Australia Gives Up Any Pretense: Pushes Straight Up Tax On Facebook & Google To Pay News Orgs

from the how-dare-you-send-us-traffic-without-paying dept

Last week we wrote about France's push to force Google to pay legacy news organizations for the high crime of... sending them traffic. That was somewhat expected, as under the EU Copyright Directive, some version of this will show up in every EU country over the next few months (though France's first approach is particularly dumb). Down in Australia, they're not subject to the EU Copyright Directive, but it's not stopping them from taking the same ridiculous approach:

Facebook and Google will be forced to share advertising revenue with Australian media companies after the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, instructed the competition watchdog to develop a mandatory code of conduct for the digital giants amid a steep decline in advertising brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

As the article notes, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had been working to get the media companies and Google and Facebook to come up with a voluntary plan, but since the media companies basically want it all, that hasn't worked out so well. Instead, the ACCC has now been told to just write up the plan. Make no mistake about this: this is the Australian government, at the behest of a bunch of legacy media companies that failed to adapt to the internet, now taxing Google and Facebook for sending media companies free internet traffic that those companies don't know how to monetize.

And it goes beyond just having to pay to send them traffic, it also requires Google and Facebook to let media companies know ahead of time if they're going to make any changes to their algorithms that might impact content rankings. That is ridiculous. It's basically giving news companies preferred placement in search rankings, and locking those legacy providers in. Why in the world should media companies get special access to the algorithm of either company?

Frydenberg said it was only fair that media companies that created the content got paid for it.

They do get paid for it. They decided to put content on the web. If they don't like the traffic, they can easily use robots.txt to block sites from scraping them. If they can't monetize the traffic, that's on them, isn't it?

“This will help to create a level playing field,” he said.

This is the exact opposite of a level playing field. This is basically tilting the playing field strongly towards legacy media companies in a manner that is not only silly for the internet companies, but in a manner that makes it nearly impossible for new entrants in the field, as the legacy players get an automatic boost from the free money they get from the internet companies that send them free traffic.

Filed Under: aggregation, australia, journalism, legacy, links, media, news, tax, traffic
Companies: facebook, google

As Politicians Are Still Looking To Destroy The Internet, Covid-19 Reminds Us Why Social Media Is Not Just Good, But Saving Lives

from the killing-it-might-kill-more-people dept

For all the fears and freak-outs over "disinformation" on social media, over the past few weeks Twitter, especially, has been an amazing source for getting accurate, thoughtful information regarding the Covid-19 pandemic and how to deal with it. It's a pretty stark contrast, in fact, between people who seemed to be paying attention to credible voices on social media, and who began "social distancing" sooner, and those who were getting their information from politicians and television (especially cable news) who seemed to wave off the dangers for way too long. That's not to say there hasn't been disinformation about Covid-19 online -- including some spread by politicians and crackpots. However, on the whole, social media has done what it does best: allowed credible, knowledgeable voices to rise to the top for many.

As Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason notes, COVID-19 Reminds Us: Social Media Is Good, Actually:

Social media have also been providing news from early outbreak zones across the globe, as users widely disseminate stories from foreign news outlets, statements from foreign leaders, and first-hand accounts from residents of affected areas abroad.

These snaphots helped give Americans a better sense of the scope of the threat posed by COVID-19 at a time when the messages coming from official channels were conflicting and confusing. They also illustrated the ways in which various social responses could play out—giving credence to calls here for "social distancing" and spurring measures to make room in medical facilities.

Around the U.S., communities still seem to be experiencing widely different reactions to the pandemic, with some areas seeing runs on grocery stores and empty streets while in others things look pretty normal. This will likely change rapidly, as more businesses close their doors voluntarily—and as more governments order them to close whether they want to or not. But for now, one thing that's been noticeable is how quickly the mood on Twitter, Reddit, etc. embraced voluntary social distancing, especially in comparison to the mood in the "real world."

The NY Times had a similar article, though with a bit more snarky a title, When Facebook Is More Trustworthy Than the President. Of course, Facebook is often more trustworthy than our current President, so that's not unique. But it is notable that during such a crisis, people are able to get much more reliable information via social media.

