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Facebook, Google to be forced to share ad revenue with Australian media

148 points by docdeek 7y ago

np_tedious 7y ago
I don't understand. If they wanted to tax it for the government / social programs it would sort of make sense. But why distribute it to old media companies? Is there any merit to this at all?
- jay_kyburz 7y ago
  I think the point is, if somebody shares a link to an article of Sydney Morning Herald on Facebook, and Facebook runs an ad along side the article, that the SMH should get some of profit from the ad. It's a super dumb idea that will never go anywhere.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    I know you're not defending it, but even this steelman doesn't make sense. They don't run an ad alongside the article; They run it alongside the _link_ to the article, and the Sydney Morning-Herald runs an ad alongside the article. Facebook is providing aggregation and sharing of the link, and advertising alongside that aggregation and sharing. Does the Aus gov't think that telecoms or smartphone manufacturers should be paying extortion money to media companies too?
    - cormacrelf 7y ago
      I can't back any of this up, but I think this is the logic. Facebook is essentially a link distribution platform. It only continues to get visitors because media companies keep providing, like spooky magic, new links to be shared on there every day. Many of their visitors would drop away immediately without news. The news is the basis for a ton of engagement once the visitors arrive (39.2K likes, etc.). If that were all true you'd think it would be enough to get Facebook to pay to keep news companies afloat, but it isn't: they don't care which news organisations survive, only that there are still new links every day. Importantly, because nobody reads articles, only headlines, news orgs get nothing without the click. So "link aggregation" without ad revenue or subscription revenue is worth zero in the usual case. Fb doesn't have a problem letting good journalism die out as long as there are enough Breitbarts going around producing engagement on Fb. It takes a lot less $ per link to produce fake news than real news with facts in it, and those headlines are pretty damn engaging, so those places will die out last or more likely never die out because the margins are still fine and their competitors have died out. I think that means they have to pay fake news places as well, otherwise promoting quality news (Fb can control how much attention a link gets) costs more tax and is disincentivised.
    - dodobirdlord 7y ago
      Facebook will display a link preview in the news feed, which will generally select some thumbnail and show the article headline and some text snippet, maybe the first sentence or two. The argument goes that by doing this, Facebook is monetizing the content of the link owner, and if people only read the headlines and text snippets and never click the link (frequently true), Facebook ends up with all of the ad revenue. At least, this is the argument used by Spain against Google News, causing Google to stop linking to Spanish news sites. https://louisem.com/3838/facebook-link-thumbnail-image-sizes https://louisem.com/3838/facebook-link-thumbnail-image-sizes
      - wutbrodo 7y ago
        > if people only read the headlines and text snippets and never click the link (frequently true), Facebook ends up with all of the ad revenue. No, you have this backwards; snippets don't leech revenue away from news orgs, they enhance their revenue. There have been cases in the past where Google was ordered to stop displaying snippets of certain sites without paying, and media companies immediately started whining about the sharp traffic declines. Complaints about the copyright of snippets is a fig leaf for protection money of the sort they're demanding once again.
- polemic 7y ago
  Read the article, it's not for social programmes.
  - Panini_Jones 7y ago
    That's what their comment said.
- seemslegit 7y ago
  Because "old media companies" are Rupert Murdoch, who does in real life what George Soros is accused of doing by media outlets controlled by... Rupert Murdoch.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  Frankly, it's just another case of the non-US developed world deciding that demanding extortion money is better than trying to innovate and create value for the world. The US economy has plenty of pathologies and plenty of things to learn from the rest of the OECD, but stuff like this is the flipside. I thought this was mostly Europe's wheelhouse, but apparently it's broader than that.
  - tikkabhuna 7y ago
    Tariffs and such have been used to even the playing field though. When scalability and network effects are strong how would a company in Australia compete with the existing players who can structure themselves to pay extremely little tax. If US tech companies want to generate profit from EU and other OECD countries why shouldn't they be taxed in the countries they generate that money from?
