the best way forward is to go back and ban news orgs from google, facebook, etc in countries where governments are captured by these media conglomerates. if the laws forbid this course of action then these companies should close down their local offices. google/fb can afford to make less money, and in this case they should.
Google displaying story snippets on the search pages obviate the need to actually visit the site itself (and load ads, content, etc) and by doing so materially harm news sites. If Google want to use the content rather than just link to it then I think compensation is fair.
> Google displaying story snippets on the search pages obviate the need to actually visit the site itself (and load ads, content, etc) and by doing so materially harm news sites.
no, the real issue here is that news sites had their business model broken for the past 20 years. they don’t know how to fix it. they are now click baiting machines. which is deepening their broken business models as trust in them is gone. this new scheme is them gasping for revenue.
Maybe you missed out on all the concentration of media assets that has happened over the past 40 years. We went from every small town having their own newspaper and small cities having their own TV stations to having moguls like Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch buying up newpapers and TV stations to form giant empires. Naturally, one of the first steps in making your empire scale is to start cutting the excess "fat" in the form of local reporters, as your media empire can use reporters in the bigger cities to cover the entire region. Then your regions start getting bigger and bigger. All the local content is now gone. This process was mostly complete by the end of the 1990s.
Then advertising on the internet took off in the 2000s, further depleting the pool of local advertising dollars available to many media organizations. Today most media organizations are a hollow shell of what they once were.
Without local news, democracy can't work, and it's sad that many places no longer have it. And quality reporting takes time and money, exactly what we don't have in today's internet. Sure, plenty of niches previously ignored are now well served, but there's a glaring gap in quality local news these days in most places.
I don’t follow what you’re saying. Can you elaborate on the “shoulds” here? What principles are so important that giant corporations should leave money on the table to rightfully uphold them?
I wasn’t aware that every news article in the Facebook news feed was user submitted content. I for some reason was under the impression that there was some degree of automated aggregation involved.
> Who would be banning the news orgs in countries where the government is captured by them? That captive government?
google and fb should be banning their news sites in countries where governments are captured.
> Why is the public interest best served by the government siding with google/facebook etc over the news orgs themselves?
the governments would not be siding with google/facebook but with the public. there is no public interest best served by breaking the nature of linking on the internet.
Yup. Their news feed is just an algorithmic hate machine. Facebook was almost ideal (conceptually) beforehand.
My future perfect social media is persistent chat for friends and family. I just want to see babies, puppies, weddings, funerals, holidays, and all the other important life events of my nearest and dearest.
> A similar Australian law, which took effect in March 2021 after talks with the big tech firms led to a brief shutdown of Facebook news feeds in the country, has largely worked, a government report said.
They are bluffing. Despite fake metrics to the contrary, news drives vast amount of secondary engagement on their platform and removing the news tab would not remove the regulatory effect (news still happen in feed)
Worse for them it would harm republicans who rely on the radicalization engine and will respond to it in a hostile way. they are bluffing.
Google and Facebook have incrementally destryed the fourth estate for decades so that's quite the flex claiming newspapers actually are grateful for Meta's "beneficence."
the best way forward is to go back and ban news orgs from google, facebook, etc in countries where governments are captured by these media conglomerates. if the laws forbid this course of action then these companies should close down their local offices. google/fb can afford to make less money, and in this case they should.