Facebook, Google and Australia

[LondonLax]

18 minutes ago, bickster said:

I think we're having different definitions of news here

If you ‘like’ the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Mirror etc your Facebook feed will continually show you articles by all those publishers. You can read the headline and a paragraph about the story or you can click on it and go to the actual website. 

[LondonLax]

An article by a former Facebook chief executive.

Quote

Lying at the heart of Facebook’s abrupt ban on all Australian news is a global strategic gamble that will have a huge bearing not just on Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth, but on the dynamic between Big Tech and democracy.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/as-a-former-facebook-chief-here-s-my-verdict-it-s-a-shameless-demonstration-of-corporate-might-20210218-p573s4.html

[bickster]

1 minute ago, LondonLax said:

If you ‘like’ the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Mirror etc your Facebook feed will continually show you articles by all those publishers. You can read the headline and a paragraph about the story or you can click on it and go to the actual website. 

Yes I understand that but I rarely if ever do that but the important point here is that bit that Facebook shows you.... who makes that. My guess is the newspaper not FB and why do they do that? Because FB is actually pushing people to their website and earning them money

And I'm still at my PRS argument. If anything the News outlets should be paying FB for generating clicks on their sites, earning them revenue

[LondonLax]

7 hours ago, bickster said:

Yes I understand that but I rarely if ever do that but the important point here is that bit that Facebook shows you.... who makes that. My guess is the newspaper not FB and why do they do that? Because FB is actually pushing people to their website and earning them money

And I'm still at my PRS argument. If anything the News outlets should be paying FB for generating clicks on their sites, earning them revenue

The ultimate problem is that there is a finite amount of advertising budget to go around. Marketing directors are make their decisions on where to best target their budget. If you are that marketing director are you going to buy up ads on each newspaper website or just spend that money on the gateway website that everyone goes to first?

News journalists can no longer get enough revenue to support the work they do. Even if a user does click the stub link to travel through to the news website the ad money has already been spent with Facebook/Google.

There are frequently complaints that news is becoming more and more sensationalist and desperate as it tries to capture viewers with less and less revenue supporting it (the decline of the Birmingham Mail is a front runner in this).

What do we do when the only news sources left are citizen ‘journalists’ who are willing to make their own ‘news’ for free and upload it to YouTube or Facebook for likes? 

Edit: There is also the tax implications. Ad revenue spent on a national newspaper will typically be tax in that country but that revenue being redirected to Google/Facebook will be sent overseas through their multinational tax arrangements and never find its way to the domestic government. 

Edited February 19, 2021 by LondonLax

[blandy]

15 hours ago, OutByEaster? said:

What am I missing about this?

It seems that Australian news outlets are insisting through their government that anywhere their content appears they want to be paid for it.

Google had an argument with them but ultimately decided to pay up to the larger players (read Murdoch).

Facebook haven't agreed  and have removed Australian news sources from their site - causing a public outcry.

Now for me, Facebook is a private website, if they decide they don't want to allow certain content on their site, that's up to them isn't it?

If it was happening here, I could still go to the BBC and find my news, but it's being reported as Facebook acting like an authoritarian state and it being a battle between plucky nations and evil tech giants for media control. I don't get it.

If it was happening here, would it means that VT would have to pay Murdoch for any link to a story in his papers? Would VT have to pay the BBC for linking to their articles? If that's the case, then I can understand why Facebook are taking this line.

With my limited understanding of things, it seems to me that Facebook are the innocent party in this and that the Australian media companies are the villains - that's not how it's reported, so I'm clearly missing the point. 

Educate me please!

I'm (maybe in a luddite way) opposed to Facebook naturally, so take this with a pinch of salt, but while the steps the Aussie Government is taking are a b it clumsy, I'm completely with the intent behind it.

