So why a News Feed?

People pay for a place to live and almost every amenity therein except the air we breathe. We pay for the electricity that moves bits around. For telephone lines. For computing hardware. For connecting to the internet. For getting information in print.

But for a certain type of software and information retrieval / news exchange, that builds on all this stuff we pay for, hurrah, we dont have to pay, not with money anyway, we just have to relinquish a bit a value (become a transparent, monitored and manipulated object).

Spot the odd business model. A business model that combines obvious amorality and social regression with economic shortsightness: You cannot build the digital society solely on monetizing personal data.

Yes, people will have to pay for journalism in the digital age, just like they have to pay individually for everything else that is not a public good paid collectively via taxes.

How we get there is not so important. No, people cannot be bothered to subscribe to hundreds of individual sources. We need decent intermediares (many of them and competing) that will (for a fee, lets say €10 per month) provide access to a basket of newspapers, journals etc.

The idea is an old one but executing it is difficult when you have to compete against above said aberrant business model. Sometimes politicians and legislators need to grow a spine or otherwise the very system that empowered them will collapse

There were so many bad outcomes of this Act. It led to the corporate dominance that exists over US media today, and that translated to greater censorship, greater homogenization, less local control, and a simplification of American perspectives in general.

Clear Channel could not exist without this Act - that should be enough on its own to condemn it.

The media is trash today because of this law. But the media is owned by those who benefited from it, so you'll never hear about this.

I did not really meant that. I meant that fascism adjacent content shows up in your recommendations somewhere around your gaming videos or whatever. You are open to it, click on it. You know nothing about discussed history so you just swallow it and move from there.

In the initial situation, you did not cared, one way or the other. But now, all you know is what this says and you believe it, because your mind was open.

The penalty for wrongthink on mastodon is banning. This ensures ideological homogeneity within each instance. For many people, this is a feature not a bug.

> that is not a public good paid collectively via taxes.

Keeping in mind that most things which are paid for in this way do not meet the economic definition of a "public good" and therefore could have been provided efficiently by private entities for profit.

"News" is different.

At its core, without external regulations, "information" is not rivalrous: If I know something, that does not preclude you from knowing it. If I make a decision based on that information, that does not preclude you from making other decisions using that information (in contrast, if I eat a particular apple, you cannot eat the same apple).

Further, to the chagrin of many, "information", at its core, is not excludable in that there is always a way in which it can be transmitted which has frustrated and continues to frustrate many who seek to control it.

"News" is different though. Because "news" is usually something that demands attention now. Human attention is a constrained resource both because time is limited and because of cognitive constraints. Therefore, if one wants to understand what to do with this piece of "news", one may not be ability to process the this other one. Further, one can be excluded from receiving "news": Sure, you may get to find out eventually, but only people who pay for X can get the "news" immediately in a digestable way etc.

When private entities try to provide information people value, there will be a variety of them, competing, contradicting etc.

When a non-accountable body is charged with providing information that all must receive with funds collected in a way that is unrelated to what people want from the information they receive, guess what will happen.