7 ms·

I really hope they just block all the news sites from their platforms. Let's see how they like it when thier traffic dries up. From other reporting I've read th

I really hope they just block all the news sites from their platforms. Let's see how they like it when thier traffic dries up. From other reporting I've read the law does say they have to treat domestic and international news the same so it could cause an issue with that approach.

smabie 6y ago
Yeah, honestly, that's what I hope they do. The amount of entitlement and this holier than thou attitude among the media is pretty annoying. Figure out how to make money like any other business. And if you can't, we'll then I guess you don't matter that much. This decision is crony capitalism at its worst.
- simias 6y ago
  I would 100% support this mindset if tech giants paid taxes where they make their money. I don't know what the situation is like in Australia but in Europe it's pretty insane. You can't abuse the system on one side and then argue the "efficient market hypothesis" on the other. Google&friends are not making money and competing "like any other business".
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    > Google&friends are not making money and competing "like any other business". I don't understand this. Can you explain, please?
    - jokethrowaway 6y ago
      Several big-enough companies use tax loopholes to avoid paying taxes or lobby the government themselves. This is not specific to big tech though, it's a single point of failure of having a centralised government that is easily corrupted by rich corporations.
      - marcus_holmes 6y ago
        sorry, again, I'm not following you. How does the ineffectiveness of tax regimes mean that Google and friends aren't competing like a normal business?
        thedevilslawyer 6y ago
        This reads like sealioning. You really can't see why an entity A that gives 1% in taxes is at an advantage in competing with an entity that gives say 20% in taxes?
        marcus_holmes 6y ago
        but this behaviour (as said above) is not unique to tech. All sufficiently large, sufficiently multinational businesses effectively stop paying the full rate of tax
    - bencollier49 6y ago
      Have a look at these. If you can afford to pay lawyers to set schemes up like this, then you are at a competitive advantage against businesses which pay regular tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shifting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shifti... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich Take the billions of dollars that you've saved from BEPS and use it to subsidize your local products, or run ads attacking the competition, or taking them to court, or hire salespeople, or build new content. Simple.
  - qaq 6y ago
    Right and say BMW, VW etc are not doing the exact same thing? There is trade imbalance between US and say Germany if both sides introduce equivalent measures it will hurt EU more than it hurts US.
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      We heard that argument so often during the Brexit referendum. It turned out to be rubbish.
      - qaq 6y ago
        Are you seriously comparing size of UK market with the size of US market?
        tonyedgecombe 6y ago
        US Sales represent 14.7% of BMW's exports, UK is 9.2%. It is cleary comparable.
    - joshuaissac 6y ago
      BMW and VW are not doing the exact same thing. They pay taxes to the US IRS for their profits made in the US. The argument against Google and Facebook is based on their use of profit-shifting to avoid taxes on European profits.
      - nwellnhof 6y ago
        > They pay taxes to the US IRS for their profits made in the US. That's plain wrong. Every company only pays income tax in its country of residence. The only difference is that there might be a sales tax for physical goods.
        joshuaissac 6y ago
        >Every company only pays income tax in its country of residence. That is not correct. Taxes are payable wherever the profits are made. It is usually the case that the country where the company is headquartered will have a far greater proportion of profits compared to revenue because a lot of the things that add value happen there, but in the case of large tech companies, this is taken to the extreme, where not just profits, but even revenue itself is shifted from where the business actually happens. For example, Google reported £1.6bn (US$2.1bn) in revenue and paid £44m ($58m) in corporation taxes (on profits of £231m ($303m) based on a 19% tax rate) in the UK for the 2019-20 financial year, but its actual UK revenue is estimated to be around £5.7b ($7.5b) for the same period.[1] Whereas car companies have consumers as their customers and have to pay sales tax, AdWords expenditure by businesses is considered a business expense and is not taxed (in the UK). If they played by the same rules, they would have paid around £1.14b ($1.5b; based on 20% VAT) in tax in 2019-20, instead of £44m. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/07/google-uk-staff-earned-average-of-234000-in-2019 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/07/google-uk...
  - mxxx 6y ago
    Situation in Australia is that they pay zero.
  - Cakez0r 6y ago
    Countries are competing in a market for tax revenue too. If a country wants more tax revenue from a business, they can either close the legal loopholes that allow the business to reduce the amount of tax that they pay or make their tax laws more competitive with those of other countries.
    - mordae 6y ago
      OMG, this is golden. It's a race to the bottom. It ends up completely destroying states and replacing them with corporations.
      - mark_l_watson 6y ago
        I like your comment, not sure if you are joking though. A few decades ago when I started reading William Gibson’s cyber punk sci-fi, I often wondered if the corporate run enclaves in his stories would anticipate real events.
