It's about compensating the news agencies for the lack of ad income they get from people following links because of the summaries. If every summary has a similar click through rate then using the clicks through to distribute the news dollars makes sense. It's just assuming that 1 in 10[0] people who see the summary click through, so they use that to compensate for the other 9.

[0] or whatever the ratio is.

That’s, of course, assuming that those 10 people would have gone to that specific news site and read that specific story if it wasn’t linked.

Which is, of course, ridiculous. Those news sites are almost certainly gaining visitors from those links, not losing them.

It assumes that had FB not summarized the article, people would have followed the link in the same location in their feed. Seems fair to me.

You can claim that news sites gain more than they lose. That's a different argument.

Again, this doesn’t talk about summaries. It talks about following a link.

At the end of the day it’s not facebook’s responsibility to make sure the news are profitable, nor does it make sense to charge Facebook per link when it’s the users posting them.

The same with Google. All the sites need to do is adjust their robot.txt file and Google will leave them alone.

The law measures and thus talks about following a link. The reason it exists is that the summaries replace following the link.

Meanwhile, I have no problem with Google and Facebook giving some of the money the create to the people who make the content that is consumed.

Then the law should allow an exception for links which are not rendered as rich links. If it’s a plain html link, then problem solved.

Social media is killing what’s left of their business model, but Craigslist and the like gutted it first.

If we as a society want news outlets to stay afloat because they provide a service we deem valuable, let’s skip all the way to the logical conclusion of funding them directly.