If the government wanted to insure that Australians had a healthy independent news ecosystem, they would have legislated against filtering news for your bubble.
They would have passed laws insuring balance and impartiality in the news itself.
Update: There is nothing in legislation that says the money paid by these companies needs to be paid to journalists or to produce news. This money will go directly into executive bonuses and the news organizations will still go out of business.
The news sites provide blurbs and descriptions through OpenGraph metadata that Facebook use, if they don't want entities to use metadata to make a link richer they could just remove the metadata no?
Basically I want to know how Google or Facebook are exploiting news content to make a profit.
Does the website pass the traffic on to the source of the content. The content is the reason for the traffic. Google and Facebook actively aim to keep the user from leaving the website and/or try to track the user after she has left.
What makes news content a pernicious case is the media and these websites are in fact in competition since they share the same customers: advertisers. Google and Facebook produce no content, nor do they sell anything. Except online ad services.
It is fascinating that commenters see this as a "shakedown" when it is tech companies who have raised this concept to new levels. Look at companies like Yelp and DoorDash for blatent examples. More subtle examples are everywhere. Middlemen everywhere. The internet is infested with middlemen.
This cannot last forever. Eventually the novelty of internet service wears off and it is just another means of communication. Tech companies are like switchboard operators. The internet is still in its infancy. They seem indispensible. So too were swicthboard operators, at one time. But in the end, we will not need them. That's innovation. Eliminating the middlemen.
Neither FB nor Google pay journalists. But they have the audience. So the newspaper posts their news story to FB and lets Google index it in the hope that enough people click through the link to read their story and see their ads.
But FB and Google both also serve ads along with the story listing, and they often post enough of the story so that the reader doesn't have to click through to the actual news site. So FB and Google get all the revenue that the story generates, and the news site gets none, despite having to pay the journalist to write it.
This is already covered by copyright law and the news sites can tell Google not to index the site and provide less OpenGhaph data for Facebook.
> This is already covered by copyright law and the news sites can tell Google not to index the site and provide less OpenGhaph data for Facebook.
They can't delist with Google, because then they don't get that traffic.
They can't provide less data, because then FB's algorithm won't shove their article into enough people's feed.
They can't sue for copyright infringement when they specifically granted both Google and FB permission to use their content as part of their listing.
It's a really tough position for newspapers. The solution is that they need to charge readers directly for news. But that would be a massively difficult undertaking (though the success of the Guardian's "support us directly" campaign using the Wikipedia model does show some hope). It would also mean changing a generation's worth of journalistic practices.
They seemed content to stand by and let their business die rather than adapt a new business model.
You're right for the vast majority of news organization on internet but we can't say that it's "never was" (or "is" for the matter). I have at least 3 examples [0] in mind of news organizations for which advertising is not part of their business model (or a very insignificant part compared to "consumers of news" part). And I'm sure we can find similar example all around the globe. Of course such organization generally relies on subscription and/or donation. And of course for this to works "consumers of news" need to pay for it.
[0] Sorry all French : Le Canard enchainé (paper) ; Le Monde Diplo (paper and web) ; Mediapart (web)
My guess is it was likely the Australian news agencies unhappy that their traffic dropped who then pressured the government to reconsider the law and restart talks with FB.
Google nor Facebook produce any.
It's one thing for consumers to not want to pay for content. We are used to having news for "free". But it's another thing for middlemen to expect to get news for free that they can use to turn a massive profit, undercutting the source's own business.
Bravo to Australia for standing up to the middlemen.
It worked.