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Some commentators believe that Facebook has called Australia a hoax. They may be about to find out that Australia is not lying.
The platform’s own irresponsible and chaotic implementation of its Australian news “ban” appears to have brought together the country – citizens and politicians from every corridor – and governments from around the world, to support the Australian government’s determination.
As a former CEO of Facebook Australia and New Zealand, Stephen Scheeler, wrote in Nine newspapers, the company has taken huge risks, betting that “by taking an aggressive hard line with a middle power, like Australia, it will send a message to the rest of the world to go back in regulation. “
But, as he says, there is an alternative scenario. “When you pull down a government’s pants in front of the world, it has no choice but to go deeper. When you shred 13 million citizen stories as a bargaining chip, you raise the stakes … So witnessing a showdown between Australia and Facebook could be the catalyst for truly global reform. It could be that future internet historians will see this decision as the time when the world sat down and started taking serious steps to hold great technologies accountable to society. “
So far, that second scenario is playing out.
It’s hard to think of a better way for a platform to enrage a nation and destroy what’s left of its own reputation than to block health sites and hospitals in a pandemic, emergency services sites in a state that recently battled fires. forest and innumerable wellness sites. groups, charities and community organizations, all in a bid to avoid making payments under a new media trading code that aims to address the power imbalance between media companies and big tech platforms.
It’s hard to think of how to look more like an arrogant international monopoly that doesn’t take a country and its proposed laws seriously than to implement a ban without warning and in such a clumsy way that a radio station could retrieve its page before listing as gift shop and users could still post news articles if they were posted as a link to a tweet. This is a company so confident in its ability to intimidate that I was prepared to hit the big button to “destroy news in Australia” without seemingly spending a moment thinking about the consequences.
It didn’t take long for comparisons to be made on how easy it had been for Facebook to shut down real and factual news and how difficult it had claimed the task of removing “fake” news and misinformation, or even turning off the live feed. . of a massacre, or to ask questions about how a company supposedly involved in “connecting the world” could so gleefully disconnect the real news from an entire nation, leaving the top-performing links to comedy sites adjacent to the news and satire.
Facebook’s response, that the breadth of its ban was due to the definition of news in the proposed code, it does not make sense since the code is not yet law, and the company immediately began to reverse some of the blocks as they were publicized by outraged users.
So far it has managed to strengthen the government’s resolve. The prime minister says, emphatically, that threats are not a good way to deal with his government.
Google, the other media giant that faced being forced to negotiate and arbitrate with news companies under the code, found a solution.
In order not to set the legal precedent of paying for news that appears in searches, it has entered into agreements of a similar magnitude with Australian media companies. large and small for stories to appear in your Showcase service. The government has achieved its goal of getting the platform to pay news outlets, and Google has avoided the precedent. The government retains the ability to activate the letter of the law and force payment for news that appears in searches at any point in the future, as a means of ensuring that voluntary agreements do not erode over time or are refused to small and medium publishers. once the needs of the greater part of the city are met.
It is true that this arrangement, reached through the power of competition law, to level the playing field between news companies and powerful monopolistic platforms with which they cannot avoid doing business, does not address the problem of the concentration of media ownership in Australia. .
But even if you have deep concerns about that issue, as I do (it was one of the reasons we established Guardian Australia eight years ago) and even if you strongly believe that the government should act to increase media diversity, as I do. Me, It doesn’t take much thought to understand the danger of setting a precedent in which a government uses competition law to decide which individual publishers it wants to favor and which it doesn’t.
Lobbying by News Corp it likely helped convince the Australian government to act on the competition regulator’s recommendations, and News Corp, as the dominant news publisher in the country, will reap substantial benefits from the code applied proportionately across the Australian publishing landscape. That’s an uncomfortable reality that has prompted some commenters to make the strange suggestion that other Australian publishers should make themselves less competitive by turning down Google’s offers – a strange idea that could only exacerbate the problem.
Writing on Medium and on the small Australian website Crikey, which was one of the first Australian publishers to sign a Showcase deal with Google, American academic Jeff Jarvis argues that Guardian Australia “allied with the devil [News Corp]”By trying to negotiate the exact same type of deal with Google as the publishing company and most other Australian media companies. He also claims that Google payments will not benefit journalism. He does not provide evidence for this claim, but if he is correct, the review to be conducted by the Treasury at the end of the first year of operation of the code would uncover it. Under the Guardian Australia business model (we have no shareholders and we operate solely to provide journalism) there is really nothing else to spend it on.
As for Facebook, you now face two options. You could do business in a similar way to Google, either on a voluntary basis or through the formal negotiation and arbitration processes under the law, or you could remain outside Australia.
Facebook argues that journalism has a “minimal” advantage for its business, that only about 4% of the content that its users see is in its news. By code logic, that means you could expect to make much smaller payments than Google does.
The continued ban on news on Facebook raises concerns, especially for small community news centers, First Nations news services, or regional or youth-oriented news services – the kinds of sites that rely heavily on Facebook measure. But it also highlights the dangers for them of relying too heavily on a third party who is prepared to disconnect overnight, without warning. Some of those organizations are already thinking about how to go back to basics and diversify the way they distribute their work. If Facebook is left out, there is a strong case for the government to help them.
Facebook’s bet is that Australia won’t be able to live without it. Imagine the consequences if we show that we can.
