[kirrent]

Yeah, the publishers want compensation for the headline, photo, and text excerpt that appear on the social network. While these are really small excerpts, the publishers contend that it's sufficient to reduce demand for the article itself from users who'll read the headline and preview, maybe interact, and continue scrolling on the social network.

It's not surprising that users will do that to me. We see plenty of people commenting on HN without reading the article, and that's just based on a text only headline.

[aussieguy1234]

They could just drop their opengraph tags if they don't want their content shared in this way. Of course, a simple link will be much less appealing to click on for most users.

[kirrent]

Much less appealing to even read in the first place. Plus you're also in competition with other publishers who will happily gobble up the impressions you used to take. So even if you're willing to play hardball as a publisher, you don't have any real capacity to coerce the social media company.

It's this imbalance in bargaining power that the Australian law at least aims to change (and it's why it's administered by the competition and consumer commission).

[theamk]

Seems like the real problem is "competition with other publishers who will happily gobble up the impressions", and the goal of the law is to reduce such competition?

I hate Facebook, but I think laws to reduce competition are pretty stupid and do not benefit public.

[lmm]

Competition creates a race to the bottom; laws are often the only way to prevent those (e.g. health and safety rules, or minimum wage laws).

[darylteo]

They have full control over these through OpenGraph Tags. It's a whole other thing if FB was scraping the content and summarising it and displaying it... but I don't believe they do that currently.

And naturally people will just copy paste the content of the report anyway.

[realusername]

If it's anything like the EU debates, the media companies publicly lied about how those open graph tags work.

I guess that "we provide the description ourselves and want to be paid for it" didn't sound good enough to the public.

[bombcar]

And these same corporations stop having comments on their own site, and then complain that commentators are using other sites. It all seems so silly to me.

[eviks]

Why not allow links without blurbs/images, is this also something that requires payment?