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The European Union backs Italy's right to make Meta pay for news
- forestingfisher 5mo agoDoes this mean HN will have to pay for all the links too? Tired of this overregulation
- tekla 5mo agoWhy not? We the posters are providing free content and views and exposure for a VC fund worth billions of dollars. Why are we not getting kickbacks?
- notrealyme123 5mo agoSounds ridiculous, but yes. They earn "something" via their exclusive advertisement spots here. I guess the daily active users are something else though.
- Scarblac 5mo agoBecause you're doing it voluntarily.
- dotcoma 5mo agoAgree. But, sadly, we live in a world in which so often what is obvious needs to be stated.
- tekla 5mo agoDid I hallucinate several years of discourse about volunteer work on the internet should be paid? And that lefty types were yelling about how billionaire corps should compensate volunteer work because they clearly had money? Something starting from Reddit mods?
- wholinator2 5mo agoI don't know if you read it but I've never heard such a thing and i do read the lefty sites sometimes.
- Scarblac 5mo agoSometimes but I've never seen commenting counted as work.
- some_random 5mo agoThose conversations have definitely happened and while I have no clue what the lefty types settled on, in my opinion such internet volunteers should lose money.
- cromka 5mo agoDo you think Meta is asked to pay for the titles?
- stephen_g 5mo agoThey are in Australia, and it’s probably safe to assume this law would be pretty similar to ours. In our version, Part 52B explicitly renders these three things as being exactly the same for the purposes of the law: (a) the content is reproduced on the service or is otherwise placed on the service; or (b) a link to the content is provided on the service; or (c) an extract of the content is provided on the service. Which quite literally means that they consider a post that only contains hyperlink (b) or a link and only a title (even just the title would fall under (c)) to be as bad as a social media site ripping off the whole article! This was the same conflation used by the supporters of the law and pretty much every news article about it before it was passed, basically all of which dishonestly claimed that social media sites were doing (a) when they were mostly only posting a title and sentence or two synopsis (that is supplied by the news site itself in its meta tags!!)
- cromka 5mo agoFair enough. Wonder what Italians want to do. I searched briefly and all I could find was "content", which I assumed were actual extracts.
- bilekas 5mo ago> Tired of this overregulation Why ? When the alternative is to let companies to whatever makes the number go up at the expense of everyone else, regulation is the only thing to protect normal people.
- this_user 5mo agoYou are not protecting "normal people". These types of laws are nothing but attempts at rent seeking by dying legacy media companies that were too incompetent to figure out working digital strategies on their own. And they would already be dead without the traffic that big platforms like Meta and Google are sending their way. If you send traffic to some e-commerce platform through an affiliate link, you are the one who gets paid. These companies are instead trying to rig the system in such a way that the affiliate would be forced to pay them. It's an absurd and desperate proposal that deserves to be rejected.
- buellerbueller 5mo ago>If you send traffic to some e-commerce platform through an affiliate link, you are the one who gets paid. These companies are instead trying to rig the system in such a way that the affiliate would be forced to pay them. It's an absurd and desperate proposal that deserves to be rejected. This isn't what is happening. People read the summarized headline/article on meta's turf and then don't go to the source article. If meta were just posting the link, it would be fine, but that isn't what is happening here.
- abigail95 5mo agoShould HN links be compensated on a percentage of non-click-throughs? There are people who just come for the comments. Would you support this law being universal and not only applied to Meta/news?
- buellerbueller 5mo agoHN links are not article summaries, so your question is not apt.
- buellerbueller 5mo agoMeta doesn't have to pay for the links. It's the summaries. I suspect the publishers would welcome the links, as they'd drive traffic and ad revenue. Instead, Meta is siphoning the revenue by summarizing the content.
- nitwit005 5mo agoWhile they cite the summaries as copyright infringement, news organizations have previously rejected removing them as a way to resolve things. They ultimately want money. Meta's fix has been to try to walk away from the news. They removed the news tab in some regions.
- buellerbueller 5mo agoI think Meta walking away from news is doing the second best thing they could here, albeit cowardly. The best thing, imo would be that Meta has enough dev talent that they could just post the link and not the summary. It isn't for the publishers to decide what information a Meta user's post contains. In other words (IMO): rev share for summaries seems reasonable; a tax on links does not. It's like the way music handles sampling: there were many lawsuits that resulted in there being a clearing requirement for the cost of using a sample of a song in your music, e.g., Biz Markie vs. Gilbert O'Sullivan (1991).
- GenerWork 5mo agoWhy won't Meta just stop showing Italian news now?
- iso1631 5mo agoWhy do they show Italian news before? Because it makes them money.
- rick_dalton 5mo agoCanada passed a similar bill a few years ago causing meta to stop showing Canadian news content on their platforms. It didn’t really impact them financially or user wise. So the same thing will probably happen in Italy.
- einszwei 5mo agoCanadian news might've been easier to replace with American news outlets due to the deep ties between the two and the shared language. I doubt this would be the case for Italian news.
- shevy-java 5mo agoSoon they can only show US news. Then they become irrelevant to the rest of the world.
