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Australia’s Proposed “Fox News Tax”

jamesallworth.medium.com

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Re: Australia’s Proposed “Fox News Tax”

#21

Post by agloeregrets »

mcv wrote: post #19
agloeregrets wrote: post #13

This isn't about the money. France is doing the same thing and Google is fine with it. It's about the detail that Google is required to share all algorithm changes with news co's four weeks in advance of them. This massively ties their hands and would require the AU news to effectively use an entirely different stack of logic and rules to display news articles...which are worth basically nothing to google because the…

> France is doing the same thing and Google is fine with it. Is it? Several countries have proposed laws that they hoped would force Google to pay for links to news sites, and every time, Google's response has been to not list those news site. And if the law didn't allow that, they just left that market entirely. The simple fact is that most sites in the Web like being found through search engines. If news sites want…

Maybe not quite the same thing, notably the AU law requires a certain percentage of articles too. But pretty much, these news companies will regret this pretty badly eventually. Like 'Congrats, you de-indexed your entire business'

Re: Australia’s Proposed “Fox News Tax”

#22

Post by cycomanic »

jassinpain wrote: post #4

I think it's interesting how they use Fox News in the title, not News Corp. Sadly the makes it clear this is a agenda article not really about the people. The statement is made that the funds raised should goto the Australia citizens and not the news producers who's content is being used by big tech without compensation. While the law maybe bad it's not made clear by the anti "Fox News" agenda of the author, sadly th…

>I think it's interesting how they use Fox News in the title, not News Corp. Sadly the makes it clear this is a agenda article not really about the people. The statement is made that the funds raised should goto the Australia citizens and not the news producers who's content is being used by big tech without compensation. While the law maybe bad it's not made clear by the anti "Fox News" agenda of the author, sadly this is what most news has come to not reporting but reporter agenda pieces.

I think it is perfectly valid to call out Fox News in the title, because most readers would not know who News Corp is but do know Fox News, and for the intents of this article they are very similar.

Moreover the reason why this is called in particularly the Fox News tax is because News Corp are the main beneficiary by quite a margin, they have >50% market share in Australia [1].

Furthermore Murdoch has a strong history of influencing Australian politics in his favour and the ruling liberal party has a history of implementing policy directly to benefit him.

The National Broadband Network was widely popular in Australia, however it threatened Murdoch's payTV business. So he had meetings with liberal party leadership, who promised to hamstring (or roll-back) the NBN. They were essentially voted into power with headlines of "vote these suckers out" (Labour was in power) and similar in all Murdoch papers and no none of the "left-leaning" papers ever did something remotely close to that. As a non-Australian it was quite shocking to observe how blatantly partisan those headlines were.

News corp is not media it is a far-right billionaire propaganda organisation.

Re: Australia’s Proposed “Fox News Tax”

#23

Post by mushbino »

AndrewSChapman wrote: post #8
Loughla wrote: post #3

So the proposition in this article is that Murdoch is just using this to enrich himself, at the expense of Google and Facebook specifically. What do you call a competition where you want both sides to somehow lose?

You're 100% correct, as it stands there's not a great outcome. What we need is for social media to have to pay for the information they profit from, whilst at the same time ensuring that official media outlets have to produce quality, well researched, fact-led journalism. If we have both of these things then we win.

I'm wondering if Google and others can claim that what's put out by outlets like Fox news are not actually news but entertainment and the laws don't apply to that. They use that argument constantly in court to wiggle out of lawsuits.

Re: Australia’s Proposed “Fox News Tax”

#24

Post by candiodari »

agloeregrets wrote: post #21
mcv wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> France is doing the same thing and Google is fine with it. Is it? Several countries have proposed laws that they hoped would force Google to pay for links to news sites, and every time, Google's response has been to not list those news site. And if the law didn't allow that, they just left that market entirely. The simple fact is that most sites in the Web like being found through search engines. If news sites want…

Maybe not quite the same thing, notably the AU law requires a certain percentage of articles too. But pretty much, these news companies will regret this pretty badly eventually. Like 'Congrats, you de-indexed your entire business'

There's a second effect too. Let's say governments get their wish and Google/FB cave. Now Google and Facebook have a direct financial incentive to destroy news organisations, or perhaps create their own (Twitter, FB and perhaps Youtube would make incredible platforms to create a crowdsourced news agency or publication, I would love to see how far they'd get)

When the News industry is already dying, this would change the dynamic from competing for eyeballs to social media companies actively trying to destroy news media, preventing their articles from having anything newsworthy or interesting at all.

You'd think the News industry would try to avoid picking this particular fight when they're already struggling to stay alive ... But I guess you'd be wrong.

