"Lawmakers around the world have pushed Meta to compensate publishers for the stories that appear on the social network." Can somebody fill me in on what this means? Publishers want to get paid for people on facebook reposting their news stories? Or is it the embedding info you get from links?
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Yes, see the laws in Canada and Australia. Meta actually now completely blocks all news links in Canada because if users posts them (or the news sites post them themselves) they would be obligated to pay for those links.
Does that makes sense to anyone? I would assume they would be happy that someone posts a link to their article and drives traffic...
It makes sense in Australia as NewsCorp (and to a lesser extent, the other trad media companies) has much influence over public opinion via TV and newspapers, so political parties are beholden to it, and thus the legislation to force internet companies to pay news sources.
See also https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2019/01/10/rupe...
News Corp typically supports the National/Liberal coalition in Australia. But Labor ministers have "quickly slammed said the decision, stating it “represents a dereliction of its commitment to the sustainability of Australian news media”."
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/01/faceb...
Edit: the article has apparently been edited and the specific quote has vanished, but there is more along the same lines.
From TLA: "Australian news publishers deserve fair compensation for the content they provide."
I don't think this person quite understands that if Meta blocks all news, there's no "providing" at all! So it's fair enough that Meta makes this move. People might even venture outside the Facebook bubble, which would be a net positive.
Just so everyone reads this correctly, ministers are -slammed- being very pissy and throwing a tantrum towards Meta, not the law, in fact they're tripling down on it.
The piss poor words of "Rod Sims" demonstrates it all in that article.
Glad Meta is leaving, maybe news publishers can demonstrate their value to the people to naturally bring them to their platform. I doubt it though. They want all the eyes to look at them and will pay Meta + Google top dollar for it, but then demand they get paid back for a bad bet, then get in bed with the government to enforce their terms.
Sickening. All the more reason to never visit, turn ad-block on to its most aggressive if I ever am forced to interact with these news sites.
This is a really bad look that media companies in Australia have so much lobbying power that they can introduce nonsense laws like this.
As best as I can tell it only makes sense to the Canadian media lobbyists who found an angle to blame "big tech" for their sagging print revenues.
Wasn't there some calamity in Canada not too long ago where they were begging Facebook to show the news?
Yes, you may be thinking of last year's wildfires where some politicians where blasting meta for blocking Canadian news during the fires.
Of course, this didn't mean they were repealing the law and they still expected Meta to pay whatever rate per link the media orgs wanted for the privilege.
The claim is it doesn’t drive traffic. People read the embedded snippet or what the person said it says and doesn’t follow to the site.
I have no idea how true that is though.
I know i rarely read the articles, i just read the headlines and the small amount of blurb accompanying it. Perhaps a lot of people are like me, and the newspapers are supplying the headlines/blurbs/image and not even getting a clickthrough, and then people don't feel the need to visit the news sites to get 'up to date'. Perhaps that's why they feel they're missing out.
In a world driven by advertising revenue, they would be happier if you visit their cesspit ad-filled website than if you converted the news into a headline, image and article summary. I guess significant% of people don't bother clicking on Facebook news links?
This is really good news. Mostly because it will deprive legacy media of indirect income they leech from facebook. I certainly don't love facebook, but I hate protectionist laws that were written by the media companies in service of the media companies.
The only companies worse than social media companies are media companies lol
Actually it's even more insidious than that, at least in Australia
Facebook (I refuse to call them Meta) is obligated to pay NewsCorp for articles posted
Facebook then writes this off as a tax deduction
Meanwhile Facebook pays effectively $0 in tax as-is because of all the various loopholes they exploit
As a result the Australian tax payer effectively is paying Newscorp to continue existing
> Facebook then writes this off as a tax deduction
I'm not sure you know what a write off is. If Facebook is paying fees for licensing content then that is an expense, which is deducted from overall gross revenue in calculating profit, and businesses are taxed on the profit they make.
