<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/21/why-link-taxes-like-canadas-c-18-represent-an-end-to-an-open-web/>
"Well, here we go again. For years now, the legacy news industry, often led by
lobbyists for Rupert Murdoch, have been pushing a bizarre plan to
tax links
on the internet. The entire rationale for this plan seems to be “news
organizations used to be rolling in easy money, they failed to innovate with
the times, and now Google and Meta are rolling in easy money, so we should just
make Google and Meta give news orgs cash.”
That’s it. That’s the entire rationale. Sometimes people try to get all high
minded and talk about the importance of journalism, which I agree is important
and which certainly could use new sustainable business models, but that doesn’t
explain why they should break the fundamental nature of the internet (everyone
can link to everyone) to solve that problem. Also, none of it explains why
internet companies should magically be responsible for paying journalism
outfits.
At
best supporters of these plans come up with this rationale: Google and
Meta take a huge percentage of digital advertising, and it’s likely that those
ad budgets used to be what supported news orgs, so therefore, they should share
some of the cash. When people look askance at that — or point out that under
that logic any business that successfully competes with a legacy business
should be forced to share its revenue with the business they out competed —
they might say “but Google and Meta “use” news without paying for it.
But, let’s interrogate that claim as well. No, Google and Meta don’t “use” news
without compensation. Quite the opposite. Both sites have a very, very small
part of their sites that may link people to news. Google News is an
aggregator/news search engine that
sends traffic to people’s sites by
linking to those news stories. Meta’s Facebook property similarly allows its
users (who often include news sites themselves) to link to their stories
elsewhere and drive traffic to them.
If those sites fail to monetize that traffic, that’s kinda on them."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