- halostatue 5mo agoFrankly, the Canadian government needs to come down on them for the misleading and untruthful message that they post when Facebook censors news links. It is past time that American companies are restrained from acting like boorish American tourists in other countries.
- bilekas 5mo agoIt so nice to see megacorps not being allowed to whatever they like as in the US. The EU has regulations and standards. If you don't follow them you can't just try to sue the body. Just follow the rules like you're supposed to. It's quite simply really.
- paulddraper 5mo agoThey already did this with Canada. Meta decided to stop showing news links in Canada. [1] Presumably, it would choose the same thing here. [1] https://www.facebook.com/sureshsingaratnam/posts/so-meta-is-actually-blocking-canadians-from-posting-links-from-snopes-on-faceboo/1397677248388192/ https://www.facebook.com/sureshsingaratnam/posts/so-meta-is-...
- buellerbueller 5mo agoYes, meta took the salt-the-earth approach. Rather then allow users to post links and meta not summarize the content, meta is now destroying its own value for Canadians. These hypercorps and their CEOs act like giant fucking children, and rather than abide by a ruling being told to play fair, they just decide to take their ball and go home. Good riddance. The sooner social media dies, the better off humanity will be.
- nradov 5mo agoYes, that was a great move. I wish Meta would do the same in all countries. I don't go to Facebook to read news.
- throw0101c 5mo ago> Yes, that was a great move. I wish Meta would do the same in all countries. I don't go to Facebook to read news. Lots of news organization saw their traffic drop though, and this reduced revenues. (Not judging either way, just noting some effects.)
- josefx 5mo agoI am not a facebook user, but going by that post they seem to go a step further and outright block any links pointing to news sites. The article mentions some provisions in the Italian law that prohibit restricting visiblity of the news sites, at least during negotiations, so that kind of salted earth move could backfire .
- pcardoso 5mo agoIf Meta refuses to back down and removes news from the feed, could that actually be a net positive? It might push people to visit newspaper sites or apps deliberately, rather than stumbling across news passively and mistaking that for being informed.
- Nasrudith 5mo agoHaha no. If the news media were any good they wouldn't be threatened by online rumormills as a replacement. Instead they produce such crap that comments sections on aggregators provide better information.
- maxdo 5mo agoGood for these news corps , bad for consumers. Free News websites almost 100% consist of ads trash .
- close04 5mo agoIsn’t Facebook just as full of ads that can’t even be blocked by uBO? When I log into the FB account I haven’t really been using in more than a decade, it’s 99% “sponsored” stuff, ads and reels. Really I could scroll through pages and pages of things I never chose to have in my feed before I see any post from a friend. At least on a news website I get to read just the news and can block the ads.
- nozzlegear 5mo agoMy Facebook feed is like 90% posts from local news and radio stations that I don't follow. I rarely see ads, just people posting ragebait comments under those local news articles.
- close04 5mo agoThe ads are "Sponsored" posts which are ads for anything you can think of. The rest are posts from pages I never liked or clicked on. Most have stupid names like "This is the best thing I've seen in at least 5 or 6 minutes" and post almost exclusively memes, a few are pages like Wccftech or XDA because FB remembers 15 years ago I clicked on them. The pattern I noticed just now is that for every sponsored post there are exactly 2 "non-ad" posts, usually both from random pages, but occasionally 1 of those posts will be from one of my real connections. Here and there there are some reels. My feed is 98% noise I don't care about nor want to see and no combination of ad and script blocking helps. It's worse than any news site.
- nozzlegear 5mo ago> My feed is 98% noise I don't care about nor want to see and no combination of ad and script blocking helps. It's worse than any news site. I agree. I click on some of the news articles I see, since they're usually local to me, but it's still noise. I didn't actually follow any of those pages so I don't know why Facebook puts them in my feed (well, I do know why: some corporate schmuck A/B tested it and found it eked out more engagement on the level).
- neksn 5mo agoThe demographics of this site have changed so much that people here are applauding… that it is now illegal to embed opengraph information on Facebook? This is deranged. And it only happens because the government is in bed with legacy media. The government being in bed with the media is awful for the common person. Embedding opengraph data is a clear case of fair use, and it’s sad to see all of this coming from a community that has long been against copyright.
- lokar 5mo agoI think they should be able to show the link, and like a normal one sentence link text, but not a large snippet, images, etc
- neksn 5mo agoThey only show what the website gives them through opengraph tags. If the site doesn’t want to give up that information they can remove the opengraph tags. Even still, fair use should allow Facebook to summarise the contents of the link if they wanted to (but they don’t do that).
- lokar 5mo agoSure, but then proper monopoly laws would ban most of what meta does.
- marcosdumay 5mo agoSue through those, then. Making insane laws prohibiting people to talk about facts they've seen elsewhere won't help.
- Manuel_D 5mo agoWhere does Meta have a monopoly? TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc. all compete with it
- nradov 5mo ago
- wotsdat 5mo ago[dead]
- greatgib 5mo agoSadly, nowadays most eu country officials are corrupted by money or influence... And most media are owned by billionaires that are good friends with officials.