Australia's Standoff Against Google and Facebook Worked - Sort Of (arstechnica.com) 48
Remember when Google threatened to leave Australia if the country implemented a "news media bargaining code" forcing social media platforms to pay news publishers?
Wired reports:
Google and Facebook did not leave; they paid up, striking deals with news organizations to pay for the content they display on their sites for the first time. The code was formally approved on March 2, 2021... One year after the media code was introduced, Google has 19 content deals with news organizations and Facebook has 11, according to [Australia's communications minister Paul] Fletcher. Now countries around the world are looking at Australia's code as a blueprint of how to subsidize the news and stop the spread of "news deserts" — communities that no longer have a local newspaper.
Canada is expected to propose its own version in March. Media associations in both the U.S. and New Zealand are calling for similar policies. Reports suggest the UK culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, is also planning to require platforms to strike cash-for-content deals.
The international interest has prompted fierce debate about how well Australia's code works.
"We know it works, we can see the evidence," says Fletcher. He points to how the deals are funding journalism in rural areas. Broadcaster The ABC said its deals with Facebook and Google enabled it to hire 50 regional journalists. Google, however, disagrees. It has accused the media code of stifling media diversity by giving media giants a better deal than smaller publishers. "The primary benefactors of such a code would be a small number of incumbent media providers," Google said in a submission to the U.S. Copyright Office, which is currently reviewing its own media laws....
The criticism of Australia's system focuses on its lack of transparency, which means that media companies cannot compare notes on the deals they are offered and there is a lack of clarity on which outlets are entitled to negotiate.... Concerns about the code's flaws are leaking into Canada, where Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party is drafting its own Australia-style legislation. "We're locking down the incumbent publishers, and we're locking down Google and Facebook's dominance as opposed to countering the dominance that exists on both sides," says Dwayne Winseck, journalism professor at Canada's Carleton University.... Yet Canada's news industry is willing to overlook these limitations because it considers the cash as a lifeline, according to Paul Deegan, president and chief executive of News Media Canada.... They are running out of time to save some of the media landscape, he explains — 40 newspapers have closed permanently since the start of the pandemic. "We've got a number of titles and even chains of titles that are quite literally teetering on the brink."
Deegan agrees the code isn't perfect. This is not a magic bullet, he says, "this is a badly needed Band-Aid."
Canada is expected to propose its own version in March. Media associations in both the U.S. and New Zealand are calling for similar policies. Reports suggest the UK culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, is also planning to require platforms to strike cash-for-content deals.
The international interest has prompted fierce debate about how well Australia's code works.
"We know it works, we can see the evidence," says Fletcher. He points to how the deals are funding journalism in rural areas. Broadcaster The ABC said its deals with Facebook and Google enabled it to hire 50 regional journalists. Google, however, disagrees. It has accused the media code of stifling media diversity by giving media giants a better deal than smaller publishers. "The primary benefactors of such a code would be a small number of incumbent media providers," Google said in a submission to the U.S. Copyright Office, which is currently reviewing its own media laws....
The criticism of Australia's system focuses on its lack of transparency, which means that media companies cannot compare notes on the deals they are offered and there is a lack of clarity on which outlets are entitled to negotiate.... Concerns about the code's flaws are leaking into Canada, where Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party is drafting its own Australia-style legislation. "We're locking down the incumbent publishers, and we're locking down Google and Facebook's dominance as opposed to countering the dominance that exists on both sides," says Dwayne Winseck, journalism professor at Canada's Carleton University.... Yet Canada's news industry is willing to overlook these limitations because it considers the cash as a lifeline, according to Paul Deegan, president and chief executive of News Media Canada.... They are running out of time to save some of the media landscape, he explains — 40 newspapers have closed permanently since the start of the pandemic. "We've got a number of titles and even chains of titles that are quite literally teetering on the brink."
Deegan agrees the code isn't perfect. This is not a magic bullet, he says, "this is a badly needed Band-Aid."
whta nonsense (Score:1)
Social media isn't news, should not fund news, should not fund lack of news in rural areas. If a news company can't adapt to the digital world, they should die.
