Megacorps vs Governments on News Content

icemann 2021-02-19 03:04:29 UTC #1

As RPS did not mention about this on it’s news page, thought I’d start some discussion on it.

Last year the government of my country (Australia) proposed changes to media laws to force overseas companies to pay for news content on their sites. Google initially completely cracked it and threatened to block all Google services, before backing down and is now in the process of putting together deals with TV media networks here.

Facebook on the other hand as of yesterday has blocked all news content from appearing on Australian user’s news feeds. Not only that, but it also blocked a whole heap of non news pages, like government emergency pages, neighbourhood watch pages etc etc.

And what is all the fuss about? Well this video explains it best:

Essentially their taking 53 cents in every dollar made from a news story when displayed on their site. When asked to pay for displaying it on their site, they have refused saying that their a US company so shouldn’t have to abide by the laws of another country. Well if your going to a run a service in another country then you have to abide by it’s laws to operate there.

Article on the topic:

BillButNotBen 2021-02-19 04:36:58 UTC #2

2021 was the beginning of the MegaCorp wars.
By 2047 nation states had surrendered and the MegaCorps reigned supreme.
In 2051 the resistance began.

Sarfrin 2021-02-19 07:46:58 UTC #3

I feel it’s about time governments had the guts to rein in social media companies a bit. I hope they do it for other massive unaccountable mega corps like Amazon too. Not that Murdoch getting more money is a good thing mind.
No hope of the current UK government doing anything though. They’re too busy enriching themselves.

BillButNotBen 2021-02-19 14:08:37 UTC #4

More seriously, it seems like the main issue is google scraping too much info in insert into search results, rather than linking to the sites themselves.
It’s kinda nuts that 50% of google searches never even click on a link.

If they were just linking to sites, I’d have more sympathy for their position. But if they’re profiting from the scrapes without sending people to the sites then that does seem unfair.

TBH, if google can redirect some of its massive profits to news organizations (other than MurdochCorp) then that might actually be the sustainable business model that a lot of them have been looking for.

icemann 2021-02-19 18:20:43 UTC #5

And print media has been on the decline for quite some time. Some of it is due to stuff this like, and the rest is the progression of technology and less people wanting news in paper form.

Personally nothing beats the style of written stuff on paper, but maybe that’s just an age thing.

LexW 2021-02-19 21:23:19 UTC #6

I’d be interesting to know what proportion “should” have lead to clicking on a link though. Most of the time when I don’t click on a link in Google it falls into one of two categories:

I was trying to remember what a thing was or who a person was and obviously the links revealed that, and I didn’t click.
I wanted Google to do some numerical conversion or translation for me, and google itself did that.

I can’t think of even one time when I googled about a news story and then didn’t click on a news story. The main case with scraped data for me is when they’re scraping stuff from Wikipedia - I do feel like Google should be forced to donate to Wikipedia, quite heftily.

I don’t say this to defend Google, I think they’re pretty predatory, but I feel like with them the issue might be overhyped.

I think it’s less overhyped with Facebook, because apparently an awful lot of people (I was surprised to find out) don’t actually go to “real” websites anymore, but only go to the Facebook pages for the same entities - i.e. instead of going to the actual Guardian website, they go to the Guardian Facebook page. Apparently outside the West this is even more extreme.

BillButNotBen 2021-02-20 03:25:00 UTC #7

This is true, and the same thing occurred to me a bit later.
I mainly don’t click links when i’m checkig spelling, doing maths or currency conversions. Or just remembering the name of a movie or something.

Since I never use facebook, I can’t really comment on their side.
I know there are some companies or games that don’t even have a website, other than their facebook page.

That’s where it gets tricky, as you could say that facebook is providing them with basically free web hosting, whereas in many other places they’d have to pay for this. It’s also providing them with free publicity that I assume they’re voluntarily using. But on the other hand it could be depriving them of income if their main income source is ads and no-one visits to see those ads.

It seems like the solution in both cases would be ad-revenue sharing, rather than Google/Facebook having to pay a flat rate.

BillButNotBen 2021-02-20 10:12:32 UTC #8

This post doesn’t always seem entirely clear to me about whether it’s talking about referrals from facebook or direct visits to sites, but it seems like getting rid of facebook news might cut visits to news websites by about 20%.

On the other hand, apparently the ABC news app has jumped to the top of the charts, so maybe some people are going direct to the source.
It also might depend how long it goes on.

While a decline of 20% might be a tough hit in the short term, I imagine that if it became permanent then some people would find other ways to get to the news, as they did before facebook.