Opposition is growing both locally and globally to media laws introduced by the Coalition Government requiring tech giants Google and Facebook to pay for displaying original news content. Why should our domestic monopolists get preference?
Not only is there no good business case for the changes, but US trade officials have slammed the bargaining code as potentially contrary to the US Australian Free Trade Agreement, and the man who started it all, claims the regulation is contrary to the very idea of the Internet.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist who in 1989 invented the world wide web is undoubtedly a dispassionate voice in the debate, given he could have made a squillion from his work but instead gave it away. As Sir Tim stated:
“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”
In a submission to the Senate inquiry on the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code bill, Berners-Lee said the ability of web users to link to other sites was “fundamental to the web” and that the the proposed media code could break it because they risked setting a precedent that “could make the web unworkable around the world”.
News Corp Australia and Nine Media have been pushing hard for the proposed laws, and much of the the mainstream media are right behind it.
Divide and conquer – Google and Facebook show who’s the boss!
Google, which dominates search, and Facebook (not including Instagram and Whatsapp) represent 20% of all internet traffic.
But contrary to the arguments of the legacy media, Google argues that the mainstream media benefit at least as much from Google as the other way around.
For example, last month (December 2020*), 18.5% of visits to news.com.au came from Google. In other words, Google search drives one in five visitors to news.com.au by people clicking on links in Google search results. Yet News is claiming that Google should pay for using News’ content. As was pointed out by respondents to the ACCC recommendations, News and others can easily remove its content from Google (a single line of code takes care of it) but of course, they won’t.
Google estimates that advertising revenue directly attributable to news content in Australia is $10 million. Without any documentation, it is hard to verify that figure. Regardless, the true figure is likely to be well below the $600 million claimed by Nine chairman Peter Costello and others. Especially given that Google’s total revenue in Australia is $4.8 billion (in 2019) and Google News represents just 0.5% of Google’s total monthly visitors (December 2020*) – or $24 million in revenue terms.
Granted, that is a simplistic calculation, but although Google does make a lot of money from advertising – money that was once directed to the mainstream media – it is not because Google uses news content to generate it.
Facebook (and social media in general) is a different story, but not necessarily a more compelling one for the agitators in the mainstream media. Of news.com.au’s traffic in December 2020, 7.5% came via social media* – two-thirds of that from Facebook.
The only content, including news content, that appears on Facebook’s platform is that shared by a user. The media platforms themselves also share articles, but to a limited degree.
There is virtually no directly attributable link between news-style content and Facebook’s advertising revenue. Moreover, Facebook reported $674 million of revenue in Australia in 2019, a figure that may well be higher thanks to – ahem – international tax accounting measures. Nevertheless, the old, failing mainstream media companies are clutching at revenue straws.
The power and reach of Google and Facebook is undoubtedly of great concern, and the tech giants have been heavily criticised for overreach recently when Twitter and Facebook banned President Trump from their platforms.
In Australia, Google has played its own power games by experimenting with excluding mainstream media content from its search results, drawing widespread opprobrium.
However, trying to force the tech giants to share their revenue with the old and declining media companies is both a furphy and irrelevant.
The ACCC inquiry that led to the proposed law was designed to provide support for the contention that the online platforms have an unfair advantage over old media. But what the inquiry (and its instigators News Limited and Nine Media) failed to mention was that the advantages were achieved because other companies grabbed the online opportunities of the Internet, while the erstwhile media giants sat on their hands.
The Internet has not only changed how we consume news, but also how (and how much) we pay for it, how it is distributed and the cost to produce and publish. The old model of advertising and subscription is no longer working. And as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman explained in their book “Manufactured Consent” in 1988, it was always a flawed model where advertisers and other vested interest directly and indirectly influence what gets published and how.
News Limited and Nine Media claim they are fighting for quality independent journalism. But News Limited, in particular has descended into unabashed partisanship – effectively a propaganda arm of the LNP Government; while the old Fairfax mastheads are increasingly focused on infotainment content.
The flag bearers of independent journalism in Australia are now the ABC, although some critics would argue it is increasingly muzzled as a result of a reliance on Government for funding, The Guardian and a growing plethora of nimble, diverse and competent independents – all focused on online distribution.
Citizenship journalism and commentary is also growing world-wide on platforms like Medium, Substack and many more, with podcasting the fastest growing media channel of all, even faster than YouTube. All cater to a younger audience that never reads traditional newspapers or watches the 6pm news.
The power and reach of Google and Facebook is of great concern, and the Government in general, and the ACCC in particular, should be looking at how to regulate and curb that power. Instead they are running not just a fool’s errand, but doing nothing to protect the consumers of media, nor strengthening competition, which should be their areas of focus.
