I must just be a gleeful kind of person, because I was genuinely curious if you had read it! I consider myself an informed citizen and all I have done is read news articles about the law, I can’t remember the last time I have ever actually read legislation. Also, being the internet I think 99.99999999% of the time two people are discussing a law neither have read it. So good job!
That’s a rather interesting way of looking at it. Many people use facebook to consume news (not just hardcore political news but scandals/crime/sports/etc.). If news disappeared from search engines and social media then people will partly disengage from those services. I guess the data scientists at Facebook will find about this first hand when they see how much usage and advertising revenue goes down in Australia after taking off all news-related content.
News is one of the major types of content that social media companies have on their sites which generate discussion, flame wars, and eyeball time.
I also think you’re overestimating the value that news companies get from having all of their work being mostly consumed through social media companies. Many people don’t actually click the links and then read the articles of news sites, they read the headline the blurb at the top and then go straight to the comments section. Those who do do actually go through to read the article often have ad blockers.
Again, very peculiar way of looking at it to me. Governments intervene in markets all the time to correct imbalances in bargaining power between two economic agents. This is the whole reason we have an ACCC in the first place, to increase competition and reduce monopolies/oligopolies where possible. This is also why we have minimum wages and many other labour market policies.
The perfect analogy is to think about the media companies here in Australia as a barely-skilled labourer and the tech giants as the owners of the only firm in the local town that the pleb resides. The no-skilled labourer wants to survive, so he asks the firm for a job. What would you do as the firm, as you have all the bargaining power? You either say no and watch him die on the street or pay him subsistence wages because he has no ability to say no, it’s either accept the pittance wages or die. So of course the government needs to intervene in the market here to create a better society (which can be done in many ways).
I suppose I am presuming that having local media companies is in the public interest and they have, for all their many faults, existence value (like the labourer in the analogy).
I did breeze through the law yesterday, and it seemed like in the legislation there were definitions of what constitutes a relevant tech company and what constitutes a relevant media company, as well as a process through which companies can be added/removed from the law.
I did think it is weird that microsoft/twitter/apple weren’t originally included.
Specific companies that pay extremely low tax rates on their gross revenue here in Australia, meanwhile the local media companies pay far higher tax rates. E.g.:
A tax on online advertising will just as severely affect local media companies to tech firms, as it is a major component of their gross revenue. If you then subsidise news orgs so that they are no worse off than before the tax, isn’t that the exact same thing as taxing specific types of companies but with extra bureaucratic steps?
Anyway, what do you think of the other major component of the law, which is that tech firms have to inform these companies on changes to the algorithm that may significantly swing their viewership numbers up or down?