All through February and early March, the voices of doctors and nurses on social media provided a vital antidote to those of confused and complacent political leaders embodied by President Trump. Their voices carried credibility and urgency in a way the always-on crisis of cable news can’t. They fed and were fed by credible journalism. And they helped force the United States to reckon with the crisis.

After four years in which social media has been viewed as an antisocial force, the crisis is revealing something surprising, and a bit retro: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others can actually deliver on their old promise to democratize information and organize communities, and on their newer promise to drain the toxic information swamp.

Elsewhere, it's been noted that the first person to really spot the threat of Covid-19 was a blogger in Florida who tracks flu outbreaks (and, no, don't ask me why the Washington Post put this story in their "Lifestyle" section):

The news seemed so intriguing — and so potentially alarming — that Sharon Sanders stayed up almost until dawn on Dec. 31 to keep track of it.

From her home in Winter Haven, Fla., Sanders began compiling reports of public comments by health officials in China’s Hubei Province. The officials, Sanders reported on her blog, FluTrackers, had announced an outbreak of an unusual cluster of pneumonia cases, caused by a mysterious virus.

The disease apparently had spread among merchants in a seafood market in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people. “A number of people from hospitals in Wuhan said that the current cause is not clear,” read one of FluTrackers’ first, uncertain posts about the outbreak.

As you may or may not recall, this was the original promise of the internet. It would enable anyone to get their voices out there, and that could allow more viewpoints and perspectives. Of course, that also includes ill-informed people or those with malicious or chaotic intent to get their voices out there as well. And over the last few years it's felt that we've over-corrected on worrying about those people. But one key point that I think has become quite clear in the past few weeks is that for much of the public, the ability to parse through and determine who is credible and who is trustworthy, is a useful skill that still applies online, and has allowed many more people to inform themselves, rather than to mis-inform themselves.

Indeed, it appears that you'd receive a lot more misinformation just by watching the mainstream news acting as a stenographer for a President who is more concerned about how the crisis makes him look, than how it actually impacts the lives of everyone. Social media has always been a tool for getting voices heard -- and part of that means that we, the users of social media, are taking on some responsibility to sort out the good from the bad.

But, most importantly, the events of the last few weeks show the importance of enabling platforms where people can connect and share knowledge, and we shouldn't toss all of that in the gutter, as some in Congress are trying to do, just because there remain a small group of people pushing misinformation.

Filed Under: covid-19, disinformation, internet, news, section 230, social media

How Reading Books Instead Of News Made Me A Better Citizen

from the consuming-information dept

As the 2020 presidential race kicks into high-gear, I find myself telling friends about an important lesson I learned last time primary season rolled around. During the run-up to the 2016 election, as now, vitriol filled the headlines. Rather than well-informed, reading the internet often left me feeling emotionally exhausted, powerless, and alone. So many stories were urgent but not important, and certainly not actionable.

Frustrated, I decided to run an experiment. I read and engaged with dramatically less news, and spent that time reading books instead. I read ancient philosophy, fantastical adventures, historical biographies, scientific treatises, globetrotting thrillers, and mind-bending stories of magical realism. I followed my enthusiasm and read what I loved, challenging myself to think more deeply and broadly in the process.

After a few months, my life and outlook had changed completely. Reading was no longer an exercise in rubbernecking and literature armed me to face the challenges of the present with fresh eyes, seek out other points of view, and put the political turmoil into perspective. Taking ownership of my media diet turned the stories I read into sources of strength, fuel to fire my own personal and public life. My wife and I volunteered to host a Ugandan refugee in our home for nine months. I helped design a game that illustrated emerging vulnerabilities in American democracy. I co-created an internet public art project that raised money for ProPublica.

We are what we pay attention to. The stories we read don't just inform, entertain, or inspire, they shape our identities, become a part of us. These stories have consequences. The Allies were inspired to defeat the Nazis by stories of resisting oppression, protecting freedom, and ending humanitarian disaster. The Nazis were themselves inspired by stories of racial superiority, national dominance, and the return to a mythical past. Humans are capable of transcendence and unspeakable horror when we convince ourselves of the righteousness of our cause.