* – according to SimilarWeb, a global web reporting service
Comments
19 responses to “Fake news abounds in the misguided war on the digital media platforms”
A quite accurate article, I’d say. This almost raised a chuckle:
Political corruption. Nowhere is it more evident in the proposed legislation to charge Google for news. Predictably, Google will withdraw its search engine from Australia if it has to change its business model.
Well you may ask, who benefits – certainly not the 21 million Google users in Australia,
Another example of the LNP looking after its media mates, and bugger the millions of young and old Australians who use Google for all sorts of things. All you will be left with is Bing and Duckduckgo for inadequate and incomplete Internet searches.
Google does not need Australia – Australia needs Google.
Having found that other search engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo link to the same news.com.au articles as Google, I find the whole thing has only one explanation – News Corp, Nine and other media groups are merely attempting blatantly to gouge money from Google via a government that is corrupt, spineless, scared and sycophantic all at once in its relationship with Rupert M. Following Tim Berners Lee’s comment, it’s as if ‘news’ articles on Murdoch and Nine web sites aren’t actually part of the Internet. The argument being advanced by the government is a completely disingenuous conflation of news ‘content’ with ‘links and snippets’; utterly dishonest. But the big issue here is that the government is eager to engineer payments by Google to Rupert so he can profit, while doing bugger-all to get Google to pay a fair amount of tax which could benefit all of society.
Netflix and other streaming services can thrive by using technology wisely and delivering what people want in competition to services are free at the point of consumption. Is it out of the question that media providers could provide services people want and are prepared to pay for?
I guess as long as you can lean on your mates in Canberra, why would you bother?
In the meantime, after the displayed gullibility of millions of Trump followers to the incredible propaganda flowing from his tweets, this is going to be a test of the skill of the Australian electorate when it comes to critiquing government policy justifications.
My question from the begining, is pretty much the same as the author’s but here i go anyway 🙂
I am still trying to understand the idea that Facebook, twitter and google should have to pay for distributing links to news items….
What I don’t understand is that providing a *link* to a news media item does not seem to be stealing the product; it is linking to it.
If a person clicks on that link they get taken to the site (unless it is behind a paywall). This then gives the publisher the eyeballs. It gives them the advertising revenue and so on. If its behind a paywall then it may indicate to the clicker that the news is worth paying for.
Every article I’ve ever clicked on, on Twitter, Facebook etc works like this. Yahoo news may work differently, but I’ve always assumed they do pay- perhaps they don’t – that should be solved.
Likewise, I can see that many online news stories use twitter posts as ‘evidence’. These link to twitter etc, but there is generally no need to travel to twitter to read them. This could be considered to be theft, and perhaps news should stop doing it. But I still think its a link.
If I personally link to something someone wrote, I don’t think I’m stealing their work, I’m acknowledging it, or giving them some advertising…. If every article on this website, or your blogs, have to pay for links to evidence, the sites will shut down. The internet will die.
I guess Murdoch will be happy.
“Displaying original news content” or “directing users to original news content”?
Mainstream print and electronic media grew fat, entitled and politically powerful behind high barriers to entry and government licences. So they were slow to act to retain, or even enhance their advantages when Tim Berners Lee stripped away their privileged positions by opening the communication flood gates.
But instead of seizing the opportunities which he delivered to strip costs out of their operation and compete for advertisers’ business by adding value to their services, they have done what they accuse others of doing: they have rushed to the government and used the remnants of their power to seek subsidies allegedly in the interests of financing investigative journalism. Like exposing the foibles of royalty and celebrities.
Ironically, the government has been persuaded to compromise its views about promoting competition by delivering these subsidies through the ACCC a body whose purpose it is to increase competition. Principles can be bought.
While it may well be, as the author points out, that the attempts by the treasurer to muzzle Google and Facebook to extract favours for News Corp and Nine Media are poorly targeted, it is quite another question how then to curb the enormous power of the companies.
It would have been nice and interesting if the writer had indicated some possible alternative measures. It would also have supported his views more convincingly.
I would just levy a tax on all social media advertising revenue (Australian sourced) and use the money to fund responsible journalism. Just a suggestion!
At least that would be an honest method of “justifying” what the established players want and the government is cooperating in delivering. Would News qualify for a grant? On the precedent of Sports Rorts, would it matter if they got a grant and didn’t deliver? Would P+I get any? How does that agree with competition policy generally? ACo out-competes BCo so the government levies a tax on ACo and gives the money to BCo—is that a sound way to allocate resources?.
All good questions! We need more discussion on what “responsible journalism” entails and how funding can be directed to it.
The thought of our government defining “responsible journalism” and funding it gives me the horrors.
Happily we don’t need to go down that path. The community as a whole needs to be engaged in this discussion on what responsible journalism entails, and while it’s unlikely that there will be a single perfect definition, it’s feasible to reach broad agreement on what it does or does not entail. For example, we might all broadly agree that responsible journalism does not engage in lies, that it is characterised by impartiality, objectivity, independent thought, etc.