        zentiggr 6y ago
        Neal Stephenson - "Snow Crash". Even the U.S. Government is reduced to a "franchulate".
        Cakez0r 6y ago
        If the police are defunded, I'd bet that private security companies would fill the void and we'd be well on our way to "Stephensonion" being the next "Orwellian"!
  - jp555 6y ago
    look to the law MAKERS, not the law followers.
  - Aunche 6y ago
    How does exploiting tax loopholes have anything to do with the success of news media? Arbitrary fines and taxes are one thing. Forcing Google and Facebook to help the news sets a completely new precedent.
- akdor1154 6y ago
  > And if you can't, we'll then I guess you don't matter that much. This is not true for the media. A functioning, critical, and trustworthy media is very important to society. Profit ≈ importance is just flat out wrong in general. (Not saying I agree with this govt intervention)
  - waheoo 6y ago
    I'm not sure you understand what media is in this country. Its all garbage. Even the "fair and unbiased" govt funded ABC is a total toothless joke. https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=HtV-2X4BjQI https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=HtV-2X4BjQI
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > I'm not sure you understand what media is in this country. Its all garbage. > Even the "fair and unbiased" govt funded ABC is a total toothless joke. > https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=HtV-2X4BjQI https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=HtV-2X4BjQI I don't know much about the Australian media, but I do know a citation to a random youtube comedian does not convincingly support such a statement.
      - waheoo 6y ago
        Thats fair, and I would question anyone getting all their news from the Daily show or last week tonight. Its incredibly biased. Australia's problem is that our news orgs are corrupt to the core, every journo is afraid to go against Murdoch in any way shape or form their careers are ended if they do. So here we are, with this "comedian," doing a better reporting job than pretty much every single outlet in the country. With very few exceptions. Climate change protests https://youtube.com/watch?v=HTAzb7UbJ6M https://youtube.com/watch?v=HTAzb7UbJ6M Darling river fuck up https://youtube.com/watch?v=gNbSazIqVYA https://youtube.com/watch?v=gNbSazIqVYA Fatty mc fuck face https://youtu.be/WmJ7CSRRCDM https://youtu.be/WmJ7CSRRCDM Misinformed journalism https://youtube.com/watch?v=3tTqyZQsG5A https://youtube.com/watch?v=3tTqyZQsG5A
  - TomMarius 6y ago
- cturner 6y ago
  An amusing angle on this situation. If you go back thirty or twenty years, it is hard to think of an industry better-positioned to capture the momentum of the internet than the news media. (1) They had teams of people producing regular fresh content, to a high quality. (2) They had existing subscriber bases, which could have been converted to other purposes (consider the online dating services offered by some of the UK newspapers.) (3) They had existing economies of scale from business lines which were not dependent on the internet, buffering them against dot com downturns and the like. (4) Several of them had other divisions producing other good content. e.g. motion picture rights. (5) They had international presence, and internal connectivity. (6) Many had existing consumer-connectivity through cable relationships. Yet. None created geek-friendly workplaces, they were too tied to their cash cows, and they have done badly.
FeistyOtter 6y ago
There was actually a study about an impact a news aggregator has on news consumption. It turns out an impact is noticable but small: around 10-20% for different metrics: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/impact-news-aggregators-internet-news-consumption-case-localization https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers...
- PostThisTooFast 6y ago
  That statement is meaningless. "Impact" is a neutral word, and then you give a metric that, again, doesn't specify what it is. So do you mean that a news aggregator's publishing of abstracts increased or decreased visits to the full story on the original site?
dawnerd 6y ago
They’re kinda doing this to themselves with the paywalls or account login walls (medium comes to mind). I haven’t read a NYT article in months.
- abraae 6y ago
  Firefox containers are your friend.
  - dawnerd 6y ago
    Not when they force login to read.
mxxx 6y ago
Article states that they’ll be fined for doing that too.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Shivetya 6y ago
  then just turn off the CC and don't serve them at all.
  - zentiggr 6y ago
    We just found a legislative way to break the Google search monopoly - more countries pass this sort of "pay to play" barrier, and Google says no, and then there's space for competitors.
    - ZekeSulastin 6y ago
      Wouldn't the competitors then have to do the same thing though, thereby reducing the incentive to compete?
      - rydre 6y ago
        It would bring up opportunity for alternative models for news instead of being tied to search/feed.
        vorpalhex 6y ago
        There's nothing preventing the news from alternative models now. It just turns out employing a bunch of people to repost tweets isn't a profitable business and forcing other companies to pay them via the law doesn't work any better.
    - zanny 6y ago
      I can't imagine the population of any country would be too happy when google.com returns a "Service discontinued due to law blah blah blah" when they want to look up how to beat eggs.
amlaxcw 6y ago
The real newspapers (or what is left of them) can still be found offline in stores, so Google is not required to find them online. I rarely google to find a serious publication. Perhaps it would be a good thing if Google stops indexing news sites.