So I expanded my experiment into a novel that quickly grew into a trilogy. Bandwidth explores what happens when someone hijacks our attention in order to transform us into the person they want us to be. Borderless examines the rise of tech platforms and the decline of nation-states. Breach extrapolates what might come next and how to build new institutions for the internet age. My hope is that the Analog Series inspires readers to reassess their own most deeply held beliefs with candor, kindness, and healthy skepticism.

As candidates and special interest groups ruthlessly vie for your attention across the vast datascapes of the internet like gladiators in a digital Colosseum, remember that seizing control of your media diet is the first step toward acting with intention to realize your version of a better future.

***

Eliot Peper is the author of Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Cumulus, True Blue, Neon Fever Dream, and the Uncommon Series. His writing has appeared in the Verge, Tor.com, Harvard Business Review, VICE, OneZero, TechCrunch, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he has given talks at Google, Comic Con, Future in Review, and SXSW.

Filed Under: election, information overload, news, news consumption

Just As Everyone Predicted: EU Copyright Directive's Link Tax Won't Lead To Google Paying Publishers

from the duh dept

Look, not only was the following story totally predictable, but many of us directly warned the EU of what would happen if they instituted a "link" or "snippet" tax as part of the EU Copyright Directive. Of course, EU officials totally ignored all of the experts (or listened to a bunch of idiots in the publishing industry who insisted that "this time it will be different," despite multiple examples of link taxes not working) and put a link tax into law anyway.

France has been the most eager to put the EU Copyright Directive into practice, and now that it's about to establish a link tax for news aggregators, the one company such a link tax is mainly directed at (Google) has made it clear that (as it's done with previous such taxes) it's not planning to pay anyone to link to them (nor should it). Instead, Google has given webmasters (including publishers) greater control over how results linking to their pages will look -- including letting publishers detail the types of snippets it will allow.

Previously, it was only possible to allow a textual snippet or to not allow one. We're now introducing a set of methods that allow more fine-grained configuration of the preview content shown for your pages. This is done through two types of new settings: a set of robots meta tags and an HTML attribute.

Google has long allowed publishers to allow for a snippet or not, but now it's also letting publishers designate a "maximum length" of the snippet, or a maximum video or image preview.

With that in place, Google has told publishers in France that in order to respect the new Copyright Directive link tax, it is removing all snippets unless the publishers opt-in via the tools mentioned above, to voluntarily choose to add back the snippets.

When the French law comes into force, we will no longer display an overview of the content in France for European press publishers, unless the publisher has made the arrangements to indicate that it is his wish. This will be the case for search results from all Google services.

Publishers have always been able to choose whether or not they want their content to be accessible through Google's search engine or Google News. We have just put in place more granular webmaster settings that allow publishers to specify how much information they want to appear as a preview in the search results. Publishers around the world can use these new settings to choose the type of preview best suited to attract users to their site.

This is being framed by some as Google trying to "bypass" the EU Copyright Directive, but that's nonsense. This is Google complying with the EU Copyright Directive. Again, this is similar to how it's reacted in France and Germany, when similar link taxes were put in place. The problem is that the Eurocrats made a bunch of really dumb miscalculations here: first, they assumed that including snippets was more valuable to Google than it is to the publishers. It is not. Their traffic will decline without snippets, meaning many will quickly rush to opt-in to add them back. Second, they assumed that putting a tax on something wouldn't change the incentives and that Google would just carry on offering the same snippets, but just paying for them. They were wrong.

Again, we went through all of this five years ago with the German link tax, and even though Google effectively did the same thing, when asked about this, I distinctly remember some EU politicians insisting that it would be different if the whole EU all agreed to a link tax, and that Google would have to pay. What's incredible is that these same politicians will now whine and complain and lie, saying that Google is evading the tax when it's actually complying with the law as written -- and complying in the same way they complied with similar laws in the past. And, indeed, France's Culture Minister has already put out a laughable statement arguing that in complying with the law, Google is violating it:

I call for a real global negotiation between Google and the publishers: the unilateral definition of the rules of the game is contrary to both the spirit of the directive and its text. I will speak very soon with my European counterparts to remedy this situation.