Facebook and Google make their money through advertising. What they do is show content generated (in terms of News) that is written, researched and paid for etc. by other organisations and businesses - whether it be, y'know the SMH, ABC,  Telegraph, Local media and so on. They place adverts on their site and when people click on the content paid for and generated by those other orgs, Facebook (or Google) get the advertising revenue. The Originator, the actual writer of the article, gets nothing for their work and expense and Intellectual property. To me that's iniquitous - imagine if all the stuff we write here on VT were reproduced on Facebook and people used Facebook to read about VT matters - VT would get no revenue, and Facebook would get revenue despite doing nothing to earn it, other than (essentially) steal VT's content.

So the notion of Facebook/Google etc contributing revenue towards the authors and owners of content they reproduce is a no brainer. They've deliberately set up a model to profit from the work of others while depriving the others of reward for their work.

Now Google both in France and Aus has agreed, once the lawmakers started to turn the wheels of action to pay up. Facebook has instead decided to try and flex its muscles and thrown a hissy fit. Seriously bad move, but (to me) indicative of a mentality of "F-you, we're too big, we're not going to do what Government demands" - and that really doesn't sit well with me, whether it's banks, hedge funds, Big Corp or whoever. Pay your way you utter parasites. Parasites on the work of others, parasites on local businesses, parasites on taxpayers.

Basically I'd like to see Facebook burn in Hell. Though I accept that because of it's size many small businesses use it as their portal to potential markets or audiences, so it would have its downsides if it did vanish.

[BOF]

This is a great read on the matter.  Facebook may be a big bad company but they're correct in this instance.

Quote

None of this should have been a surprise. Back in September we wrote about Facebook publicly saying that if Australia went forward with its ridiculous attack on the open internet, and instituted a "news link tax" on Facebook and Google, that it would block news links on Facebook in Australia... and basically everyone ignored it. So, yesterday, when Facebook announced that it was no longer allowing news to be shared in Australia (and relatedly, no longer allowing the sharing of Australian news services on Facebook), it should not have been a surprise.

And yet... it seemed to make tons of people freak out for all the wrong reasons. Almost everyone started blaming and attacking Facebook. And, look, I get it, Facebook is a terrible, terrible company and deserves lots of blame for lots of bad things that it does. But this ain't it.

.....

Quote

If it is not already clear, Facebook is not compatible with democracy.

Threatening to bring an entire country to its knees to agree to Facebook’s terms is the ultimate admission of monopoly power.

But that's completely nonsensical. We can argue about whether or not Facebook is "compatible with democracy" but the simple facts of the situation are that Australia -- pushed heavily by Rupert Murdoch -- has decided to put in place a plan to tax Google and Facebook for any links to news. The bill has all sorts of problems, but there are two huge ones that should concern basically anyone who supports a free and open internet.

First is the link tax. This is fundamentally against the principles of an open internet. The government saying that you can't link to a news site unless you pay a tax should be seen as inherently problematic for a long list of reasons. At a most basic level, it's demanding payment for traffic. There are two entire industries out there based entirely around trying to get more traffic from these companies: "search engine optimization" and "social media management." The reasons there are those industries is because everyone else in the world has figured out that having prominent links on search engines and social media is valuable in its own right and that it's up to the sites that get those links, and the corresponding traffic, to make use of it.

.....

There's more in the link...

 

[Davkaus]

I'm not familiar with Facebook's presentation of articles, but how Google represents them in its search results is a headline and the first line of the article. If that is enough for people to consume your content purely from Google, and people see no value in clicking through to see your full article, I'm not sure why Google are the bad guys there. Additionally, again, if the linking is so unfair, why are people throwing a fit about Facebook just blocking it?

They're not happy with Facebook linking for free, they're not happy with Facebook not linking. They essentially think that Facebook should not only have to allow those links but they should also have to pay for it. In what other sectors do we compel a business to operate in such a way to subsidise another industry? These businesses clearly benefit from being linked to by companies like Facebook and Google, but they're not happy with that, they also think they deserve a cut of those companies profits.