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      I'm not a big fan of tariffs in general, and think there are usually better policy tools to achieve the same objective, but they have their place: there are sound reasons to want to retain domestic production capacity in certain industries, while still taking advantage of the efficiency that full nationalization often precludes. It's not entirely unreasonable to include domestic media in this category either. But this set of demands goes far beyond what's required to protect critical domestic production, by explicitly laying out specifics for how the market should be structured: > require the companies to negotiate in good faith on how to pay news media for use of their content, advise news media in advance of algorithm changes that would affect content rankings, favour original source news content in search page results, and share data with media companies. On top of that, the doublespeak about the purpose of demands like these rankle me: > Frydenberg said it was only fair that media companies that created the content got paid for it. “This will help to create a level playing field,” he said. Paywalls have existed for ages. The notion that "it's only fair" that a business that chooses a business model based on ad revenue also get a government-coerced payout from a third-party is lunatic on its face. Aggregators and referrers like Google and Facebook don't create content[0] and thus aren't eating media companies' lunch; competitors like blogs are. If it's "not fair" that they're paid, why not fund them directly out of the government? > If US tech companies want to generate profit from EU and other OECD countries why shouldn't they be taxed in the countries they generate that money from? Are you under the impression that their profits within the country aren't already taxed? The difference here is that the tax receipts are going directly to media companies instead of to the gov't (and the fact that implicit taxes generally don't manage to capture the attention of the uninformed voter, who'd probably be put off by the idea that a tax should be have such narrowly-targeted payers and recipients without being explicitly Pigovian (Eg cigarettes)). [0] Except to the extent that individual posts on Facebook have reduced news consumption, but I'm not sure if that's true
- tensor 7y ago
  The old media companies business model collapsed (newspapers). So they are essentially turning the old media companies into public companies, but instead of using tax dollars they are arbitrarily punishing Google and Facebook because they have a lot of money.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    It is far worse than that. If they did a 'bailout and buy up' of failing companies. Instead it is still for private profit and receiving an arbitrary punishment to try to enrich private parties. Which is so damn very corrupt by definition.
- thu2111 7y ago
  Because politicians believe, probably correctly, that journalists decide elections. When journalists come knocking for favours they get them. It's the same story in Germany, France, Spain etc. Less so in the UK where newspapers are more diverse and have mostly either gone paywalled and stabilised, or have such huge popularity and reach (e.g. Daily Mail) that they can be profitable off of traffic and ads. But most countries have a lot of newspapers all hard to differentiate from each other due to journalistic groupthink. They can't/won't compete by altering the way they report news, so they are reduced to calling in favours in capital cities.
jasonlfunk 7y ago
What if Google and Facebook just said “No, thank you.”? I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship, which might say something about the tech giants. The only possible thing the Aussies could do is block the websites, and that sounds like political suicide to me. I’m guessing the companies will decide to play ball, but if other countries start to follow suit, it might be interesting to see what happens if they start pushing back.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > The only possible thing the Aussies could do is block the websites, and that sounds like political suicide to me. The first thing they could do is fine them. Google and FB might say "ha! but we don't have bank accounts in Australia!" and the government will simply collect from companies in Australia that have outstanding bills from Google for e.g. Adwords or Google Cloud. Google can still run their websites to be reachable from Australia, but they wouldn't be able to do business in Australia. And what's the point of running an ad tech empire if you can't make money off of it?
  - antjanus 7y ago
    plus, it'll be easier for them to obfuscate the data somehow and share some specific piece of information that's technically correct but is useless. They can also just drag this out in court for a long time until everyone forgets, they restructure how their money works, and then they'll share the useless info freely. Just my take on the situation.
  - RareSoft 7y ago
    Could Australian ISPs be instructed to just blacklist Google's and Facebook's Ad servers nationally?
    - shakna 7y ago
      There are currently several sites banned in Australia, and the blacklisting took the form of ISPs hijacking the DNS lookup. Which means it is totally ineffective. Our government is not well known for mandating the right tool for the right job, when it comes to tech.
adamiscool8 7y ago
The code was to require the companies to negotiate in good faith on how to pay news media for use of their content, advise news media in advance of algorithm changes that would affect content rankings, favour original source news content in search page results, and share data with media companies. This seems...confused. At that point why wouldn't Facebook, Google, et al just ban the media company links from their platforms and avoid the hassle?
- save_ferris 7y ago
  Because news media represents one of their largest channels of legitimate traffic and engagement. It’s why Google put so many resources into AMP, Facebook on their curated news feeds, etc. Removing news links would probably eventually kill social media platforms in the long run, or at least accept a new path with much less growth.
  - AbrahamParangi 7y ago
    I think you overestimate the market pull for the product legacy media companies produce. Removing legacy news from Facebook and Google would certainly hasten the death of legacy news and have no effect on tech companies, who's users would just replace legacy news with reddit posts, blog spam, etc.
    - Spivak 7y ago
