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FB / Google News in Australia
Feb. 19th, 2021 01:48 pmThere has been some stuff going on in Australia with a law proposing to require FB and Google to pay to link to news sites. They have learned from past experiences with accidentally killing off all other news aggregators in the Spanish effort to do something similar to make it so the law only hits FB and the Goog. Google initially was defiant, but seems to be negotiating with News Corp now on some specialized site, and, I might add, heavily, heavily, heavily making sure that everyone knows they are playing ball with News Corp which, oh, by the way, Murdoch, remember him, hmmm? As a result of this proposal. It will be interesting to see how that goes.
FB meanwhile, has stuck with “defiant” and basically made it so globally, you cannot link on FB to Australian news and within Australia, you can’t link to any news? Australian news? Not sure? The government is expressing ... outrage, maybe? About this news policy, saying, hey, pandemic, financial, wildfires, stuff people need to know about! FB is meanwhile, We Are Now a Fucking News Source.
I feel like, on balance, it would be a lot better if FB had never been a news source, but I’ll take, incrementally stops being a news source going forward. You don’t even have to pay me an Australian Dollar to get me to take that deal. I’d _pay_ to make that happen. I remember how badly behaved people I did not feel comfortable unfriending were in response to FB Trending News stories. That can just never happen again, thank you very much. I don’t have a friend ecosystem on Twitter to threaten, so whatever.
I figured there must be some kind of a business model explanation, however, because whatever the impulses of the people who make these decisions, the decision is not made on those impulses. It is made on some cold, hard calculations involving a lot of data and minimal morality.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/google-is-threatening-to-kill-google-news-in-europe-if-the-eu-goes-ahead-with-its-snippet-tax/
This from an earlier round, but sheds a bunch of light. Basically, FB would also be happy to never have to police people’s bad behavior with respect to the news ever again. And news is more important to the success of search, than it is to the success of FB. So, there ya go. It’s long, it’s a couple years old, and it is from an earlier round in this war, but it is enlightening.
From a Sorta Normal Person perspective, neither FB or Google directly makes any money at all (quite the contrary) from linking out to news sites. And yet, they were going to have to pay so you/they could do that. If keeping the biggest, most entrenched news organizations afloat around the world matters to you (you know, like the “beloved” NYT here in the US and News Corp in Australia and whatever), and you want to see even more monetization elsewhere on the services you use for free to pay for that, okay. I’m not such a fan — but I also don’t care very much.
FB meanwhile, has stuck with “defiant” and basically made it so globally, you cannot link on FB to Australian news and within Australia, you can’t link to any news? Australian news? Not sure? The government is expressing ... outrage, maybe? About this news policy, saying, hey, pandemic, financial, wildfires, stuff people need to know about! FB is meanwhile, We Are Now a Fucking News Source.
I feel like, on balance, it would be a lot better if FB had never been a news source, but I’ll take, incrementally stops being a news source going forward. You don’t even have to pay me an Australian Dollar to get me to take that deal. I’d _pay_ to make that happen. I remember how badly behaved people I did not feel comfortable unfriending were in response to FB Trending News stories. That can just never happen again, thank you very much. I don’t have a friend ecosystem on Twitter to threaten, so whatever.
I figured there must be some kind of a business model explanation, however, because whatever the impulses of the people who make these decisions, the decision is not made on those impulses. It is made on some cold, hard calculations involving a lot of data and minimal morality.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/google-is-threatening-to-kill-google-news-in-europe-if-the-eu-goes-ahead-with-its-snippet-tax/
This from an earlier round, but sheds a bunch of light. Basically, FB would also be happy to never have to police people’s bad behavior with respect to the news ever again. And news is more important to the success of search, than it is to the success of FB. So, there ya go. It’s long, it’s a couple years old, and it is from an earlier round in this war, but it is enlightening.
From a Sorta Normal Person perspective, neither FB or Google directly makes any money at all (quite the contrary) from linking out to news sites. And yet, they were going to have to pay so you/they could do that. If keeping the biggest, most entrenched news organizations afloat around the world matters to you (you know, like the “beloved” NYT here in the US and News Corp in Australia and whatever), and you want to see even more monetization elsewhere on the services you use for free to pay for that, okay. I’m not such a fan — but I also don’t care very much.