Hi everyone. Seo week, I have resisted temptation and writing about Australia without a single mention of a kangaroo, a barbarian, or Naomi Watts. (Even though she appeared in a TV movie version of one of my books.) G’day!
The clear view
When they started their companies, the founders of Google and Facebook had no idea that they would eventually be accused of ruining the news industry. Google’s Page and Brin wanted to capture the entire web, on the reasonable premise that anyone who set up a site on that open channel would welcome the traffic. Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook didn’t even think that people on his network would change news links, but they came up with the idea of the News Feed as a personalized newspaper, matching news with “stories”. about parties, weddings, and who were friends. Like Google, Facebook assumed that the sites the users linked to would welcome the traffic.
One only has to look to Australia this week to see that things did not work out that way. The news industry in general is hurt, and some publishers, especially the powerful Rupert Murdoch, say that platforms that benefit from their news content are a big reason for that. This argument won the favor of the country’s government, which is considering a law requiring platforms like Google and Facebook to negotiate compensation for the damage it has done to news publications.
While both companies are denying guilt, Google decided this week throw a few millions from his huge profits to Murdoch and other publishers. (The agreement is circulated as part of an existing global program, but the timing is closely tying this settlement to the forthcoming law in Murdo’s native country.) Meanwhile, the Zuckerberg, who is always calm, has dug his heels in, a move he makes so often. there is a suspicion that a team of cobblers has been called. Without even waiting for the law to pass, he instructed his team to change the News Feed to No News Feed, deleting all links to news articles in Australian news feeds and also blocking links to Australian news sites around the world. Facebook didn’t win any friends by removing the removal so hard that it ended inadvertently taking down government and public interest sites offering vital information.
The weird thing about these machines is that this war – which may spread to other countries that are not happy with the platforms – is fighting on the wrong battlefield. While the law doesn’t look particularly specific about the case, Australian lawyers seem to have accepted Murdochian’s long-held allegation that Google and Facebook steal news content by linking to articles, sometimes even taking cookies. But that claim is false: The links are beneficial to the news organizations, as they send readers to their pages. If a news site wants to pull out, it can simply block the links. Where is the harm?