      But Reddit and blog spam sites just repackage the content from legacy media companies so the well would likely dry up for everyone. Honestly it might be nice for information to move a little slower.
  - myrandomcomment 7y ago
    Spain tried this and Google just dropped all the Spanish news sites from Google News in Spain. "We regret that due to the Spanish law, Spanish publishers aren't featured in Google News and Google News is closed in Spain."
csunbird 7y ago
Because of the SEO, most of the news sites are already clickbaits with junk information in them, it seems like this will grow a new industry: Link-tax-optimization.
- wslh 7y ago
  It is true that mass media is plenty of clickbaits with junk information in them. It is also true that these clickbaits are driving profits to Google. I don't know what is the "ethical" business solution to this problem but I know that Google, at least, is favoring clickbaits and text spinning over quality. If you write a good blog with a single article per week it will be in the tail of searchers below text spinning content that has a higher frequency of updates.
  - tomComb 7y ago
    Isn't it consumers who are favoring clickbait (which then drivers publishers to do the same)?
    - wslh 7y ago
      Consumers are being deceived by clickbaits.
      - tomComb 7y ago
        I don't agree - to me it seems that one can easily identify and therefor avoid clickbait without clicking on it.
        wslh 7y ago
        > I don't agree - to me it seems that one can easily identify and therefor avoid clickbait without clicking on it. Do you mean your grandma and grandpa can easily identify clickbaits?
        7y ago
hubbabubbarex 7y ago
I like this. Big tech, time to pay some taxes to countries.. All of these big tax avoiding companies.
Causality1 7y ago
The article doesn't really make it clear exactly which ads Australia is trying to get a piece of. If Google is taking article content from publishers and combining it with ads before sending it to the user, I get why they'd want that money. If however, they're trying to get ads from Google search results, how does that make any sense at all? That's like every business in town trying to get ad revenue from the Yellow Pages.
mohankumar246 7y ago
I believe this move should be followed by governments worldwide, you are accessing worlwide data by providing services to citizens of different countries. You are also generating $ by ad services generated by this data(i.e. access to news portals), and it goes to profit only one country. Are the ads from only local companies?(I don't think so). How fair is that? In a world where trade deals are done to benefit both nations in case of commodities, why not do the same for bits and bytes of information?
buboard 7y ago
the primary issue is the ad market capture by G+FB. Instead of forcing them to pay up, force them to provide evidence that their advertising works, and that the market capture is not just capture-by-marketing or regulatory-capture of the entire advertising pie. Also, break up their monopolizing tactics, like not sharing search queries with target sites (removal of referral) and monopolizing the browser search bars. Maybe G should share the search term instead of revenue.
ketzo 7y ago
This is one of those things that seems to me, on a very superficial level, to be "fair" -- online advertising companies have DECIMATED traditional media -- but I can't help but feel there are some really strange second- or third- order effects coming down the line. This is just such an unnatural? forced? solution, and in my very limited experience, that leads to weird incentives later down the line. It sort of feels like Google and Facebook are being incentivized to NOT display the content of traditional media institutions. That... doesn't seem like the intent.
raz32dust 7y ago
Even though the specifics are not clear, we will (and should) be having more and more of these kinds of discussions going forward to avoid the monopoly created by the distribution reach of tech giants. It is in the interest of the tech companies themselves to come up with something reasonable, because the governments won't be able to, and whatever they come up with will likely be too complicated, mired in politics and too specific to each country. It is better if the tech companies can nip this in the bud even before it becomes too politicized. Google, Facebook and Amazon owe their power to being great at content distribution. And I believe that if they take care to compensate content creators fairly, these sorts of upheavals will be greatly reduced. I think YouTube does a fair job of this. Not perfect, but a better balance, and I believe even that is enough.
- mehrdada 7y ago
  How you dragged Amazon in the mix at the end is perplexing to me.
  - SanchoPanda 7y ago
    Amazon's ad network is growing incredibly quickly, and op may be referring to the content against which these ads are placed.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  The problem here is a different one than people think it is. Once upon a time if you wanted to advertise you had to go to somebody with a centralized distribution operation. They had to have a printing press or a radio station. Then they would charge you a large pile of money and put your ad in front of thousands of people. This revenue was used to pay for news reporting. Today there are cat videos with millions of views. Advertisers who want to reach people in a particular demographic don't have to pay a premium to advertise in a publication whose readership skews towards that demographic, they can just advertise to the subset of the cat video viewers who happen to be in that demographic. There are more than enough cat videos and hot girls eating bananas on the internet to drive the cost of putting your ad in front of a person way down from where it was when you had to pay a newspaper or a TV station to do it. Meanwhile Google makes a lot of money because the cat owner doesn't have