How hard is this to understand? If you make something against the law (aggregating news and posting snippets without a license), don't be surprised if the companies who have been doing that stop doing that. You outlawed something, and so Google obeyed your new law and stopped doing it.

If the EU Parliament wanted a different outcome, perhaps instead of attacking those of us who warned this would happen, they should have listened to us. Apparently that's just too difficult.

Filed Under: aggregators, article 11, article 14, controls, france, link tax, metatags, news, snippet tax
Companies: google

Once More With Feeling: Nearly All General Interest News Paywalls Will Fail

from the if-you're-not-one-of-the-giants dept

Just a few weeks ago we pointed out (for not the first time) that news paywalls for general interest publications did not seem likely to succeed outside of a very small number of exceptions: mainly three giant east coast newspapers which have established themselves as key news sources: the NY Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal (arguably the last one, with its focus on finance, might not even count as "general interest"). In that last post, we pointed out that even people who liked to pay for news tended to only subscribe to a single news source. That helps create a winner take all proposition where only a very small number (see above) can actually build a sustainable business model through an internet paywall.

And that means that even if you're a pretty well known newspaper, falling outside the big ones, it means you're going to be in trouble. Witness the LA Times failing paywall. As Nieman Lab notes, in terms of paper subscriptions, the LA Times used to rank above the Washington Post. But it didn't make the transition to digital the way the Post did:

Digital subscriptions at the Los Angeles Times are way below expectations, and leadership, in a memo to staff, said the future of the paper could depend on solving the issue rapidly.

Whether due to unrealistic expectations or editorial and business failures, the Times is nowhere close to meeting its digital subscription goal. The Times had hoped to double its digital subscriptions from just more than 150,000 to 300,000 this year — a number that would have to be doubled again, the memo said, to come close to covering editorial costs. But midway through the year, the Times is nowhere near that number, having netted only 13,000 digital subscriptions in 2019.

As the article notes, the LA Times basically missed the boat here, despite having a wealthy owner who could have invested a ton of money.

Of course, part of the problem here is focusing solely on paywalls as a solution. As seen by the three success stories, it can work, but in a winner-take-all kind of market, you need to be a winner, and the LA Times was not positioned to do that. And the LA Times hasn't done much to distinguish itself as to why you'd want to subscribe to it rather than its competitors.

And it doesn't look like the paper is going to figure it out any time soon. So far it's plan seems to be wishful thinking:

In a memo sent to staff on Monday afternoon and obtained by Poynter, Executive Editor Norman Pearlstine and Managing Editor Scott Kraft wrote, “Our future depends on rapid and substantial subscription revenue growth.” They added, “Performance for the first half of the year … has been disappointing.”

That's the wrong approach. Subscription growth would be one way to increase revenue -- but to do that you have to give people a reason to subscribe, and just doing the same things as those other newspapers isn't going to cut it. I'm surprised that the LA Times hasn't, instead, decided to buck the paywall trend and go in the other direction. Why not focus on opening itself up, building up traffic, and providing an alternative to the east coast papers who got all the subscribers by doing strong reporting, and then layering in other, better business models?

Unfortunately, the newspaper business keeps making the same mistakes over and over again and refuses to get creative. The possible demise of the LA Times is just one symptom of that failure to innovate.

Filed Under: journalism, news, newspapers, paywalls

The Paywall Conundrum: Even Those Who Like Paying For News Don't Pay For Much News

from the just-one-site dept

For years, we've tended to mock newspaper paywalls -- not because we don't want to see news publishers get paid (that would actually be good!), but because it just doesn't seem like a really sustainable way to build a news product for nearly every publication. In other words, nearly all media paywalls are destined to fail -- often spectacularly -- because they can't generate nearly enough paying subscribers. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between. Large general interest news sites like the NY Times and the Washington Post seem to have made it work. Small, narrowly focused sites can sometimes get by as well -- if their content is unique and special enough. But most general interest news sites are unlikely to be able to make it work -- and a new study drives home that point. Even for people who like paying for news, they tend to only pay for one news subscription. Really.