smabie 6y ago

Yeah, honestly, that's what I hope they do. The amount of entitlement and this holier than thou attitude among the media is pretty annoying. Figure out how to make money like any other business. And if you can't, we'll then I guess you don't matter that much. This decision is crony capitalism at its worst.

simias 6y ago
I would 100% support this mindset if tech giants paid taxes where they make their money. I don't know what the situation is like in Australia but in Europe it's pretty insane. You can't abuse the system on one side and then argue the "efficient market hypothesis" on the other. Google&friends are not making money and competing "like any other business".
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  > Google&friends are not making money and competing "like any other business". I don't understand this. Can you explain, please?
  - jokethrowaway 6y ago
    Several big-enough companies use tax loopholes to avoid paying taxes or lobby the government themselves. This is not specific to big tech though, it's a single point of failure of having a centralised government that is easily corrupted by rich corporations.
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      sorry, again, I'm not following you. How does the ineffectiveness of tax regimes mean that Google and friends aren't competing like a normal business?
      - thedevilslawyer 6y ago
        This reads like sealioning. You really can't see why an entity A that gives 1% in taxes is at an advantage in competing with an entity that gives say 20% in taxes?
        marcus_holmes 6y ago
        but this behaviour (as said above) is not unique to tech. All sufficiently large, sufficiently multinational businesses effectively stop paying the full rate of tax
  - bencollier49 6y ago
    Have a look at these. If you can afford to pay lawyers to set schemes up like this, then you are at a competitive advantage against businesses which pay regular tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shifting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shifti... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich Take the billions of dollars that you've saved from BEPS and use it to subsidize your local products, or run ads attacking the competition, or taking them to court, or hire salespeople, or build new content. Simple.
- qaq 6y ago
  Right and say BMW, VW etc are not doing the exact same thing? There is trade imbalance between US and say Germany if both sides introduce equivalent measures it will hurt EU more than it hurts US.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    We heard that argument so often during the Brexit referendum. It turned out to be rubbish.
    - qaq 6y ago
      Are you seriously comparing size of UK market with the size of US market?
      - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
        US Sales represent 14.7% of BMW's exports, UK is 9.2%. It is cleary comparable.
  - joshuaissac 6y ago
    BMW and VW are not doing the exact same thing. They pay taxes to the US IRS for their profits made in the US. The argument against Google and Facebook is based on their use of profit-shifting to avoid taxes on European profits.
    - nwellnhof 6y ago
      > They pay taxes to the US IRS for their profits made in the US. That's plain wrong. Every company only pays income tax in its country of residence. The only difference is that there might be a sales tax for physical goods.
      - joshuaissac 6y ago
        >Every company only pays income tax in its country of residence. That is not correct. Taxes are payable wherever the profits are made. It is usually the case that the country where the company is headquartered will have a far greater proportion of profits compared to revenue because a lot of the things that add value happen there, but in the case of large tech companies, this is taken to the extreme, where not just profits, but even revenue itself is shifted from where the business actually happens. For example, Google reported £1.6bn (US$2.1bn) in revenue and paid £44m ($58m) in corporation taxes (on profits of £231m ($303m) based on a 19% tax rate) in the UK for the 2019-20 financial year, but its actual UK revenue is estimated to be around £5.7b ($7.5b) for the same period.[1] Whereas car companies have consumers as their customers and have to pay sales tax, AdWords expenditure by businesses is considered a business expense and is not taxed (in the UK). If they played by the same rules, they would have paid around £1.14b ($1.5b; based on 20% VAT) in tax in 2019-20, instead of £44m. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/07/google-uk-staff-earned-average-of-234000-in-2019 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/07/google-uk...
- mxxx 6y ago
  Situation in Australia is that they pay zero.
- Cakez0r 6y ago
  Countries are competing in a market for tax revenue too. If a country wants more tax revenue from a business, they can either close the legal loopholes that allow the business to reduce the amount of tax that they pay or make their tax laws more competitive with those of other countries.
  - mordae 6y ago
    OMG, this is golden. It's a race to the bottom. It ends up completely destroying states and replacing them with corporations.
    - mark_l_watson 6y ago
      I like your comment, not sure if you are joking though. A few decades ago when I started reading William Gibson’s cyber punk sci-fi, I often wondered if the corporate run enclaves in his stories would anticipate real events.
      - zentiggr 6y ago
        Neal Stephenson - "Snow Crash". Even the U.S. Government is reduced to a "franchulate".
        Cakez0r 6y ago
        If the police are defunded, I'd bet that private security companies would fill the void and we'd be well on our way to "Stephensonion" being the next "Orwellian"!
- jp555 6y ago
  look to the law MAKERS, not the law followers.
- Aunche 6y ago
  How does exploiting tax loopholes have anything to do with the success of news media? Arbitrary fines and taxes are one thing. Forcing Google and Facebook to help the news sets a completely new precedent.
akdor1154 6y ago
> And if you can't, we'll then I guess you don't matter that much. This is not true for the media. A functioning, critical, and trustworthy media is very important to society. Profit ≈ importance is just flat out wrong in general. (Not saying I agree with this govt intervention)
- waheoo 6y ago
  I'm not sure you understand what media is in this country. Its all garbage. Even the "fair and unbiased" govt funded ABC is a total toothless joke. https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=HtV-2X4BjQI https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=HtV-2X4BjQI
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > I'm not sure you understand what media is in this country. Its all garbage. > Even the "fair and unbiased" govt funded ABC is a total toothless joke. > https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=HtV-2X4BjQI https://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=HtV-2X4BjQI I don't know much about the Australian media, but I do know a citation to a random youtube comedian does not convincingly support such a statement.
    - waheoo 6y ago
      Thats fair, and I would question anyone getting all their news from the Daily show or last week tonight. Its incredibly biased. Australia's problem is that our news orgs are corrupt to the core, every journo is afraid to go against Murdoch in any way shape or form their careers are ended if they do. So here we are, with this "comedian," doing a better reporting job than pretty much every single outlet in the country. With very few exceptions. Climate change protests https://youtube.com/watch?v=HTAzb7UbJ6M https://youtube.com/watch?v=HTAzb7UbJ6M Darling river fuck up https://youtube.com/watch?v=gNbSazIqVYA https://youtube.com/watch?v=gNbSazIqVYA Fatty mc fuck face https://youtu.be/WmJ7CSRRCDM https://youtu.be/WmJ7CSRRCDM Misinformed journalism https://youtube.com/watch?v=3tTqyZQsG5A https://youtube.com/watch?v=3tTqyZQsG5A
- TomMarius 6y ago
cturner 6y ago
An amusing angle on this situation. If you go back thirty or twenty years, it is hard to think of an industry better-positioned to capture the momentum of the internet than the news media. (1) They had teams of people producing regular fresh content, to a high quality. (2) They had existing subscriber bases, which could have been converted to other purposes (consider the online dating services offered by some of the UK newspapers.) (3) They had existing economies of scale from business lines which were not dependent on the internet, buffering them against dot com downturns and the like. (4) Several of them had other divisions producing other good content. e.g. motion picture rights. (5) They had international presence, and internal connectivity. (6) Many had existing consumer-connectivity through cable relationships. Yet. None created geek-friendly workplaces, they were too tied to their cash cows, and they have done badly.

