Meta Threatens To Yank News Content From California Over Payments Bill - Slashdo...

›

• 1 hidden comment

• Re:Yup (Score:5, Informative)

  by arbiter1 ( 1204146 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2023 @08:26PM (#63566037)

  Spain tried it as well in 2014 to make google pay, all google did was remove spain news orgs from their feed. Google paid zip in fee's, spain news orgs lost most their traffic.

  • Re:

    The Australian government learnt from Spain's mistakes. The trouble now is that the big Australian media companies are raking in money but smaller content producers get nothing. Also, the standard of journalism continues to fall.

• By the way, there's a name for what the news organizations are doing in California: it's called "Rent Seeking Behavior."

  Rent Seeking, in a nutshell, is when one company (or group of companies) convinces the government to enact regulation that favors it or disfavors a competitor. Like a monopoly, it's a form of anti-competitive behavior which harms the consumer.

  Whatever you may think of Facebook in general, the bottom line is that Meta is on the right side of this issue. The state has no business mandating royalty payments for content Facebook hasn't even asked for.

  • Re:

    There's a name for what the news organizations are asking for, but it's "wanting to get paid for the stuff that Google steals".

    Google is not the good guy here.

    • Re:

      Neither are those who rely on Google for traffic, and then want the government create this bizarre legislative contract between Google and said clickbait generators.
      
      So no, it's rent-seeking behavior. Clean-cut.
      Whether Google is a good guy or a bad guy doesn't matter. It's entirely orthogonal to setting the precedent of the clickbait brigades getting the government to enforce anyone who may share knowledge of an article they publicly post.
      
      I mean fuck, maybe we can extend this to its logical conclusion a

    • Re:

      Last I checked, Google respects the robots.txt file. Perhaps Google inclusion should be opt-in instead of opt-out but either way the choice belongs to the web site operator. Google offers the choice of allowing it to include your site in its results (including the snippets they store) or disallowing it.

      The state wishes to supplant that process with a scheme where not only can the web site demand Google to include their content, they can compel Google to pay for it as well. That's just wrong.

  • Re:

    Then why is Facebook republishing this information?

    • Re:

      Because news publishers voluntarily put this information into their articles' meta tags, to be republished for free by everyone in search results and link blurbs.

    • Re:

      They're not. Facebook *users* are posting links to the news sites in their feeds and, like Google, Facebook includes a short blurb that it retrieves from the link.

• Re:

  "We find this mildly useful to have on our website but it doesn't provide enough value that it would be worth paying any extra money to have."

  I don't see that as an unreasonable position.

  • Re:

    The point is that the volume of their response is out of proportion to the ide that it is "mildly useful". If it was mildly useful, they wouldn't be jumping up and down and yelling about how awful this law is. They would just quietly reevaluate their position and decide whether to pay or go home.

    I assess it is much more likely they find it very useful, and lucrative, to have free news and are jumping up and down because the gravy train is in danger of drying up.

    • Re:

      "Useful" is a relative definition. What's useful to me isn't necessarily useful to you.

      So you get to unilaterally decide what's "useful" to others and what their response "should" be? Hmm.... That sounds awfully familiar.... Just where have I heard a similar argument on this page????/s

      Citation Needed. What's the basis for that assessment?

      The only thing "out of proportion" here is the idea that people should be forced to pay for something that was given away for free. If you don't want others quoting yo

• Re:

  This may be dumb, but in case you haven't noticed yet, is the SOP for how American companies operating in other countries, and only a handful of countries are strong enough to fight back.

  FB is just using what is tried-and-true elsewhere back to America.

• Re:

  I find that post so utterly ironic given what you call for in the post above.
  
  If this is a copyright issue, then solve it in court.
  But that's the problem, right? It's not quite a copyright issue, which is why we (who the fuck IS we here, the news lobby?) want to legislatively enforce contracted payment.
  All fine and dandy when it's aimed at Meta, because they're a megacorp. Less funny when it's aimed at Joe's blog.

• 1 hidden comment

• Re:

  Yes! I rely on trusted sources like Fox News! They would never lie. Even if they privately say they do, over and over again. That was obviously just kidding around, so just ignore that.

• Re:

  Heh. There is no news in California (or anywhere else), only propaganda and advertising.

• Re: Wait?

  Your state is socialist republic too. Unless you don't have Medicare and tax social security.

• Re:

  You actually want to use facebook...for anything??? This bill is just about facebook news, you know, not facebook in general.

• Re:

  Careful there, DeSantis.
  
  You neo-fascist fuckfaces are having fun with this now, but eventually the Court is going to say enough is enough with your thinly-veiled bills of attainder.