I'd also be interested in where one draws the line in terms of when a link is taxable. As I said in an earlier post, people don't like Facebook and they're huge so it's easy to argue against them, what about smaller providers? Is it anyone that just profits in some way? That's pretty much any website with any adverts or that directly provides any commercial value isn't it?

Edited February 19, 2021 by Davkaus

[LondonLax]

14 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

I'm not familiar with Facebook's presentation of articles, but how Google represents them in its search results is a headline and the first line of the article. If that is enough for people to consume your content purely from Google, and people see no value in clicking through to see your full article, I'm not sure why Google are the bad guys there. Additionally, again, if the linking is so unfair, why are people throwing a fit about Facebook just blocking it?

They're not happy with Facebook linking for free, they're not happy with Facebook not linking. They essentially think that Facebook should not only have to allow those links but they should also have to pay for it. In what other sectors do we compel a business to operate in such a way to subsidise another industry? These businesses clearly benefit from being linked to by companies like Facebook and Google, but they're not happy with that, they also think they deserve a cut of those companies profits.

I'd also be interested in where one draws the line in terms of when a link is taxable. As I said in an earlier post, people don't like Facebook and they're huge so it's easy to argue against them, what about smaller providers? Is it anyone that just profits in some way? That's pretty much any website with any adverts or that directly provides any commercial value isn't it?

As I put in the post above the problem is that Google and Facebook hoover up all the ad revenue and ship it offshore. Even if they provide a click link to a news site in return they have already 'eaten the newspapers lunch'. There is not enough revenue leftover for newpaper journalism to operate a viable quality product. That void is filled with is sensationalism or one man operations spouting conspiracies.  

It's all well and good for multinational tech companies to cry about how they are just disrupting the rules of the game and everyone should get on board but it doesn't have to be that way if we don't want it to (See the ruling against Uber today as well, having to provide basic employment contracts to their workers).  

[OutByEaster?]

And that's where I came in, I want to be in team Blandy; big bad corporate Facebook versus representative democracy in the form of the Australian government is a narrative that ticks all my boxes, but I can't find facts that support the outrage against Facebook for this. Being able to link to other sources for free is an inherent part of the way I both consume stuff on the internet and use VT, not being able to do that would fundamentally change the entire structure of the web.

I get the point about 'what if facebook started taking stuff from VT to the detriment of advertising revenues for the site?' but then VT takes tweets all the time, we do links to news articles all the time, VT is a form of social media as a very smart fella reminded us not too long ago on another thread - if the law applies to all social media (and I don't think you can create a law that only applies to a handful of companies), then anyone linking to a news story out of Australia will very shortly be putting VT in a precarious legal position - that's nuts.

Facebook and google clearly profit from free linking to news articles, but in so long as they're presenting a headline or a couple of lines and a thumbnail, they're also driving traffic to the originator - without that drive, it's possible advertising revenues could reduce on the host site. 

News aggregation - where sites are purely based on grabbing news, should have some sort of responsibility to the people who produce that news - me linking to what Mark Bosnich has said about Jack Grealish shouldn't mean VT (or Facebook) have to pay some sort of annual licence fee to government as a news site.

I'm trying to think of an analogue version of this and the nearest I can come up with is Vogue asking the dentist to pay them a fee because they've left a copy of the magazine in their waiting room.

 

 

[bickster]

1 hour ago, BOF said:

This is a great read on the matter.  Facebook may be a big bad company but they're correct in this instance.

 

Yep, that pretty much agrees with what I've been trying to say AND more

[LondonLax]

Well now we have all established our positions all that is left is to get out the popcorn and see how this show unfolds 

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, OutByEaster? said:

And that's where I came in, I want to be in team Blandy; big bad corporate Facebook versus representative democracy in the form of the Australian government is a narrative that ticks all my boxes, but I can't find facts that support the outrage against Facebook for this. Being able to link to other sources for free is an inherent part of the way I both consume stuff on the internet and use VT, not being able to do that would fundamentally change the entire structure of the web.