If we can’t even have a reasoned discussion on what responsible journalism entails, no wonder we end up having such poor journalism in the country.
I full agree with you, especially on this:
About this bit, I have a couple comments:
We might all agree that responsible journalism does not engage in lies, but the disagreement is often about what a lie is. For example, ‘Iraq has WMDs’ was promulgated as absolute truth in the lead up to the Iraq war – at the time, it was probably the consensus view, and it was difficult to prove otherwise. Also, whether a particular news piece is impartial, objective, demonstrates independent thought, etc. is impossible to establish objectively – and there is the same problem with the idea of the majority view being the correct one. (Even Twitter recognizes that the majority view is not necessarily right, as they explicitly note in their bumpf about their new community ‘fact-checking’ initiative, Birdwatch.)
So, my view is that even if we reach broad agreement on ‘facts’ and ‘objectivity’, that does not guarantee that what we approve of is responsible journalism. I think, for instance, that there was quite broad consensus in the 1930s, not just in Germany, that Jews were a problem.
What I think we do need is what you said at first: that the community as a whole needs to be engaged in this discussion on what responsible journalism entails; and that this discussion needs to be vigorous and ongoing, part of the responsibility of being a citizen. The idea of somebody funding “good” journalism still gives me the horrors, because somebody has to decide what does and what doesn’t qualify for funding. Besides, for anybody with an internet connection, there is a plethora of citizen journalist blogs and small organisations which put out a wide range of analysis which is often better than that provided by bigger media organisations. What might be useful from government would be the breaking up of media concentration in Australia.
Hi, I think we need to be careful to avoid falling into the post-modernist trap that there is no such thing as “objectivity” or that even if there is, it is impossible to reach objective agreement on anything. This is not to say that that we cannot reasonably disagree on what the “objective facts” are.
While we often do reasonably disagree, it doesn’t mean that everything is subjective. For example, we might reasonably agree that there is a need to address climate change, even if we reasonably disagree on the best way to achieve that goal.
So our idea of “responsible journalism” needs to be constantly scrutinised, but we don’t need to feel that we cannot tell at all whether a piece of journalism is responsible or not.
The example you bring about the alleged consensus in the 1930s that “Jews were a problem” is an interesting one. I’m personally doubtful that there was such a consensus, even within Germany (let alone throughout the world). But your anecdote raises an important point. Objectivity is not simply about internal consensus within a given society. True objectivity also includes closely examining what other societies (different from our own) think about our values – i.e., we must subject our values to external scrutiny, not just to internal scrutiny.
That’s why I often feel exasperated whenever I hear US or Australian ambassadors claim that their job is to proclaim “American values” or “Australian values” in whatever country they are in. Whereas their real job (I would argue) is to closely examine how other societies go, and see if there is anything that we might learn from societies that are different from our own.
Arrgh, you’re probably right about there not being a consensus in the 1930s – even in Germany – regarding Jewish people.
However, you misunderstood me if you took me to be arguing that there are no objective facts. I was arguing for something for something you seem to agree with: “This is not to say that that we cannot reasonably disagree on what the “objective facts” are.”
Anyway, funding (somebody’s idea of) good journalism probably won’t do much harm, if any, and it might even do some good. Thanks for the exchange!
Just thinking about the funding aspect, I don’t think there is a single right model. But one model worth exploring is the research grant model we already have in place to subsidise scholarly research.
So any journalist could apply for funding by submitting a proposal which would be evaluated objectively by an independent board. And there would be minimum transparency requirements so that the wider public can scrutinise how well the board is performing against its remit. (Including whether the funding is being distributed in a “competitively neutral” manner.)
And yes, I imagine P+I could apply too. But P+I seems to be more a forum for expressing opinion. I’m not sure that it actually engages in “on the ground” journalism – e.g., to seek out facts, expert opinion, …
BTW, the tax on advertising revenues is (I would argue) competitively neutral – it applies to all advertising. But if your point is that it should also apply to advertising revenues earned by the mainstream media (e.g., The Age), then yes I agree that might be desirable from the perspective of competitive neutrality.
Anyway, thank you for responding to my short suggestion and asking good questions!
Kien Choong, Having been a finance/tax professional previously, I tried to post a full explanation on how these Tech companies are almost completely dodging their tax obligations. But somehow, my post was tagged as spam. Suffice to say, the tax question is just as critical as the revenue question. These guys are paying practically no tax in Australia for the billions that they earn!!
Can’t fit it all into one article, Hans, but stay tuned!
What is the “enormous power”? Where does it come from? Does Google curate news and withhold inconvenient facts? Or does it give people easier access to them than powerful interests may prefer?
Did Google steal their lunch or was it Carsales, Seek and eBay? It used to be policy to keep Holden on life support, but no more. I have recently bought my first new car in 22 years and am blown away by how much one gets for one’s money these days. Coal should be next to be extracted from the teat.