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You can dislike google and facebook, and feel that they need to be regulated, and still not support objectively bad laws. > Imagine how much quality investigat

You can dislike google and facebook, and feel that they need to be regulated, and still not support objectively bad laws. > Imagine how much quality investigative journalism could've been funded with just the money Google spent developing messaging apps. If you want to tax big tech companies because you feel the end result of doing so is good, then do that. Tax them. Don't create some hairbrained scheme to allow a media conglomerate to extort them. Especially when it won't actually help investigative journalism. The law is crafted to support an entrenched tabloid, not local and investigative journalism, which is what's suffering the most. This law funnels money from tech companies to rupert murdoch. That's not a win. The fox news guy doesn't need a bailout, he's doing okay on his own. > Accept Google's terms or go out of business. What are these "terms"? Aa far as I can tell they're "get traffic for free". What am I missing? Your counter seems to be that Google posts the headline so that, you know, you can pick what to click, and that somehow having the headline means that I won't click on the link. I don't get it.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
> What are these "terms"? Let me highlight some history from the article above: > In 2014, Warner got an email from Google asking if he would be interested in giving the company access to his data in order to scrape it for Knowledge Graph, for free. > At the end of it, we just said ‘look, we’re not comfortable with this.’” > “But then they went ahead and took the data anyway.” The sole way to opt out that Google offered was to delist the site from Google Search, which is effectively deleting your site from the Internet. So the terms of your employer are basically "let Google do what it wants or else". And that's what they've been doing to news companies for years. There's nothing "objectively bad" about forcing a bad actor to finally pay up for it's conduct. Allowing Google or Facebook to decline to participate would be simply allowing the robbers to leave with all of the loot. To better explain: Google and Facebook are monopolies. One common monopoly practice is called predatory pricing: Where you price so low, you are losing money, temporarily, in order to kill competing businesses. For Google and Facebook, refusing to negotiate here, removing service from a given country, is similar: They're aware if they decline to participate, a given country's news organizations will suffer, and eventually relent. Google and Facebook, as global monopolies, are large enough and profitable enough that this doesn't hurt them much, so they have no reason to negotiate fairly and honestly. Hence why Google and Facebook argue the price they should pay is $0: They currently don't bear a significant enough loss from simply refusing to play. They must be forced to participate so that honest negotiation can happen. Realistically, the long term answer is to break these companies up, but in the interim, we need to use regulation to force them to pay up in areas where they would have to if they weren't monopolies.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  Again: I'm talking about news. You keep bringing up a thing that isn't news. What are the terms for news sites? > There's nothing "objectively bad" about forcing a bad actor to finally pay up for it's conduct. Correct. That's why I said, essentially, "if you want them to pay up, tax them". I'm not saying any law that forces tech companies to pay money must be objectively bad. I am saying that this law is. You understand the difference. > Realistically, the long term answer is to break these companies up, but in the interim, we need to use regulation to force them to pay up in areas where they would have to if they weren't monopolies. And to do this, you support a bit of regulatory capture that instead directs the funds to a media monopoly. Like I said, it's an objectively bad law. > One common monopoly practice is called predatory pricing: Where you price so low, you are losing money, temporarily, in order to kill competing businesses You're actually arguing that the price, free, which Google and Facebook charge is too high, and that they need to further decrease it (by subsidizing the content they aggregate). Is the price too high, or is it predatorily low? You can't argue both sides. If you were really concerned with predatory pricing, you'd be against this law, because it (if applied generally) prevents competitors to Google or Facebook from gaining marketshare, since they can't afford to pay media companies. So as long as the entrenched actors pay the tax, upstarts can't start.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    > "if you want them to pay up, tax them" Tried that. Your employer as of yesterday has... decided to make the little guys pay for that too: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-amazon-google-pass-costs-digital-services-taxes-2020-9?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-amazon-google-pass-cos... Fundamentally, we're trying a lot of different strategies to fix this, but Google is greatly invested in dodging any sort of responsibility for it's externalities and actions. Perhaps the solution here is to both implement a tax and prohibit harmful over-trillion-dollar-monopolies from raising prices at the same time? But then, they'll say it's unfair that they can't set whatever prices they want. I am not sure Australia's attempt will be any more successful, but it's increasingly becoming apparent we just need to ban these companies from operating, forcibly shut them down, and retire their user-hostile services.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

> What are these "terms"? Let me highlight some history from the article above: > In 2014, Warner got an email from Google asking if he would be interested in giving the company access to his data in order to scrape it for Knowledge Graph, for free. > At the end of it, we just said ‘look, we’re not comfortable with this.’” > “But then they went ahead and took the data anyway.” The sole way to opt out that Google offered was to delist the site from Google Search, which is effectively deleting your site from the Internet. So the terms of your employer are basically "let Google do what it wants or else". And that's what they've been doing to news companies for years. There's nothing "objectively bad" about forcing a bad actor to finally pay up for it's conduct. Allowing Google or Facebook to decline to participate would be simply allowing the robbers to leave with all of the loot. To better explain: Google and Facebook are monopolies. One common monopoly practice is called predatory pricing: Where you price so low, you are losing money, temporarily, in order to kill competing businesses. For Google and Facebook, refusing to negotiate here, removing service from a given country, is similar: They're aware if they decline to participate, a given country's news organizations will suffer, and eventually relent. Google and Facebook, as global monopolies, are large enough and profitable enough that this doesn't hurt them much, so they have no reason to negotiate fairly and honestly. Hence why Google and Facebook argue the price they should pay is $0: They currently don't bear a significant enough loss from simply refusing to play. They must be forced to participate so that honest negotiation can happen. Realistically, the long term answer is to break these companies up, but in the interim, we need to use regulation to force them to pay up in areas where they would have to if they weren't monopolies.

joshuamorton 6y ago
Again: I'm talking about news. You keep bringing up a thing that isn't news. What are the terms for news sites? > There's nothing "objectively bad" about forcing a bad actor to finally pay up for it's conduct. Correct. That's why I said, essentially, "if you want them to pay up, tax them". I'm not saying any law that forces tech companies to pay money must be objectively bad. I am saying that this law is. You understand the difference. > Realistically, the long term answer is to break these companies up, but in the interim, we need to use regulation to force them to pay up in areas where they would have to if they weren't monopolies. And to do this, you support a bit of regulatory capture that instead directs the funds to a media monopoly. Like I said, it's an objectively bad law. > One common monopoly practice is called predatory pricing: Where you price so low, you are losing money, temporarily, in order to kill competing businesses You're actually arguing that the price, free, which Google and Facebook charge is too high, and that they need to further decrease it (by subsidizing the content they aggregate). Is the price too high, or is it predatorily low? You can't argue both sides. If you were really concerned with predatory pricing, you'd be against this law, because it (if applied generally) prevents competitors to Google or Facebook from gaining marketshare, since they can't afford to pay media companies. So as long as the entrenched actors pay the tax, upstarts can't start.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  > "if you want them to pay up, tax them" Tried that. Your employer as of yesterday has... decided to make the little guys pay for that too: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-amazon-google-pass-costs-digital-services-taxes-2020-9?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-amazon-google-pass-cos... Fundamentally, we're trying a lot of different strategies to fix this, but Google is greatly invested in dodging any sort of responsibility for it's externalities and actions. Perhaps the solution here is to both implement a tax and prohibit harmful over-trillion-dollar-monopolies from raising prices at the same time? But then, they'll say it's unfair that they can't set whatever prices they want. I am not sure Australia's attempt will be any more successful, but it's increasingly becoming apparent we just need to ban these companies from operating, forcibly shut them down, and retire their user-hostile services.