Pattern Matching
There’s a Smarter Way to Make Tech Pay for News
How to bolster the media without breaking the internet
A proposed law intended to bolster the struggling news media at the expense of thriving tech platforms is playing out quite poorly in Australia.
Google reluctantly obeyed the legislation, which is expected to pass in the next week, by agreeing to pay large sums to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and other corporate media giants in exchange for linking to their articles. (News Corp is the dominant player in Australia’s heavily concentrated media market.) Facebook refused, opting instead to ban all news from its network in Australia. In the process, Facebook appears to have also blocked posts from public health agencies, weather sites, political candidates, and nonprofits helping victims of domestic violence, among others. It even briefly took out some of its own pages. The company says it is working to restore non-news content.
It’s hard to say whether Facebook’s approach is worse, but it’s easy to see that the proposed law — which would require the dominant internet platforms to negotiate with all news organizations above a certain revenue threshold for the right to host links to their content — is deeply flawed, even for those who sympathize with its motivations. (I wrote about those motivations last year, and covered the immediate fallout from Facebook’s response earlier this week.)
It might also be easy to forget, amid the debacle and recriminations, that the status quo is disastrous as well. In the United States, as in Australia and many other countries, the internet broke the business model that had long sustained public-interest journalism — especially local journalism — and with relatively few exceptions, the news industry has been more or less in freefall for the past 15 years. It’s hard to measure the full societal cost of that crash, but looking around at the state of our democracy, public discourse, and public trust in the media and institutions should offer some clues.
It’s natural to fight about whose fault that is, and to look for heroes and villains. Australia’s law seems informed by that sort of frame: It views platforms such as Facebook and Google as profiting unjustly from the media’s…