As publishers worldwide put up paywalls and start requiring payment for their content — about 50 percent of respondents in the U.S, Denmark, Australia, and the Netherlands say they bump into one or more paywalls each week when reading news; that figure is 70 percent in Norway — “we find only a small increase in the numbers paying for any online news — whether by subscription, membership, or donation,” the researchers write. Following the Trump bump of 2017, the percentage of U.S. respondents who pay for news in the U.S. is stable at 16%, and stable at 11% in an average of nine other countries. Norway and Sweden are seeing particular success in getting people to pay up — and “industry data reveal that Norwegians and Swedes are prepared to pay online for tabloid titles VG and Aftenbladet (premium models) as well as more upmarket titles such as AftenPosten and Dagens Nyheter.”

In the U.S., by contrast, “the main subscription focus has been at the quality end of the market.” The people who pay for news in the U.S. are wealthier and better educated than those who do not.

No matter how rich and educated they are, though, most people are only paying for one subscription. “The average (median) number of news subscriptions per person among those that pay is one in almost every country.”

And here's the thing: unless you're pretty damn confident that enough people will buy into your paywall, moving to a paywall likely forecloses the ability to succeed with most other business models, by vastly limiting your audience (some publishers try to have it both ways with a "leaky" paywall, in which it's not that difficult to get around it, but more and more sites appear to be moving away from the more leaky options).

This is why I still think there are better approaches. Get past the idea of a paywall -- which is clearly a negative for users -- and focus on adding value for people who want to pay, rather than punishing those who don't or are unable to do so. It's why we here at Techdirt focus on a kind of membership model for what we do -- encouraging people to pay to support us, not to "get around a paywall" or to "read the news," but to get extra, useful, valuable features. Some may argue that these are basically the same thing, but I think the difference is extremely important. A paywall is about locking up the news. A membership model is one in which we make our content available, but save certain features and access to those who are willing to support us more fully. One is about putting up barriers and tollbooths, and the other is about offering a better reason to support, while expecting that the free news still continues to drive more support of the other offerings. In other words, it's a complementary business model that can work in conjunction with other stuff, rather than counter to it. Plus, it's just more respectful for your community.

Filed Under: business models, news, paywalls

NY Times Publishes Laughable Propaganda To Argue Google Owes Newspapers Like Itself Free Money

from the all-the-propaganda-that-fits-to-pad-our-bottom-line dept

Earlier this week, I posted about a silly new organization that claims it's going to "save journalism" mainly by whining about how evil Google and Facebook are. As I noted in that piece, even if you believe Google and Facebook are evil, it's not clear how whining about them being evil provides any new journalists jobs. But the news industry as a whole has been on this weird "blame someone else" kick for way too long. The "News Media Alliance" (formerly the Newspaper Association of America) has been on a weird anti-tech protectionist kick for years now, and on Monday published a "study" claiming that Google made $4.7 billion from news -- a number that was then trumpeted loudly by the NY Times, which just happens to be one of the larger members of the News Media Alliance.

There's just one tiny problem. The "study" is no study at all and basically everyone in the media business is laughing at the NY Times for publishing such a ridiculously bogus study without highlighting how bogus it was. The $4.7 billion is not based on any careful research. It's based on one off-hand comment from over a decade ago by an exec who hasn't been at Google in years, and then extrapolated forward. Really.

That study relies on a public comment then–Google executive Marissa Mayer made at a media event in 2008, when she estimated that Google News brought in $100 million in revenue. The NMA report calculates what the same proportion of the company’s revenue would be today, then further inflates this figure based on the fact that news consumption via Google’s main search is 6 times larger than via Google News (according to the NMA’s estimate of referral traffic to newspaper websites).

This is not what any sensible person would call a "sound" methodology. Oh, and I almost forgot the kicker:

...the News Media Alliance cautioned that its estimate for Google’s income was conservative

The NY Times also kinda skimmed over the purposeful timing of this study's release. The News Media Alliance has been pushing for sometime for a special antitrust exemption to allow big news orgs to collude to try to force more money out of Google and Facebook, and the study was released just a day before a Congressional hearing on the topic. Most normal reporters would recognize that, maybe (just maybe) there was an ulterior motive in releasing this "report" with such a flimsy statistic. But the Times reported it as if it was fact.