FeistyOtter 6y ago

There was actually a study about an impact a news aggregator has on news consumption. It turns out an impact is noticable but small: around 10-20% for different metrics: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/impact-news-aggregators-internet-news-consumption-case-localization https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers...

PostThisTooFast 6y ago
That statement is meaningless. "Impact" is a neutral word, and then you give a metric that, again, doesn't specify what it is. So do you mean that a news aggregator's publishing of abstracts increased or decreased visits to the full story on the original site?

dawnerd 6y ago

They’re kinda doing this to themselves with the paywalls or account login walls (medium comes to mind). I haven’t read a NYT article in months.

abraae 6y ago
Firefox containers are your friend.
- dawnerd 6y ago
  Not when they force login to read.

mxxx 6y ago

Article states that they’ll be fined for doing that too.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Shivetya 6y ago
then just turn off the CC and don't serve them at all.
- zentiggr 6y ago
  We just found a legislative way to break the Google search monopoly - more countries pass this sort of "pay to play" barrier, and Google says no, and then there's space for competitors.
  - ZekeSulastin 6y ago
    Wouldn't the competitors then have to do the same thing though, thereby reducing the incentive to compete?
    - rydre 6y ago
      It would bring up opportunity for alternative models for news instead of being tied to search/feed.
      - vorpalhex 6y ago
        There's nothing preventing the news from alternative models now. It just turns out employing a bunch of people to repost tweets isn't a profitable business and forcing other companies to pay them via the law doesn't work any better.
  - zanny 6y ago
    I can't imagine the population of any country would be too happy when google.com returns a "Service discontinued due to law blah blah blah" when they want to look up how to beat eggs.

amlaxcw 6y ago

The real newspapers (or what is left of them) can still be found offline in stores, so Google is not required to find them online. I rarely google to find a serious publication. Perhaps it would be a good thing if Google stops indexing news sites.