Perhaps someone with more familiarity with this issue can explain why negotiating collectively with news orgs would mean that the benefits facebook provides in terms of increasing traffic would not play a role in those negotiations. Facebook can always threaten to walk and not strike a deal, just as the news orgs can threaten to walk. But right now there are anti-trust issues if they try to collectively bargain with Facebook, and to this naive commentator it seems like letting them bargain collectively seems like a reasonable compromise -- better than a legally mandated fee.
I think this will only lower traffic to traffic starved local news sites and similar. I don't see this as a win for news organizations. I think google/facebook/etc will just stop aggregating news. They certainly aren't going to be sending billions their way. It's kind of up to those news sites to put in advertising to get value from being on google's news page, google isn't going to pay them and neither is facebook.
Perhaps someone with more familiarity with this issue can explain why negotiating collectively with news orgs would mean that the benefits facebook provides in terms of increasing traffic would not play a role in those negotiations. Facebook can always threaten to walk and not strike a deal, just as the news orgs can threaten to walk. But right now there are anti-trust issues if they try to collectively bargain with Facebook, and to this naive commentator it seems like letting them bargain collectively seems like a reasonable compromise -- better than a legally mandated fee.
I think this will only lower traffic to traffic starved local news sites and similar. I don't see this as a win for news organizations. I think google/facebook/etc will just stop aggregating news. They certainly aren't going to be sending billions their way. It's kind of up to those news sites to put in advertising to get value from being on google's news page, google isn't going to pay them and neither is facebook.
There's a good article from September on how Australia's similar bill worked pretty well: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/should-we-save-newspapers...
Local news is in trouble, and it might be worth saving.
The Australian bill only served to move money from one set of large corporations to another set of large corporations.
what do you think of the fact that "local news" is actually owned by a single large company? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stations_owned_or_oper...
May. Also may not.
Oh, no!
Anyway...