an ad network, but if they put Google ads on their cat video channel they can make $72/month, and then Google gets a cut, times a billion people. The news media assume that because they used to make a lot of money and now Google makes a lot of money, the money Google makes is mostly attributable to the work they do, but it isn't. It's mostly attributable to all the people posting videos of their cats and home improvement projects and college track meets and movie parodies and whatever else. Their problem is that the value of an ad impression has fallen dramatically because there is so much more competition. But that wasn't caused by Google and they can't solve it. Even if you took all the money Google makes from ads related to news reporting and gave it to the companies doing news reporting, it wouldn't be as much as they used to make when they had a de facto monopoly on advertising. And if you really want more of the money to go to the content creators, the best thing you could do is break up the ad networks (and prohibit them from ever buying each other again), so they would have more competition and move more of the margins to creators. But it still wouldn't be as much as they used to get.
zarriak 7y ago
This seems like a bad idea in that it doesn't address the actual issue: most people just read headlines now. The question that leads from that is asking whether that is a result of the design of Facebook. Google is a different problem and it looks like they recognized the problem more with them and wanted to deal with the algorithms but I still think that people have accepted too readily the problem is that people just scan headlines and not that Facebook and Google to a lesser extent have an incentive for people not to click links too frequently.
- buboard 7y ago
  clickbaity headlines are a result of websites desperately trying to get attention through clicks. If they don't need the clicks to remain profitable, the problem will go away
  - zarriak 7y ago
    I mean it in more the sense that Facebook only serves your content to a very small amount of people who like your page to test it before they send it to more and more people, and that if I was trying to resolve the issues the companies were having with Facebook I would address that issue first.
Karishma1234 7y ago
This appears to be theft by political power. I hope Google and Facebook unite here and with the help of American government thwart such nonsensical efforts to steal their revenue.
dirtydroog 7y ago
Does anyone care to provide a synopsis? I'm not comfortable with registering with an anti-Semitic newspaper. https://youtu.be/asQ8KFrZY84?t=1067 https://youtu.be/asQ8KFrZY84?t=1067
KCUOJJQJ 7y ago
Sounds bad. The government could tax Google and Facebook and decide to subsidize the media. Subsidizing the media would look weird probably but it would be more honest. Or am I wrong?
- buboard 7y ago
  neither solution is attacking the root of the issue: the monopolization of the ad market which has made news reporting/blogging unsustainable. If the aussies want to have a body of independent sustainable journalism, government subsidies are dangerous. This ruling makes more sense, it's like attaching a VAT on google's pipeline.
freediver 7y ago
This is indeed a landmark decision and I hope it will snowball into what it should really become: Google sharing revenue with all sites that it takes content from (hello Wikipedia and every blogger out there) not just media sites. Otherwise this measure is strongly biased in an unproductive way.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  > Wikipedia Most Wikipedia content is licensed under a Creative Commons license, so, by intent, Google's free to use it as long as there's attribution. I'm not sure what would happen if a law forced Wikimedia to take money for something it's intentionally giving away.
  - freediver 6y ago
    The fact that they give it away, should not prevent/stop the receiving party to pay a fair share for it, if they extract value from it (and in Google's case monetize it). Also I am giving away my comment here, but I am sure happy if someone upvotes it (although that is not implicit in the transaction).
- 0xy 7y ago
  Do you think Google is more likely to share revenue, or to cut off those content snippets and shutdown Google News? Publishers will not get a cent, nor should they (they don't block Google by choice).
satori99 7y ago
It is worth noting that "The Australian Media" in this case refers almost entirely to Rupert Murdoch.
- BLKNSLVR 7y ago
  That's the heart of the matter here, or at least where my interest lies. Protection of the independence of "The Australian Media" has been chipped away at for a long time, with the media ownership laws being watered down more and more, allowing for greater concentration of ownership. What makes me suspicious is that protectionist action such as this is only coming now, at a time where the already-concentrated landscape is threatened, and because it's already concentrated there are a lot of powerful people with their fingers in the pie - much more-so than when it was less concentrated (almost by definition). Therefore, my take on this is that it's protectionist for News Corp / Rupert Murdoch more-so than any reasons of the "social good". Very much a case a of "when elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled".
tareqak 7y ago
Same news from the Associated Press: https://apnews.com/8ca7559d39b89d097a158043ca8f44bc https://apnews.com/8ca7559d39b89d097a158043ca8f44bc .
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
France and Spain have both led in this already, the ideal scenario is other governments taking the opportunity to jump on board. Google is more powerful than any given government, and can simply withhold service. ...Unless enough countries band together and demand this and leave Google no choice but to comply.