I get the point about 'what if facebook started taking stuff from VT to the detriment of advertising revenues for the site?' but then VT takes tweets all the time, we do links to news articles all the time, VT is a form of social media as a very smart fella reminded us not too long ago on another thread - if the law applies to all social media (and I don't think you can create a law that only applies to a handful of companies), then anyone linking to a news story out of Australia will very shortly be putting VT in a precarious legal position - that's nuts.

Facebook and google clearly profit from free linking to news articles, but in so long as they're presenting a headline or a couple of lines and a thumbnail, they're also driving traffic to the originator - without that drive, it's possible advertising revenues could reduce on the host site. 

News aggregation - where sites are purely based on grabbing news, should have some sort of responsibility to the people who produce that news - me linking to what Mark Bosnich has said about Jack Grealish shouldn't mean VT (or Facebook) have to pay some sort of annual licence fee to government as a news site.

I'm trying to think of an analogue version of this and the nearest I can come up with is Vogue asking the dentist to pay them a fee because they've left a copy of the magazine in their waiting room.

I get what you're saying, but in practice it will presumably never be in anyone's interest to chase a forum of fans of a British football club for the exceedingly rare occasions anyone links to an Australian newspaper on it. The ratio of costs of enforcement versus benefit recoverable would be absurd.

Size does matter in these things.

[bickster]

3 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I get what you're saying, but in practice it will presumably never be in anyone's interest to chase a forum of fans of a British football club for the exceedingly rare occasions anyone links to an Australian newspaper on it. The ratio of costs of enforcement versus benefit recoverable would be absurd.

Size does matter in these things.

We're discussing the general principal of this law if it were enacted worldwide

[HanoiVillan]

Just now, bickster said:

We're discussing the general principal of this law if it were enacted worldwide

I'm responding to the point about 'putting VT in a precarious legal position', which seems to me to be extremely unlikely to be true in practice.

[bickster]

12 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I'm responding to the point about 'putting VT in a precarious legal position', which seems to me to be extremely unlikely to be true in practice.

That depends if this legal disease spreads worldwide. No one has suggested the Aussie Govt is coming after VT. A lot of this discussion is about principals and relating it to other scenarios

[blandy]

2 hours ago, Davkaus said:

I'm not familiar with Facebook's presentation of articles, but how Google represents them in its search results is a headline and the first line of the article. If that is enough for people to consume your content purely from Google, and people see no value in clicking through to see your full article, I'm not sure why Google are the bad guys there. Additionally, again, if the linking is so unfair, why are people throwing a fit about Facebook just blocking it?

For years, Facebook has said "we can't block all this fake News and racism and nasty stuff, it's really extremely difficult"

Suddenly, overnight, they showed how easy it is for them to block whatever they want.

Further, they didn't just block News, they deliberately blocked medical health advice about Covid, in the middle of a pigging epidemic, and they did it out of spite. They claim it's because the law is badly worded. But there isn't (yet) a law on the statue book, so that's bollex.

Vindictive ****.

And more generally, what Facebook and Google do is have a News page where they basically collate what others have worked to provide and in essence summarise that work so people can get an overview of "Todays News"  and they (Facebook) can get all the revenue - it's like "don't look at the actual journalists work to find out what's going on, look at our use of their work and we get to keep the advertising revenue and they don't get any." They're basically a monopoly abusing their position.

[HanoiVillan]

3 minutes ago, bickster said:

That depends if this legal disease spreads worldwide. No one has suggested the Aussie Govt is coming after VT. A lot of this discussion is about principals and relating it to other scenarios

Okay, you have given examples of music royalties, so let me relate it to that scenario. If I had a friend who was somehow stupid enough to really want to listen to me sing an Oasis song, and he paid me 1p each Saturday evening and came over to my house to listen to me, then I would *technically* need to be paying royalties, but in practice nobody would give the tiniest of shits about this. If, on the other hand, I managed to turn 'karaoke singers going into people's houses' into a viable business, and it started to have a material impact on music sales and streaming numbers, then people would start to care about it.

