[agloeregrets]

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'

[candiodari]

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.

[mcv]

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.