Australia Facebook users in Australia may soon be blocked from sharing news.
The social media giant is threatening that Australia will make it impossible for Australian users to share local and international news content on both Facebook and Instagram if the government passes new rules changing the financial arrangement between publishers and plat online platforms.
The new rules, with the strong support of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia Australia, will force Facebook and Google to give news outlets a big reduction in digital advertising revenue. The news is yet another aggressive attempt by any nation to seize Silicon Valley’s power over the business.
As Facebook sees it, the new rules are impossible. That would force the social network to enter into revenue-sharing agreements with publishers, where the final terms would be decided by independent arbitrators – and Facebook would have no instinct to pull out of the deal.
“We tried to make this work,” Campbell Brown, head of Facebook’s global news partnership, said in an interview. “We’ve proposed a version of something that works for us … Unfortunately, there are a lot of things in this proposed law that just make it unstable.”
In a Monday night post, Brown said Brown Australia has left Facebook with two choices: “To completely remove the news or adopt a system that allows publishers to charge us for as much content as we want without any explicit limits. Unfortunately, no business can run.” That way. “
“This draft code has become law, we reluctantly stop publishing and allowing people in Australia to share local and international news on Facebook and Instagram,” he wrote.
News organizations around the world have long since taken over the digital advertising industry through Facebook and Google. Both companies are based in the U.S. More than half of the annual digital advertising spending in Australia, and companies account for more than 70 per cent in Australia. Although the publisher’s content is reaching a larger and larger audience, scraping for small pieces of pie is left.
In recent years, European countries have largely failed to push the platform to give publishers more. When Spain signed a law on Google in 2014 to pay for headlines and news stories in Google News, Google removed Spanish news outlets hitting the country’s news industry. France and Germany have also tried unsuccessfully to bring Google to heel.
Australia’s new law proceeds by setting up a panel of arbitrators that will determine the price Facebook and Google will have to pay publishers. There would be no recourse to exit the contract on the platform, and Australia could face a hefty fine of up to 10 per cent of their total income in Australia for each offense.
While news accounts for a relatively small portion of Facebook and Google’s overall revenue, the ability to access and share news is seen as part of the platform’s appeal. Facebook’s decision to deprive users of the ability to share news could thus have a major impact on its reputation, especially if other countries follow suit.
Brown is not worried about the effects of such a wave. He said, “I think Australia is an outsider.”
He added, “We are here to further our inclusive investments in new markets in the US and the world.” “We’ve got things that really work, and we have no intention of slowing down. We’re going to accelerate the expansion of Facebook News into other markets.”
For Murdoch’s News Corp, which started in Australia and controls most of the country’s news industry, the law is a clear victory. Mordoc U.S. And Australia has been at the forefront of the fight against both Facebook and Google in Australia, publicly criticizing the platform and launching a multi-faceted news aggregator called News.
Last October, Facebook finally agreed to pay publishers millions of dollars a year to display their content in a dedicated news tab. Appropriately, it was Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corp., who appeared with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to announce the news. “Why do you feel so often?” Thomson asked the head of Facebook.
Google announced a similar plan in June to pay publishers for content. Like Facebook, it has also appealed to publishers for its unprecedented reach. And, like Facebook, it has made numerous philanthropic donations for investments in journalism and the news industry. Google News vice president Richard Gingaras did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment.
Whether Industry Australia’s efforts are an overall victory for the news industry is still under debate. Many news industry veterans believe that stricter regulations are unfavorable, and ultimately undermine the ability of publishers to benefit from the distribution provided by platforms such as Facebook and Google.
The Bloomberg Opinion Editorial Board recently argued that “by motivating the platform to eliminate news snippets and previews altogether, it will potentially reduce publisher traffic, reduce advertising revenue, reduce competition, hamper customer innovation and redundant service unnecessarily.” Will, ”the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board argues recently. .
Mark Thompson, the outgoing chief executive of the New York Times Company, is similarly wary of Australia’s move.
“In my own opinion, the bigger the platform we can get to work bilaterally and voluntarily to support journalism at every level, the better,” he told Reuters recently. “The longer it takes to become part of a longer, broader, regulatory and political process, the less likely it is to be helped in a timely manner, and the more likely you are to get a variety of opposite results.”