148 points by docdeek 7y ago

I don't understand. If they wanted to tax it for the government / social programs it would sort of make sense. But why distribute it to old media companies? Is there any merit to this at all?

jay_kyburz 7y ago
I think the point is, if somebody shares a link to an article of Sydney Morning Herald on Facebook, and Facebook runs an ad along side the article, that the SMH should get some of profit from the ad. It's a super dumb idea that will never go anywhere.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  I know you're not defending it, but even this steelman doesn't make sense. They don't run an ad alongside the article; They run it alongside the _link_ to the article, and the Sydney Morning-Herald runs an ad alongside the article. Facebook is providing aggregation and sharing of the link, and advertising alongside that aggregation and sharing. Does the Aus gov't think that telecoms or smartphone manufacturers should be paying extortion money to media companies too?
  - cormacrelf 7y ago
    I can't back any of this up, but I think this is the logic. Facebook is essentially a link distribution platform. It only continues to get visitors because media companies keep providing, like spooky magic, new links to be shared on there every day. Many of their visitors would drop away immediately without news. The news is the basis for a ton of engagement once the visitors arrive (39.2K likes, etc.). If that were all true you'd think it would be enough to get Facebook to pay to keep news companies afloat, but it isn't: they don't care which news organisations survive, only that there are still new links every day. Importantly, because nobody reads articles, only headlines, news orgs get nothing without the click. So "link aggregation" without ad revenue or subscription revenue is worth zero in the usual case. Fb doesn't have a problem letting good journalism die out as long as there are enough Breitbarts going around producing engagement on Fb. It takes a lot less $ per link to produce fake news than real news with facts in it, and those headlines are pretty damn engaging, so those places will die out last or more likely never die out because the margins are still fine and their competitors have died out. I think that means they have to pay fake news places as well, otherwise promoting quality news (Fb can control how much attention a link gets) costs more tax and is disincentivised.
  - dodobirdlord 7y ago
    Facebook will display a link preview in the news feed, which will generally select some thumbnail and show the article headline and some text snippet, maybe the first sentence or two. The argument goes that by doing this, Facebook is monetizing the content of the link owner, and if people only read the headlines and text snippets and never click the link (frequently true), Facebook ends up with all of the ad revenue. At least, this is the argument used by Spain against Google News, causing Google to stop linking to Spanish news sites. https://louisem.com/3838/facebook-link-thumbnail-image-sizes https://louisem.com/3838/facebook-link-thumbnail-image-sizes
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      > if people only read the headlines and text snippets and never click the link (frequently true), Facebook ends up with all of the ad revenue. No, you have this backwards; snippets don't leech revenue away from news orgs, they enhance their revenue. There have been cases in the past where Google was ordered to stop displaying snippets of certain sites without paying, and media companies immediately started whining about the sharp traffic declines. Complaints about the copyright of snippets is a fig leaf for protection money of the sort they're demanding once again.
polemic 7y ago
Read the article, it's not for social programmes.
- Panini_Jones 7y ago
  That's what their comment said.
seemslegit 7y ago
Because "old media companies" are Rupert Murdoch, who does in real life what George Soros is accused of doing by media outlets controlled by... Rupert Murdoch.
wutbrodo 7y ago
Frankly, it's just another case of the non-US developed world deciding that demanding extortion money is better than trying to innovate and create value for the world. The US economy has plenty of pathologies and plenty of things to learn from the rest of the OECD, but stuff like this is the flipside. I thought this was mostly Europe's wheelhouse, but apparently it's broader than that.
- tikkabhuna 7y ago
  Tariffs and such have been used to even the playing field though. When scalability and network effects are strong how would a company in Australia compete with the existing players who can structure themselves to pay extremely little tax. If US tech companies want to generate profit from EU and other OECD countries why shouldn't they be taxed in the countries they generate that money from?
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    I'm not a big fan of tariffs in general, and think there are usually better policy tools to achieve the same objective, but they have their place: there are sound reasons to want to retain domestic production capacity in certain industries, while still taking advantage of the efficiency that full nationalization often precludes. It's not entirely unreasonable to include domestic media in this category either. But this set of demands goes far beyond what's required to protect critical domestic production, by explicitly laying out specifics for how the market should be structured: > require the companies to negotiate in good faith on how to pay news media for use of their content, advise news media in advance of algorithm changes that would affect content rankings, favour original source news content in search page results, and share data with media companies. On top of that, the doublespeak about the purpose of demands like these rankle me: > Frydenberg said it was only fair that media companies that created the content got paid for it. “This will help to create a level playing field,” he said. Paywalls have existed for ages. The notion that "it's only fair" that a business that chooses a business model based on ad revenue also get a government-coerced payout from a third-party is lunatic on its face. Aggregators and referrers like Google and Facebook don't create content[0] and thus aren't eating media companies' lunch; competitors like blogs are. If it's "not fair" that they're paid, why not fund them directly out of the government? > If US tech companies want to generate profit from EU and other OECD countries why shouldn't they be taxed in the countries they generate that money from? Are you under the impression that their profits within the country aren't already taxed? The difference here is that the tax receipts are going directly to media companies instead of to the gov't (and the fact that implicit taxes generally don't manage to capture the attention of the uninformed voter, who'd probably be put off by the idea that a tax should be have such narrowly-targeted payers and recipients without being explicitly Pigovian (Eg cigarettes)). [0] Except to the extent that individual posts on Facebook have reduced news consumption, but I'm not sure if that's true
tensor 7y ago
The old media companies business model collapsed (newspapers). So they are essentially turning the old media companies into public companies, but instead of using tax dollars they are arbitrarily punishing Google and Facebook because they have a lot of money.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  It is far worse than that. If they did a 'bailout and buy up' of failing companies. Instead it is still for private profit and receiving an arbitrary punishment to try to enrich private parties. Which is so damn very corrupt by definition.
thu2111 7y ago
Because politicians believe, probably correctly, that journalists decide elections. When journalists come knocking for favours they get them. It's the same story in Germany, France, Spain etc. Less so in the UK where newspapers are more diverse and have mostly either gone paywalled and stabilised, or have such huge popularity and reach (e.g. Daily Mail) that they can be profitable off of traffic and ads. But most countries have a lot of newspapers all hard to differentiate from each other due to journalistic groupthink. They can't/won't compete by altering the way they report news, so they are reduced to calling in favours in capital cities.