There is 1 Facebook, there are probably literally millions of niche special interest forums. My point is not just about VT, it is about any small site of this nature. It's hard to see how small sites could actually be regulated unless a] the mechanics of linking and URLs were somehow changed, or b] forums needed an operating licence from a regulatory body that collected these royalties. I agree these are bad outcomes, but they don't seem likely.

All I'm doing is responding to the points in the post quoted, which relate the issue to VT (by name, 6 times!). The point of this law is to target Facebook and Google, who are eating the advertising revenue of big media companies, not unprofitable special interest forums. What I'm saying is I'm not sure that it's meaningful to decouple the 'principles' from the question of size, or certainly not at this stage.

[OutByEaster?]

18 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I'm responding to the point about 'putting VT in a precarious legal position', which seems to me to be extremely unlikely to be true in practice.

Agreed, but I think the vague aspect of this law opens it up.

It's not clear where the responsibility lies - who would prosecute who and what for? How would agreements be made and monitored?

Google are making deals with a handful of major publishers but not with everyone - if they link to a smaller publication, I dunno, the South Brisbane Herald and they don't already have an agreement in place with that paper for linking to its news, does the South Brisbane Herald sue google? Do they report google to the government?

Similarly, if the South Brisbane Herald runs a story that someone had put on facebook on its website, is there a standing fee they'd need to pay facebook as the publisher, or do they need to enter into an individual relationship with facebook - would the resulting bureaucratic mess lead Facebook to saying anyone can link to us, it's cheaper than chasing you up?

If deals are made at an individual level and any publisher in Australia can use the law to sue Facebook, then does Facebook potentially face the prospect of making 100,000 deals in Australia just to avoid court? What's to stop me writing a fanzine and asking my brother in law to post it on facebook so that I can collect a facebook fee? 

If the UK were to adopt the same rules, VT would be both a publisher and a social media company - so that you might get the ridiculous situation where if one of the match reports here were reproduced on Facebook, we'd be entitled to a fee from Facebook, even if we'd put that match report on Facebook ourselves.

Youtube currently have a form you can fill in around uploading things and copyright, largely to protect them from infringement issues - the law sort of suggests that you could end up filling in a form that's almost a self billing mechanism - I've written a song, I've put it on my own tiny website, now I'm uploading it to yours and I'd like my $10.00 please.

It doesn't seem to make any sense other than at the level of one or two large companies and one or two large publishers arguing about advert revenues.

I just get the sense that there's a much much better way for these companies to settle their differences than forcing government to make up rules.

I mean I'm clearly missing an awful lot in terms of understanding of what exactly the Australian law is - but I'm pretty sure you can't put in a law that only affects the two richest people you can find.

[KenjiOgiwara]

I sort of agree with the news companies. Facebook has for some time moonlighted as a news hub. You can argue they don't do it intentionally, but they do. It's no point visiting papers as you get the news you want through facebook. The advertisement money that could have gone to the papers go to Facebook and that's before you talk subs. 

I think if any of these big tech companies got their product used by a third party that made money off it without offering anything back, they'd be well miffed about it. These companies are sueing anyone that uses their technology and comes up as competition, see Google vs Sonos. 

While journalism might not be a developed tech, it's still intangible assets or whatever you call it? Surely intellectual property rights etc. exists in the news world as well? 

Then again I know very little about this, so I might be wrong. I just know I really dislike Facebook. 

[blandy]

40 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Size does matter in these things.

Yes, that is the key point. It's not about general small users (say VT) "fair usage" policy - like VT has a rule about "always provide and link and an extract" because of that very reason - it is fair usage to use a quote in context (for a small operator like VT) and provide a link to the bigger article, to help the original author. But when you have a huge scale operator hoovering up basically everyone's articles and showing the aggregated content as "todays's news, get it all here" they are distorting the market to gain revenue at the expense of others.