Re: Australia’s Proposed “Fox News Tax”

#25

Post by EGreg »

rootusrootus wrote: post #14
EGreg wrote: post #7

This is exactly why we need micropayments on the web. Without correct solutions from the open source movement and the open Web, the State will end up doing stuff like this. We have been building a community-to-publisher micropayment model. You can read about the economics of it here: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#ECONOMICS And furthermore, all these projects should start adopting the Web Monetization stardard…

I don't think any normal person wants micropayments. It's a hassle, and if I have to pay for every thing I want to click on, I'm mostly not going to click anything at all. Even if it's just pennies. It is the epitome of 'getting nickled and dimed to death'. I expect the future of the 'net is a collection of walled gardens, where you pay just once and get everything from news to music, movies, etc. Basically what Appl…

I don’t think you have read the link I sent.

We address that of course. Micropayments are supposed to be from communities to publishers, same as Netflix pays shows based on how many episodes or minutes are watched. You pay netflix and let them do the whole payout thing. They are an aggregator. Now decentralize that!

Re: Australia’s Proposed “Fox News Tax”

#26

Post by rootusrootus »

EGreg wrote: post #25
rootusrootus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think any normal person wants micropayments. It's a hassle, and if I have to pay for every thing I want to click on, I'm mostly not going to click anything at all. Even if it's just pennies. It is the epitome of 'getting nickled and dimed to death'. I expect the future of the 'net is a collection of walled gardens, where you pay just once and get everything from news to music, movies, etc. Basically what Appl…

I don’t think you have read the link I sent. We address that of course. Micropayments are supposed to be from communities to publishers, same as Netflix pays shows based on how many episodes or minutes are watched. You pay netflix and let them do the whole payout thing. They are an aggregator. Now decentralize that!

Isn't that some version of what we already have, though? When I think micropayments I'm thinking of the consumer side. I thought there was consensus on that term, but I might be wrong. Would hardly be the first time :)

Re: Australia’s Proposed “Fox News Tax”

#27

Post by aurizon »

caminocorner wrote: post #20

Calling this a Fox News Tax is a stretch, which requires the author to make several connections to publishers, the first of which was the Wall Street Journal. Why not call it the WSJ Tax? Indicates this is a scammy title looking for clicks.

FTM = Follow the money - all the way to Murdoch...

Re: Australia’s Proposed “Fox News Tax”

#28

Post by mcv »

candiodari wrote: post #24
agloeregrets wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not quite the same thing, notably the AU law requires a certain percentage of articles too. But pretty much, these news companies will regret this pretty badly eventually. Like 'Congrats, you de-indexed your entire business'

There's a second effect too. Let's say governments get their wish and Google/FB cave. Now Google and Facebook have a direct financial incentive to destroy news organisations, or perhaps create their own (Twitter, FB and perhaps Youtube would make incredible platforms to create a crowdsourced news agency or publication, I would love to see how far they'd get) When the News industry is already dying, this would change…

Also, if getting listed as news is enough to get money, then that's not necessarily an incentive that encourages investigative journalism. We've already seen that making up lies and calling it news is cheaper than thorough investigative journalism. If governments want to protect investigative journalism, they should probably just subsidise it directly, instead of forcing other parties to subsidise various news articles.

Re: Australia’s Proposed “Fox News Tax”

#29

Post by lokedhs »

mcv wrote: post #19
agloeregrets wrote: post #13

This isn't about the money. France is doing the same thing and Google is fine with it. It's about the detail that Google is required to share all algorithm changes with news co's four weeks in advance of them. This massively ties their hands and would require the AU news to effectively use an entirely different stack of logic and rules to display news articles...which are worth basically nothing to google because the…

> France is doing the same thing and Google is fine with it. Is it? Several countries have proposed laws that they hoped would force Google to pay for links to news sites, and every time, Google's response has been to not list those news site. And if the law didn't allow that, they just left that market entirely. The simple fact is that most sites in the Web like being found through search engines. If news sites want…

In France's case, they did agree on that: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/21/google-inks-agreement-in-f...

So it's clearly not a matter of principle for them. As far as I understand, Google sending traffic to the news organisations will count as payment, which is probably why it's acceptable. If they don't want to pay any money for the text they copy from the articles, they can just increase the number of links to that organisation to compensate so they don't have to pay.

Re: Australia’s Proposed “Fox News Tax”

#30

Post by anothernewdude »

AndrewSChapman wrote: post #6
anothernewdude wrote: post #2

> “Google’s threat to withdraw its search engine from Australia is chilling to anyone who cares about democracy.” Is it? Or have they just realised they may have just stopped the business model that has kept search engines free? Even if you think the business model survives, how is this even close to chilling? So you get competitors in its place. How does that hurt democracy? What hurts democracy is Media companies l…

I think the supposition is that if Google and FB have to pay for news articles from proper news outlets with proper journalists, they may decide not do. At the same time, people will not change their habits of getting their news from social media. This will lead to most people getting "news" from writers that are not qualified journalists, increasing the echo chamber effect and narrowing the range of information peop…

That happens regardless. People pick their own sources, and aren't optimising for truth.
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