The Chicago Tribune was bought out by finance company that said they could monetize it more, and we digital subscribers were hit with a more than treble rate... so we all cancelled en mass. Now it's in deep shit and it should be. Someone thinks social media should prop that and similar up?
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Re:whta nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: whta nonsense (Score:2)
Very true. Only dumb people fail to realize that the 'engagement' algos of google FB twitter etc have screwed up news so completely we have a new category called fact checkers or fake news checkers, we see 100x disruptive flame wars on every social channel incl slashdot driven solely by algos learning to predict which humans at that point of time are ripe for useless arguments and what PoV to show them to trigger that response.
All for the KRA KPI of engagement leading to ad revenues or valuation.
The fact th
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I'd say that Google and social media in general have increased access to news. A lot of people just ignored it or didn't see stories because they didn't buy that newspaper or visit its homepage regularly. Now the news people see is a lot more diverse, going from basically one or two sources to several thanks to linking and social posts.
Of course bad actors have risen to take advantage of the weaknesses in this system, particularly it's lack of resilience to fake news and the fact that people you know postin
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Social media isn't news
completely agree, hence googles and facebooks replacement of real news with Social media needs to stopped.
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Neither company has done any such replacement; retards reading social media as news don't make it so.
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Things like the comment section of youtube are a sort of social media.
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Re: whta nonsense (Score:1)
The "negotiate" part sounds wrong -- how do small papers and new sources get some of the ad revinue?
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Social media isn't news, should not fund news, should not fund lack of news in rural areas
This isn't about social media, it's about news. If you derive a lot of advertising income from pages that link to news, but you don't produce any of that news, should you contribute to the investigative reporting, the writing the fact checking (if any) and the hosting of that news?
If a news company can't adapt to the digital world, they should die.
Financially successful adaptation has meant getting rid of most reporters, scientifically literate ones first, and producing human interest or false stories loaded with native advertising. News Corporation in particular seems has
Re: whta nonsense (Score:2)
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So Google should be able to take entire paragraphs from a newspaper that is hasn't contributed anything to and use it to drive advertising dollars to Google's site?
The same question applies to Facebook.
How exactly is a new company supposed to compete with that? Maybe if Google and Facebook had contributed something to the news company that they "stole" the story from your subscription wouldn't have seen a three fold increase.
Google destroyed news ecosystem (Score:4, Insightful)
As Bruce Sterling said "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google"
Long form methodical journalism died on Google's ethos that no one should actually have to pay anything for good information because information "wants to be free". As long as Google was getting a small fraction of the minimal income left on the table, getting a small cut over everyone's pennies meant they still made billions.
So today's journalism is like yesterday's open source documentation. Some of the stuff that's done for free is great but the people we needed to have doing it to function as the immune system for our society have moved onto more reliable and rewarding methods of being remunerated, such as cleaning septic tanks.
Loss of classsified ads (Score:1)
Google does not show ads on the news.google.com page.
More likely, it was the loss of classified ad revenue to carsales.com.au and realestate.com.au
As to regional newspapers, why did the big corporations buy them up and then shut them down?
Perhaps removing competition, or they planned to shut them down all along, as it was cheaper to run them online from a central office... more profit!
This lens is telling: when it comes to media ownership consolidation, the big media companies argue that the internet provid
Re: Loss of classsified ads (Score:2)
Why it is not about copyright (Score:1)
Google earns its money in ways that don't depend on using the newspapers snippets on news.google.com
1) Ads on searches
2) Ads on other company's web sites, throught Adsense's targeted advertising service
This (plus the loss of classified revenue to realestate.com.au and carsguide.com.au) cuts into the pool of advertising money that would otherwise go to newspapers.
Most copyright protection focuses on 'cease and desist'. Why is it that the Australian law blocked Google from delisting the newspapers? Because Go
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BS (Score:1)
If obsolete media can't turn a profit it should fucking die.
The only reason this law exists is because all the media in Australia is biased towards supporting the ruling party, and they don't want to lose that power.