jasonlfunk 7y ago

What if Google and Facebook just said “No, thank you.”? I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship, which might say something about the tech giants. The only possible thing the Aussies could do is block the websites, and that sounds like political suicide to me. I’m guessing the companies will decide to play ball, but if other countries start to follow suit, it might be interesting to see what happens if they start pushing back.

luckylion 7y ago
> The only possible thing the Aussies could do is block the websites, and that sounds like political suicide to me. The first thing they could do is fine them. Google and FB might say "ha! but we don't have bank accounts in Australia!" and the government will simply collect from companies in Australia that have outstanding bills from Google for e.g. Adwords or Google Cloud. Google can still run their websites to be reachable from Australia, but they wouldn't be able to do business in Australia. And what's the point of running an ad tech empire if you can't make money off of it?
- antjanus 7y ago
  plus, it'll be easier for them to obfuscate the data somehow and share some specific piece of information that's technically correct but is useless. They can also just drag this out in court for a long time until everyone forgets, they restructure how their money works, and then they'll share the useless info freely. Just my take on the situation.
- RareSoft 7y ago
  Could Australian ISPs be instructed to just blacklist Google's and Facebook's Ad servers nationally?
  - shakna 7y ago
    There are currently several sites banned in Australia, and the blacklisting took the form of ISPs hijacking the DNS lookup. Which means it is totally ineffective. Our government is not well known for mandating the right tool for the right job, when it comes to tech.

adamiscool8 7y ago

The code was to require the companies to negotiate in good faith on how to pay news media for use of their content, advise news media in advance of algorithm changes that would affect content rankings, favour original source news content in search page results, and share data with media companies. This seems...confused. At that point why wouldn't Facebook, Google, et al just ban the media company links from their platforms and avoid the hassle?

save_ferris 7y ago
Because news media represents one of their largest channels of legitimate traffic and engagement. It’s why Google put so many resources into AMP, Facebook on their curated news feeds, etc. Removing news links would probably eventually kill social media platforms in the long run, or at least accept a new path with much less growth.
- AbrahamParangi 7y ago
  I think you overestimate the market pull for the product legacy media companies produce. Removing legacy news from Facebook and Google would certainly hasten the death of legacy news and have no effect on tech companies, who's users would just replace legacy news with reddit posts, blog spam, etc.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    But Reddit and blog spam sites just repackage the content from legacy media companies so the well would likely dry up for everyone. Honestly it might be nice for information to move a little slower.
- myrandomcomment 7y ago
  Spain tried this and Google just dropped all the Spanish news sites from Google News in Spain. "We regret that due to the Spanish law, Spanish publishers aren't featured in Google News and Google News is closed in Spain."

