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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

#161

Post by joshuamorton »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #160
joshuamorton wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 offe…

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.

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

#162

Post by BLKNSLVR »

waheoo wrote: post #130
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is a monopoly for what service? I don't use Google (directly) for search. I use Google for some email accounts and other providers for other email accounts. I use Firefox instead of Chrome. I use Android, mainly because it's far more open than ios, and it's possible to use a de-Googled Android (although the useful-ness is reduced). None of the above is related to news, however, which is what this particular di…

You're not serious? Antitrust is about optics, google is clearly monopolistic. Facebook is likely also but it's not perceived that way, Facebook has a lot of real alternatives, people use more than one social platform, whereas people only use one google, oops sorry, I mean search engine. https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/au...

So "Search" is your answer to my question. Fair enough.

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

#163

Post by tomhoward »

RileyJames wrote: post #81
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.

TheAge has gone to sh*t. It’s basically a collection of government press releases now. I’d been noticing just though reading it, and then their own journalists made the same point. It had become pretty blatant. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/14/journalists-at...

To be fair, The Age has long been in a state of derangement through having to compete for its traditional audience with both the (state-funded) ABC and The (trust-funded) Guardian, as well as smaller outlets like The Saturday Paper, Crikey, etc, whilst having lost much of the classifieds revenue that used to fund the formidable investigative, political and business reporting on which it built its proud reputation.

It hasn't been a decent publication for at least 12-15 years, and has long sought to attract eyeballs by stooping to BuzzFeed-style clickbait.

The Nine merger is an attempt to restore it to the position it used to hold in the market, but sadly the world has changed too much for that to be possible, so it's just gone from one kind of trash to another, it would seem.

It's a shame, I have great nostalgia for what it used to be in my early adulthood of the late 90s/early 2000s.

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

#164

Post by brokenmachine »

catmanjan wrote: post #155
brokenmachine wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But a corporation's interests might line up with yours, just like a government.

Superficially, it is profitable for a corporation to make their customers happy so they will want to buy/use their product. Not everything is a monopoly.

Personally, I feel like our government is only concerned with staying in power - historically that's been whoever Murdoch favours - and that's why we get garbage like this.

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

#165

Post by ocdtrekkie »

joshuamorton wrote: post #161
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 offe…

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 underst…

> "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-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.

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