sought to level the playing field between the platforms and the public would take these realities into account. There is still time to amend it before Parliament takes a vote, and here’s hoping that lawmakers do — both in Australia and beyond it.

I have to say that I agree that most of the takes around this are of the shittest variety. It's utterly fucking ridiculous to state that this ban of news within Facebook is 'bringing a country to it's knees', Facebook is not a public fucking utility no matter how stupidly reliant so many people and groups are on it.

There is every opportunity and ability for people to use or create a proper alternative, the vacuum left by Facebook in Australia opens up the space for entrepreneurs to create something much better there. 

But what if, in the meantime, Australians simply… visit websites? Subscribe to newsletters? Read… books?

From a Google perspective it’s slightly different in as much as Google do very well from not just linking but syndicating content in the listings more and more. A lot of top results in search, depending on the type of query have a huge amount of monthly searches but almost zero visits to the site owners. So Google gets results for its searchers (plus associated ad revenue from search listings and subsequent cross site display / YouTube ads) but the site publisher doesn’t get a visit or revenue from it in any way. Google need to play the long game as if those publishers disappear then Google will not have content to scrape to syndicate.

The obvious retort is Google sends lots of traffic and yes it does, but it really does depend on the query. For example there was a huge fallout over a lyric website having the full lyrics to songs it had added to its site being lifted and placed on Google’s search results when you searched for a song. So now that site, which really could only survive through ad revenue noticed it was number one for a lot of results but traffic was dropping. I think Google settled by citing the site and only showing part of the lyric but I’m pretty sure their first response when the site in question threatened litigation was to remove their results completely which is obviously a shitty thing to do from a company who’s mantra used to be “do no evil”.

And yes, now just reading Yoss’ post news publishers have been taking a beating for years on this. A lot of news cards can give enough for someone wanting to get a scan of the news in the morning not even bothering with visiting the website that provides the content.