csunbird 7y ago

Because of the SEO, most of the news sites are already clickbaits with junk information in them, it seems like this will grow a new industry: Link-tax-optimization.

wslh 7y ago
It is true that mass media is plenty of clickbaits with junk information in them. It is also true that these clickbaits are driving profits to Google. I don't know what is the "ethical" business solution to this problem but I know that Google, at least, is favoring clickbaits and text spinning over quality. If you write a good blog with a single article per week it will be in the tail of searchers below text spinning content that has a higher frequency of updates.
- tomComb 7y ago
  Isn't it consumers who are favoring clickbait (which then drivers publishers to do the same)?
  - wslh 7y ago
    Consumers are being deceived by clickbaits.
    - tomComb 7y ago
      I don't agree - to me it seems that one can easily identify and therefor avoid clickbait without clicking on it.
      - wslh 7y ago
        > I don't agree - to me it seems that one can easily identify and therefor avoid clickbait without clicking on it. Do you mean your grandma and grandpa can easily identify clickbaits?
        7y ago

hubbabubbarex 7y ago

I like this. Big tech, time to pay some taxes to countries.. All of these big tax avoiding companies.

Causality1 7y ago

The article doesn't really make it clear exactly which ads Australia is trying to get a piece of. If Google is taking article content from publishers and combining it with ads before sending it to the user, I get why they'd want that money. If however, they're trying to get ads from Google search results, how does that make any sense at all? That's like every business in town trying to get ad revenue from the Yellow Pages.

mohankumar246 7y ago

I believe this move should be followed by governments worldwide, you are accessing worlwide data by providing services to citizens of different countries. You are also generating $ by ad services generated by this data(i.e. access to news portals), and it goes to profit only one country. Are the ads from only local companies?(I don't think so). How fair is that? In a world where trade deals are done to benefit both nations in case of commodities, why not do the same for bits and bytes of information?

buboard 7y ago

the primary issue is the ad market capture by G+FB. Instead of forcing them to pay up, force them to provide evidence that their advertising works, and that the market capture is not just capture-by-marketing or regulatory-capture of the entire advertising pie. Also, break up their monopolizing tactics, like not sharing search queries with target sites (removal of referral) and monopolizing the browser search bars. Maybe G should share the search term instead of revenue.

ketzo 7y ago

This is one of those things that seems to me, on a very superficial level, to be "fair" -- online advertising companies have DECIMATED traditional media -- but I can't help but feel there are some really strange second- or third- order effects coming down the line. This is just such an unnatural? forced? solution, and in my very limited experience, that leads to weird incentives later down the line. It sort of feels like Google and Facebook are being incentivized to NOT display the content of traditional media institutions. That... doesn't seem like the intent.

raz32dust 7y ago

Even though the specifics are not clear, we will (and should) be having more and more of these kinds of discussions going forward to avoid the monopoly created by the distribution reach of tech giants. It is in the interest of the tech companies themselves to come up with something reasonable, because the governments won't be able to, and whatever they come up with will likely be too complicated, mired in politics and too specific to each country. It is better if the tech companies can nip this in the bud even before it becomes too politicized. Google, Facebook and Amazon owe their power to being great at content distribution. And I believe that if they take care to compensate content creators fairly, these sorts of upheavals will be greatly reduced. I think YouTube does a fair job of this. Not perfect, but a better balance, and I believe even that is enough.

mehrdada 7y ago
How you dragged Amazon in the mix at the end is perplexing to me.
- SanchoPanda 7y ago
  Amazon's ad network is growing incredibly quickly, and op may be referring to the content against which these ads are placed.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
The problem here is a different one than people think it is. Once upon a time if you wanted to advertise you had to go to somebody with a centralized distribution operation. They had to have a printing press or a radio station. Then they would charge you a large pile of money and put your ad in front of thousands of people. This revenue was used to pay for news reporting. Today there are cat videos with millions of views. Advertisers who want to reach people in a particular demographic don't have to pay a premium to advertise in a publication whose readership skews towards that demographic, they can just advertise to the subset of the cat video viewers who happen to be in that demographic. There are more than enough cat videos and hot girls eating bananas on the internet to drive the cost of putting your ad in front of a person way down from where it was when you had to pay a newspaper or a TV station to do it. Meanwhile Google makes a lot of money because the cat owner doesn't have an ad network, but if they put Google ads on their cat video channel they can make $72/month, and then Google gets a cut, times a billion people. The news media assume that because they used to make a lot of money and now Google makes a lot of money, the money Google makes is mostly attributable to the work they do, but it isn't. It's mostly attributable to all the people posting videos of their cats and home improvement projects and college track meets and movie parodies and whatever else. Their problem is that the value of an ad impression has fallen dramatically because there is so much more competition. But that wasn't caused by Google and they can't solve it. Even if you took all the money Google makes from ads related to news reporting and gave it to the companies doing news reporting, it wouldn't be as much as they used to make when they had a de facto monopoly on advertising. And if you really want more of the money to go to the content creators, the best thing you could do is break up the ad networks (and prohibit them from ever buying each other again), so they would have more competition and move more of the margins to creators. But it still wouldn't be as much as they used to get.

