Bill allows U.S. publishers to team up when negotiating with Facebook, Google

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-media-facebook-us-exclusive/exclusive-coming-bill-would-allow-u-s-news-publishers-to-team-up-when-negotiating-with-facebook-google-idUSKBN2AJ16X

by mikesabbagh • 5 years ago

26 16 5 years ago

reuters.com

Beggers1960• 5 years ago

I like the sound of this. It's the only way Facebook etc are going to actually bow to pressure.

The same tactics should be employed by governments.

mschuster91• 5 years ago

They should not. The Australian move, just as the EU Leistungsschutzrecht crap, was nothing more than Murdoch (or, in EU, Axel Springer and friends) trying to cling onto money.

Fuck these democracy destroying rags.

chris_wot2• 5 years ago

It also affected non-Murdoch press, however.

m12k• 5 years ago

There are so any things wrong with Facebook, but them not paying news sites for the privilege of sending traffic their way is not one of them. We desperately need good legislation around social media, and I fear that bad legislation like this, written by newspaper lobbyists, is going to let politicians get away with saying "look, I did something" and call it a day.

loceng• 5 years ago

Fuelling journalism seems like the answer, trickle up - providing citizens with $100/year to allocate to the journalist of their choice, essentially citizens "voting" with money for who they want to hear news from; this is a policy proposal by Andrew Yang, similar idea to his Democracy Dollars, $100/year voucher to every eligible voter to give to the politician of their choice - would help wash out money from lobbyists/industrial complexes 8:1. Journalism Dollars + Democracy Dollars will have a compounding effect, tie that to Ranked Choice Voting and Freedom Dividend/UBI - and you make people anti-exploitable - and compounding the impact of even more policies, breaking apart the duopoly and grip that the handful of mainstream media companies that have amassed so much power/reach.

dicomdan• 5 years ago

The news media corps are getting more desperate trying to push this narrative that tech companies have to pay them to advertise their articles.

With the public trust for media companies at all time low, this certainly isn’t helping.

chris_wot2• 5 years ago

Yep, and this is why Facebook was so desperate to cut off Australians from the news. Pure self interest, they know that their reckoning is coming and they were trying to head it off at the pass.

forinti• 5 years ago

I thought people didn't like unions in the US.

onetimemanytime• 5 years ago

I don't have a perfect solution, but having Google and Facebook take 80% ++ of digital ad revenue is not healthy. I hope we're not too late

ausbah• 5 years ago

I'm not convinced "free market" really holds any substantive meaning anymore.

boh• 5 years ago

Vs what time in the past 100 years? Free market is just an economic model (keyword "model") that illustrate potential market dynamics. It's never been reproduced in the real world (regardless of whatever argument has been made, deregulation doesn't reproduce it either).

jsnell• 5 years ago

Bill proposals are considered off-topic for HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26185428

dsparkman• 5 years ago

Nothing like some good old-fashion collusion.

im3w1l• 5 years ago

In some sense it seems fair that small players can group together, so that when they negotiate with a big company they have a block of comparable size. Otherwise small companies have no choice but to merge into a large company to negiotate together.

But the proof is in the pudding I suppose, and there may certainly be unexpected or undesirable consequences.

lanevorockz• 5 years ago

Freedom is pretty much gone these days ... The main issue is that companies now reversed the capital market. By providing services for free, the USERS became the product.

LatteLazy• 5 years ago

I still feel like legislators and publishers are massively overestimating the importance of "news"papers. Facebook just removed them all in aus, because what they add is very small compared to all the other stuff people come to FB or Google for. I don't need Fox, the NYT or CBS to reword government press releases thanks...

Bill allows U.S. publishers to team up when negotiating with Facebook, Google

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