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If social media can't survive without stealing news from other sites then they should "fucking die" as well. Maybe if Facebook and Google didn't copy the news from other sites to drive advertising sales then there wouldn't need to be any laws forcing Google and Facebook to kick back a few dollars to the news organizations they are getting their news from.
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If all they used was a hyperlink I would agree with you. The problem is that they also copy whole sections of the articles from news sites so there is no reason for a person to actually visit the original site.
I guess I could add a rebuttal insult but I can't be bothered to stoop to that level.
Desert rat here (Score:2)
I like the law (Score:3)
The problem was that people just read the news on google and didn't bother going to the newspapers sites to see the advertising. This meant that google got the content and eyeballs for free. If google paid even a little bit for the news, the publishers wouldn't go broke, google gets quality news and the world is better for it.
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That is not actually true.
Google News only shows titles, and a small descriptive summary of the articles. They are specifically designed to balance between giving enough information to users, but not harm our partners. Publisher relations are paramount.
Ah, yes I used to work on Google News.
Fuck off, Americans (Score:3)
It has accused the media code of stifling media diversity by giving media giants a better deal than smaller publishers
Nothing's stopping you from giving smaller publishers better deals. You weren't giving them deals in the first place.
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Isn't one of Australia's biggest media outlets owned by the Australian government? Is there some reason to charge a search engine for showing Australian taxpayers information they already paid for just because it isn't on a State-owned website? That sounds like a scam to me.
Owned, by the government, no.
The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) is owned by the people of Australia, not it's state and it's mandate is to provide education and entertainment to Australians. Attempting to touch it would be a death sentence for any government.
Also the ABC wasn't pushing this rent seeking... It was Murdoch who owns most of Australia's media. Murdoch would be happy to see the ABC burn as it's his biggest competitor and doesn't follow Murdochs narrative (Murdoch still thinks of
Serves old media - damages independent journalists (Score:1)
One high quality, small independent media outlet here in Australia has a good collection of articles about this corrupt media code:
https://www.michaelwest.com.au... [michaelwest.com.au]
https://www.michaelwest.com.au... [michaelwest.com.au]
https://www.michaelwest.com.au... [michaelwest.com.au]
Do not copy this code. It is a bribe for old media to make them keep continue to publish content supporting the government.
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The guys a walkley award winner, former SMH editor and Professor of political science. Theres nothing "wannabe" about him. Manal al-Sharif writes for the NYT, one of the most prestigious mastheads in the world. Kim Wingerei is a seasoned author, Cadet Journo Stephanie Tan is already Walkley Nominated, I could go on, but none of these people are "Wannabe".
I've heard the same claim you make here about Crikey, but that bloody thing has taken down governments with its investigations.
Which makes me wonder what *
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Slow death coming before internet (Score:2)
Print media has been dying for a LONG time.
In the 1970s, most small towns had some form of local paper that was published at least weekly. Locally, we had a daily and a number of weekly "shopper papers".
By the 1980s, the daily had been bought out by a regional holding company and folded into a paper that kind of covered local new from time to time. Much of that was press releases, meeting notices, obituaries, and public notices.
The drop in local content caused people to re-evaluate whether the increasing co
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Tech companies should stop threatening (Score:2)
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I really wish Facebook, at least, had stuck to it's guns regarding Australia.
As an Australian I'd be perfectly happy with no "news" on Facebook since I don't read "news" on Facebook, I go to media websites.
That said, if our ABC has been able to employ 50 regional reporters, that's a good outcome I suppose.
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Except they have in the past repeatedly. I fully expected Google to pull out, they did the same thing in Spain, delisting all Spanish media outlets.
The thing is, they will only ever pull out over a minor issue. The threats can be taken seriously on matters of commercial disagreements in a small aspect of a service, but they can't be taken seriously when it comes to industry and business defining matters such as laws governing the collection and processing of data.
If Google says they'll delist Murdoch, yeah
I can't help but notice that Australia and Canada (Score:2)
We need that everywhere (Score:2)
What's the point in google news displaying a headline, and one sentence, if when I follow the link, the actual site demands payment?