you don't need a metaphor here. the world's largest communications platform is using content generated by journalism organizations to make money, and those orgs are now asking for a piece of it. it's that simple.

Yes, and those communications platforms should be able to say "No" if they would rather not serve links to articles.

> Yes, and it is in no way the responsibility of the communication platforms to ensure journalist are profitable.

they aren't. this is akin to licensing content.

"Licensing to link" is a bit different from "licensing content".

And we don't need a license to link. We have never needed a license to link. You published it in public; that's my license to link. The only access restrictions have been robots.txt and restrictions the site itself imposes by technical means.

IANAL, but so far as I know, the controlling precedent is Ticketmaster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster_Corp._v._Tickets.....) If you put it online, I can link to it. That's been the legally-defined rules since 2000.

So if California wants to change that, they're very probably going to lose the court case that is almost certainly going to be triggered by this bill. And then, as others have pointed out, the result will be that nobody links to the news sites, and they lose traffic instead of gaining money.

Licensing implies a choice. At a minimum, social media companies should be able to decide if they want to allow links to news companies and negotiate the rate.