[rektide]

Cory Doctorow had (as usual) a good write up on these happenings. He spends a good while talking about how lopsided this law is. For a start:

> But of course, this isn't a negotiation between workers and employers: it's a bargain between a cartel of news organizations and a search duopoly. That's not ideal! For starters, it means that the government gets to decide who is a "news organization."

> That's ripe for abuse. News organizations are expected to report on the government and the government gets to decide whether they are entitled to participate in collective bargaining with Googbook, which could mean the difference between financial viability and bankruptcy.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-comple...

He does say that there is some public accountability & reporting that big companies like Facebook & Google will face, which should be helpful generally. But yeah, this looks like a very silly effort, alas:

> It's not wrong to say that the only reason this regulation got off the drawing-board is that [Rupert] Murdoch viewed it as a way to shift a few balance-points from Big Tech's side of the ledger to Big Media's side.

[iliketosleep]

That was an interesting read which shows the original intention behind it wasn't necessarily evil, and that the media code was designed to treat the symptoms of an underlying problem (which are of course the monopolies).