I may be using the incorrect term. Regardless, they're happy to claim it as an expense as far as taxation goes, but given they pay no tax to begin with, the "cost of doing business complying with the regulation" is effectively passed on to the tax payer
> I may be using the incorrect term. Regardless, they're happy to claim it as an expense as far as taxation goes
That's how business expenses work. Tax revenue goes down as a percentage of the expense.
How else would you want it to work?
And for 30% tax rate, for every $30 in reduced taxes facebook is paying $100, so they still lose $70.
And all else equal that money becomes profit for the news companies so the taxes still get paid.
> but given they pay no tax to begin with, the "cost of doing business complying with the regulation" is effectively passed on to the tax payer
If they pay no tax even before this law, then what's the problem? If they go from $0 to $0 then the tax payer isn't losing out on anything. And in that situation, even a single dollar of news company profit means a reduction in tax payer burden.
That's an incorrect understanding of the accounting.
First of all it's not a tax deduction, it's a business expense which reduces profit.
Second when you have a tax deduction only a portion (around 20%) of the amount actually reduces taxes, the rest is simply a loss for the business.
> As a result the Australian tax payer effectively is paying Newscorp to continue existing
By that logic the tax payer is paying the electric bill and janitorial services.
That's really not how accounting works.
If Facebook is avoiding taxes via legal loopholes but aren't taking any kind of government subsidies, is it really as though tax payers are paying Newscorp? No tax dollars are being spent to cover anything, the money is just never being paid by Facebook to the government because the government created carve-outs that let Facebook to reduce their liability.
Caveat here, I'm neither a fan of Facebook or tax loop holes. In my opinion tax law should be exceedingly simple and easy to calculate. I don't want to defend Facebook here, but saying the public is paying for this feels like a slight of hand.
Taxes not paid by private entities are, by definition, money out of the public coffer.
How far will you take that? Do buisiness owe all of their profit as tax?
At some point you say "this is your tax", that doesn't mean that all other profit is money out of the public coffer. Governments do not tax all money.
> Governments do not tax all money
No one said they did. I said all private money is money not available to the public. If Facebook bribes legislators to carve out tax loopholes for them, that money stays private, therefore it's denied to the public coffers.
Aside from any offended libertarian sensibilities, what part of that do you disagree with?
Sure, in the same way that you not donating your home to the state is money out of the public coffers as well.
That is true. You understand that right?
Like, a donation is voluntary, taxes aren't and you think that makes them theft, I get all that. If I choose not to donate my house to the state, it is literally money denied to the public coffers.
In the case of my home, the state has no expectation or entitlement to receive it. One could argue the same in the case of Facebook bribing legislators to get tax carve outs. I wouldn't (because it's very corrupt), but one could.
Only if the taxes are actually owed. If an entity lowers their tax burden legally then the public was never owed the money.
I don't agree with this model and would much prefer a simple tax code. But as-is, its disingenuous to say that taxes unpaid because one finds a legal way to avoid owing them is taking out of the public coffers. One can't take money that was never owed in the first place.
This is completely backwards non-logic. If Facebook weren't avoiding tax, you could say that making Facebook pay News Corp means we lose out on tax revenue (because they can claim what they pay as an expense). But if they were already not paying tax, then the money they're paying News Corp is coming 100% from their profits and 0% from taxes they would've paid. (And indeed, assuming News Corp doesn't manage to avoid taxes as efficiently as Facebook, the public actually ends up better off, because News Corp does have to pay tax on their profits)
If they’re already paying 0, then paying even more 0 probably isn’t going to change much. Unless this is a refundable credit, where they can actually get that money back the same year regardless if they’ve already gotten to 0.
I don’t really agree with Canadas “link sharing” payment (people have only told me it is the case that links alone cause payment. I have not read the law. I don’t care enough to look). I do agree with Facebook having to pay for scraping and/or summarizing articles when links are posted, however.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Why not allow links without blurbs/images, is this also something that requires payment?
Large discussion about a similar bill in Canada: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36524662