There may be plenty of reasons to distrust Google and Facebook and their role regarding journalism, but this report is not any of that. Google doesn't even put ads on most of Google News, but instead pushes visitors off to the websites of news orgs. If those news orgs are failing to monetize that traffic, it seems pretty ridiculous to blame google for that and demand more money via collusive efforts.

As Jeff Jarvis notes in his own response to the NYT's piece, if the publishers want to point the blame finger, they might want to start by turning it back on themselves:

The problem has long been that publishers aren’t competent at exploiting the full value of these clicks by creating meaningful and valuable ongoing relationships with the people sent their way. So what does Google do? It tries to help publishers by, for example, starting a subscription service that drives more readers to easily subscribe — and join and contribute — to news sites directly from Google pages. The NMA study cites that subscription service as an example of Google emphasizing news and by implication exploiting publishers. It is the opposite. Google started the subscription service because publishers begged for it — I was in the room when they did — and Google listened. The same goes for most every product change the study lists in which Google emphasizes news more. That helps publishers. The study then uses ridiculously limited data (including, crucially, an offhand and often disputed remark 10 years ago by a then-exec at Google about the conceptual value of news) to make leaps over logic to argue that news is important on its services and thus Google owes news publishers a cut of its revenue (which Google gains by offering publishers’ former customers, advertisers, a better deal; it’s called competition). By this logic, Instagram should be buying cat food for every kitty in the land and Reddit owes a fortune to conspiracy theorists.

The real problem here is news publishers’ dogged refusal to understand how the internet has changed their world, throwing the paradigm they understood into the grinder.

Yes, the world has changed. But the NMA seems to think that the government should now just force the internet companies to hand over money after their own members spent years twiddling their thumbs and squandering any attempt to build up loyal followings and sustainable business models. It's not easy to keep a media business sustainable these days, but so much of it has to do with those companies refusing to recognize how the internet was changing the business, and how to take advantage of those changes.

Filed Under: collusion, internet, news, newspapers
Companies: google, news media alliance, ny times

News Organization Like Reuters Supporting The EU Copyright Directive Is A Shameful Support For Censorship

from the sad-times dept

A bunch of sites have been reporting on the news that over 200 organizations have signed a letter in support of the EU Copyright Directive, with most of the news reports focusing on the fact that a ton of music collection societies and music industry trade groups are on the letter. The letter itself makes no real argument, it just says "pass this damn thing." Well, since the law hasn't yet passed, I think I can quote the whole thing without getting fined, so here it is:

We, the undersigned organisations, representing authors, composers, writers, journalists, performers and others working in all artistic fields, news agencies, book, press, scientific and music publishers, audiovisual and independent music producers call on the European Parliament to adopt the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market.

This Directive has been long sought to create a much-needed level playing field for all actors of the creative sector in the European Digital Single Market, whilst giving citizens better access to a wider array of content.

This is an historic opportunity. We need an internet that is fair and sustainable for all. This is why we urge policymakers to adopt the Directive quickly, as agreed in trilogue negotiations.

Of course, we've explained multiple times why none of this makes much sense. Nothing in the EU Copyright Directive is about creating a "level playing field" or "giving citizens better access to a wider array of content." Indeed, as written, it will do the exact opposite. It will heavily weight the playing field towards large organizations (both tech and copyright) and massively limit availability to content through mass mandatory filtering.

Anyway, I'm not surprised at all the collection societies signing on to this -- as they know that they'll be in the best position to demand more money from platforms should this become law. What I find most troubling, however, is to see a bunch of news organizations -- including behemoths like Reuters -- signed on. I know that many large news publishers (stupidly) support Article 11, in the false belief that it will magically create a new stream of revenue for them from Google News having to pay to link to them (even though that hasn't worked in Germany or Spain when similar laws passed in both places).

But it's simply stunning that these news publishers -- who often hold themselves up as the supporters of free expression -- are now seen to be supporting the censorship powers of Article 13 as well. This is an incredibly short-sighted position for these news orgs to take. News reporting quite frequently depends on things like fair use and fair dealing -- and the current version of the EU Copyright Directive will make that nearly impossible.

It is disappointing in the extreme to see organizations like Reuters completely toss their principles out the window in hopes of taxing Google.

Filed Under: article 11, article 13, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, eu parliament, music, news