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An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

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Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#151

Post by Wolfenstein98k »

stephen_g wrote: post #74
pfundstein wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the entire Australian media has been nothing but puppets controlled by murdoch You're going a bit heavy on hyperbole there. There's a decent amount of non-murdoch news; ABC, SBS, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, The Conversation, etc.

It's actually getting worse and worse. The Age and the Herald, having been sold to Nine are much lower quality than they once were. The Government is putting more and more pressure on the ABC, with constant (effective) funding cuts, and both direct editorial interference or indirect (i.e. threatening more funding cuts because of journalists publishing articles they don't like). With the ABC, this has been going on fo…

Alberici was caught making egregious errors and was heavily biased. She couldn't even tell that MYOB is a software company, instead calling them an insurance company IIRC.

Her claims that all corporate losses are profit-shifting was similarly egregious.

She deserved to lose her position, she was campaigning for one side and lying to do so.

I don't say this lightly - go look at the investigation into her piece and why it was taken down.

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#152

Post by aembleton »

threeseed wrote: post #2

As I've mentioned before you only need to look at the fact that public and smaller news organisations e.g. ABC, SBS are not compensated to get an idea of the intention of this policy. It's purely to prop up News Corp which is struggling (16% loss in 2020 revenue) because of weak newspaper sales and Foxtel bleeding customers to Netflix, Disney etc. And unfortunately just like in UK and US whenever Rupert Murdoch says…

If they're struggling, are they that relevant any more in swinging elections?

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#153

Post by joshuamorton »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #145
joshuamorton wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Realistically? What percentage of news do you read the in-depth article, versus the headline, picture, and two-sentence-blurb that tells you the main point? And the front page of a news site, say, cnn.com, is it monetized with ads? (It is. Even with all my blockers I see a LendingTree ad right now.) For me the answer is, either I get a headline that I don't care about, or I read at least some of the article. > (It'…

> You can't have it both ways. "Pay me for this." "No." "I'll make you pay me!" "Ok then I'll stop." "No don't stop that's even worse. Pay me and keep doing the thing!" That's the conversation happening, and it makes zero sense. But that is the level of craziness we are under in the Google regime: Accept Google's terms or go out of business. That's the whole problem. Google has infinite negotiating power. The counter…

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.

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#154

Post by abdulla »

abdulla wrote: post #3

Stratechery has a good analysis of the "News Media Bargaining Code": https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargainin...

Committing the faux pas of replying to myself, here's another take:

https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/08/31/scott-morrison-v-facebo...

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#155

Post by catmanjan »

brokenmachine wrote: post #140
catmanjan wrote: post #11

As an Australian I have no doubt the policy is misguided, but the fact that these American companies are being so loud about it makes me wonder if the government is actually on the right track. In general I would say whatever corporations want is not in my best interest, so whatever they don't want, might be.

Do you feel that what the government wants is in your best interest? I'm Australian and I don't.

No, but I feel it could, I don't think any corporation ever could

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#156

Post by hnick »

joshuamorton wrote: post #84
Barrin92 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to miss the point because normally platforms also have to pay for content. Facebook is a platform that hosts user/business produced content. No content, no reason to go to facebook. Likewise, Facebook brings attention to content owners. All of this is 'free' nominally. That's not the question, the question is who has more market power and squeezes who.

Are you saying that Google should pay me to include my website in it's search results?

I think there is an argument that they should for rich snippets at least. They go a bit beyond being an index then.

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#157

Post by hnick »

arthens wrote: post #71

A week ago back some friends and I looked at the draft of the law... it's honestly terrifying. They basically want Google/fb/? to be upfront with all changes. The goal is clearly to give aussie media outlet an unfair advantage and let them use this information to manipulate the ranking algorithm and/or bypass whatever restrictions are put in place. These info need to be "in terms that are readily comprehensible". IAN…

> The goal is clearly to give aussie media outlet an unfair advantage and let them use this information to manipulate the ranking algorithm and/or bypass whatever restrictions are put in place. These info need to be "in terms that are readily comprehensible".

I wonder what kind of malicious compliance we could see while still being within the letter of the law.

e.g. Articles that start with "Murdoch is a cancer on society" will be ranked much higher than those that don't. Enjoy.

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#159

Post by postingawayonhn »

shortweb3 wrote: post #147
hnick wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be, but as an incidental side effect I don't think it's a great outcome. The law as suggested is confusing and uncertain and that will have a chilling effect on sharing 'news' while the crazies sharing opinions might not be so shy. Day 1 for example, it supposedly won't effect Reddit. But if FB/Goog pull out, Reddit will be the next target really quickly. Repeat for anything relevant until it hits something…

Can someone explain why this is beneficial to Murdoch or other organisations? Right now if I perform a search for say ‘coronavirus vaccine Australia’ two government sites come up and 10 news sites. If I then click on a news site they can advertise to me and in the case of the guardian ask for donations in the case of Murdoch ask for subscriptions. If they are removed then how my only choice is to go direct to the sit…

They don't want to be removed. The law is written in a way that makes it really hard for Facebook and Google to do so. They want to be paid (News Corp thinks they should be paying $1b and NINE think about $600m).

Re: An Update About Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia

#160

Post by ocdtrekkie »

joshuamorton wrote: post #153
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't have it both ways. "Pay me for this." "No." "I'll make you pay me!" "Ok then I'll stop." "No don't stop that's even worse. Pay me and keep doing the thing!" That's the conversation happening, and it makes zero sense. But that is the level of craziness we are under in the Google regime: Accept Google's terms or go out of business. That's the whole problem. Google has infinite negotiating power. The counter…

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 me…

> 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.

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