[sircastor]

I don’t like Facebook, and I think the way it abuses its position is awful, but I don’t understand the position of the news industry or the judiciary supporting the industry.

If I were to stand on a corner and tell people what was on the menu and the daily special of a cafe down the block, I cannot think of a situation where that cafe would think they were owed money for my doing this.

I understand that Facebook and Google have a powerful market position, but I don’t see that as part of the argument.

[jedberg]

Your analogy isn't quite right. More like this:

There are a bunch of stores in your area that offer free samples. You open your own store where people can tell you what stores they like, you go and grab the free sample, and then give the sample out at your store for free in exchange for there person's email and phone number and filing out a survey on which samples they like. Then you tell them where the sample came from and also sell their name and number and preferences to advertisers, some of whom are the stores you're getting samples from. Really hungry people will go to the store and pay for more, everyone else will be happy with the samples you gave them and walk away, maybe telling their friends how good it was. Your store gets hugely popular and has way more visitors every day than any of the local stores.

Now the government comes in and tells you that you have to pay for your samples, but regular people can still go to those stores and get their free samples.

But see, this is why I think Facebook was right here. If the stores really didn't want you doing this, they could just not give you a free sample. I'm not sure why the government needs to step in here at all. If you're providing a benefit to the other stores (more foot traffic) than why should they get paid? And if the traffic you are providing isn't good, why should they let you get the free samples?

[sofixa]

> But see, this is why I think Facebook was right here. If the stores really didn't want you doing this, they could just not give you a free sample. I'm not sure why the government needs to step in here at all. If you're providing a benefit to the other stores (more foot traffic) than why should they get paid? And if the traffic you are providing isn't good, why should they let you get the free samples

Because it's neither here nor there. The traffic that trickles down to news sites is minimal because for a lot of people the title, photo and description are enough, but it's still more than the nothing they'd get if they block Google/Facebook indexing, because most people use the latter for news.

[jbob2000]

This analogy doesn't work because information is not a limited commodity. Once you've "printed" the news, its value drops to 0. This isn't the old days where you had to physically print 1,000,000 papers if you wanted the message to get to 1,000,000 people. You can "print" the news once now, and EVERYONE can see it.

[jedberg]

No analogy is perfect. :)

But even still, it costs them money to research and write the news. Distribution is free but creation is not.

[austhrow743]

Collaborating with the free sample store gets them more business than if they don't and others do, but less than if no one did. So "If the stores really didn't want you doing this, they could just not give you a free sample" doesn't really work.

[harikb]

I thought news sites maintained their own pages and followers on Facebook. How does your analogy account for that?

[jedberg]

That’s separate. I’m just talking about when a user posts a link to the news in their feed.

[seanmcdirmid]

Maybe it is kind of like those people that hand out free samples at Costco, they are contracted by the product vendor, but some people think Costco should be paying for all those free samples because those samples draw traffic to their store.

Or something like that.

[ece]

I think there are 3 reasons I can think of why newspapers are demanding more from FB/Google:

1) Ad-spend has gone digital and especially local newspapers have had a hard time transitioning. FB/Google have captured the growth here over the past decade or so.

2) Changes in the FB news feed has large affects on their traffic, something which they have no control over.

3) They can't build a subscriber-only moat if they have to give away stories for people to click through on sites like FB.

I think number 3 can be worked around with summaries, or offering limited full story views/month, and number 2 is unfortunate, but better content will win out and help with number 3 as well.

Number 1 is where they have the strongest case to want a profit sharing agreement, and that's what FB/Google are basically doing. Whether this will help those organizations that actually need help is to be seen. I hope it does, especially local newspapers. If stories like these are true, then $1 billion is only 1/5th of the captured value: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-new...

[framilisandro]

Facebook now is full of uncontrol advertisements and trash I don't like it either Any suggestion of a better social network?

[hertzrat]

Your analogy needs to be reworked a bit. Information about what’s in the menu doesn’t solve the hunger problem. Headlines or summaries can solve peoples information problem. Your analogy works slightly better for Yelp actually. Apparently the restaurant industry is upset about it but I’m not familiar enough with the issue to know why

[yowlingcat]

> Headlines or summaries can solve peoples information problem.

They can also create information problems. It's not cut and dry.