zarriak 7y ago

This seems like a bad idea in that it doesn't address the actual issue: most people just read headlines now. The question that leads from that is asking whether that is a result of the design of Facebook. Google is a different problem and it looks like they recognized the problem more with them and wanted to deal with the algorithms but I still think that people have accepted too readily the problem is that people just scan headlines and not that Facebook and Google to a lesser extent have an incentive for people not to click links too frequently.

buboard 7y ago
clickbaity headlines are a result of websites desperately trying to get attention through clicks. If they don't need the clicks to remain profitable, the problem will go away
- zarriak 7y ago
  I mean it in more the sense that Facebook only serves your content to a very small amount of people who like your page to test it before they send it to more and more people, and that if I was trying to resolve the issues the companies were having with Facebook I would address that issue first.

Karishma1234 7y ago

This appears to be theft by political power. I hope Google and Facebook unite here and with the help of American government thwart such nonsensical efforts to steal their revenue.

dirtydroog 7y ago

Does anyone care to provide a synopsis? I'm not comfortable with registering with an anti-Semitic newspaper. https://youtu.be/asQ8KFrZY84?t=1067 https://youtu.be/asQ8KFrZY84?t=1067

KCUOJJQJ 7y ago

Sounds bad. The government could tax Google and Facebook and decide to subsidize the media. Subsidizing the media would look weird probably but it would be more honest. Or am I wrong?

buboard 7y ago
neither solution is attacking the root of the issue: the monopolization of the ad market which has made news reporting/blogging unsustainable. If the aussies want to have a body of independent sustainable journalism, government subsidies are dangerous. This ruling makes more sense, it's like attaching a VAT on google's pipeline.

freediver 7y ago

This is indeed a landmark decision and I hope it will snowball into what it should really become: Google sharing revenue with all sites that it takes content from (hello Wikipedia and every blogger out there) not just media sites. Otherwise this measure is strongly biased in an unproductive way.

dehrmann 7y ago
> Wikipedia Most Wikipedia content is licensed under a Creative Commons license, so, by intent, Google's free to use it as long as there's attribution. I'm not sure what would happen if a law forced Wikimedia to take money for something it's intentionally giving away.
- freediver 6y ago
  The fact that they give it away, should not prevent/stop the receiving party to pay a fair share for it, if they extract value from it (and in Google's case monetize it). Also I am giving away my comment here, but I am sure happy if someone upvotes it (although that is not implicit in the transaction).
0xy 7y ago
Do you think Google is more likely to share revenue, or to cut off those content snippets and shutdown Google News? Publishers will not get a cent, nor should they (they don't block Google by choice).

satori99 7y ago

It is worth noting that "The Australian Media" in this case refers almost entirely to Rupert Murdoch.

BLKNSLVR 7y ago
That's the heart of the matter here, or at least where my interest lies. Protection of the independence of "The Australian Media" has been chipped away at for a long time, with the media ownership laws being watered down more and more, allowing for greater concentration of ownership. What makes me suspicious is that protectionist action such as this is only coming now, at a time where the already-concentrated landscape is threatened, and because it's already concentrated there are a lot of powerful people with their fingers in the pie - much more-so than when it was less concentrated (almost by definition). Therefore, my take on this is that it's protectionist for News Corp / Rupert Murdoch more-so than any reasons of the "social good". Very much a case a of "when elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled".

tareqak 7y ago

Same news from the Associated Press: https://apnews.com/8ca7559d39b89d097a158043ca8f44bc https://apnews.com/8ca7559d39b89d097a158043ca8f44bc .

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

France and Spain have both led in this already, the ideal scenario is other governments taking the opportunity to jump on board. Google is more powerful than any given government, and can simply withhold service. ...Unless enough countries band together and demand this and leave Google no choice but to comply.