The Next Now: First Trump, now Murdoch, banned from Facebook

One might joke that another major source of misinformation has just been banned from Facebook: Murdoch’s Australian news media empire. Others might say it with a plain face. Can you blame them? The dumpster fire of clickbait and stories such as “Reality star’s next-level underboob look” - yes, that’s a real news.com.au story - certainly hasn’t helped increasingly strong opinions that modern news media no longer serves a positive social purpose.

Today’s move by Facebook to ban the sharing of links to Australian news sources is extreme and outrageous... according to news sources. They’re very angry at Facebook. Strangely, they’re not angry at the Australian government for proposing such embarrassingly internet-illiterate measures in the first place.

Let’s break down four realities to assist readers who remain on the fence about this developing situation:

1. The government wants Facebook to pay news outlets whenever their content is linked to. Not for ‘using’ or republishing it - merely when anyone links to it, which is in fact of commercial benefit to those news organisations already. In some cases, news orgs can thank Facebook for 20-30% of their traffic (and traffic is how they make money), so this seems like an almost-devious attempt to double-dip.
2. The government isn’t saying anyone else should get paid to be linked to - only news organisations. They’re dictating that it’s just ACMA registered news sources who get paid; only news outlets who already make hundreds of thousands or more in revenue. I won’t get paid by Facebook every time I link to this ‘newsletter’. Should I be? Through extrapolation, should Facebook also pay Google if I link to a YouTube video on Facebook? None of this, or any variation of it, actually makes sense. That’s how you quite literally dismantle “the web”.
3. To reiterate, the government isn’t saying we should tax Facebook to support the media as it serves a positive social purpose, whose revenues have been hit by advertising moving to social media. That would be a far less intellectually dishonest route. Instead, based on what boils down to flawed intellectual property arguments, the government is attempting to set a precedent that the news, and only the news, deserve to be paid whenever their content is so much as linked to.
4. Politicians and media executives are suggesting that without their news on Facebook, it becomes a cesspool of fake news, that it’ll become a source of misinformation, that it becomes a cancer amidst society... They obviously haven’t been on Facebook lately. It already is, with or without them. Please stop using Facebook.

Pretending that an ‘everyone must now pay to link’ model didn't break the internet, the fundamental question you must ask yourself is: why would Facebook want to pay for these links? For something that is not materially important to them? You might say it’s worth a lot to them. Newsflash: it’s not - they just canned it without batting an eyelid. There have been no sound arguments and no defensible numbers put forward anywhere, by anyone, to legitimately argue an alternate financial reality. To put it another way: if given the choice of paying for something that would have no return-on-investment, or turning off that something to avoid losing that money, which are you choosing? After all, Facebook’s board has a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to make money and create shareholder value, not the opposite.

That is the choice that the Australian government presented to Facebook, by way of attempting to mandate a dangerously tech-naive proposal with an industry-bias they haven’t well explained. This is clearly a nation state’s attempt to bully a wealthy business into offering a handout. A handout to a mate named Rupert, is what I would say if I wanted to stir the pot… which I just have.

Brass tacks: if the government’s proposal wasn’t ultimately just seeking money-for-nothing for the news media, they would have made the [even more insane] argument that every content creator should be paid when they’re linked to; that as a by-product the fabric of the internet should shift to one where only the wealthy can afford to link to information in large volumes, or let their users link to information... Thus, wealthy institutions then control the flow of information even more than those wearing tinfoil hats insist they do right now.

Today’s unnecessary outcome is going to hurt Australian news media revenues more than the handouts would have benefited them. News outlets should not be very angry at Facebook. They should be very angry at the Australian government. I’m irrationally hopeful that this becomes a catalyst for the maturing of Australia’s political representation with respect to technology policy. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll see some more tech literate individuals moving through the ranks in the near future, for all of our benefit.