Australia has been hard-nosing Facebook for more than a year to get the online company to pay for the Australian news stories that appear on its pages for free.
The Aussies are just one of the countries who have tried to rein in Facebook's monopolistic and sometimes monarchical practices. Usually, though, the issue is privacy, and for the most part, FB has won its battles to collect and keep private data for its own use.
Europe does have a privacy law in place for online services. In the US, things are more grim. On Tuesday, the New York Times columnist Shira Ovide wrote that the hope for future online privacy in the United States now rests on two states' attempts to restrict data harvesting. They are California, whose privacy law continues its "buggy but promising" path, and Illinois, whose law focuses on restricting the use of users' physical attributes, including face scanning, fingerprints, DNA, and so forth. With federal lawmakers getting nothing done, Ovide says, state governments may be privacy's best hope.
But let's go back to Australia's battle to regulate Facebook. Facebook claims that its feed includes just four percent news, and that its revenue gain from news is trivial. It also seems that media companies post stories themselves and pay for ads. The government was resolute about forcing Facebook to pay for the news on the site, and furthermore, they wanted to force Facebook to develop its contracts with media providers using mandatory mediation.
So last Friday, Facebook triggered its "nuclear option," as they called it, and said that users could not view or share news stories on its pages. Also blocked were government pages, including pages by food banks, Save the Children, Human Rights Watch, First Nation media services, and many more.
Some of the reactions were apoplectic. One lawmaker posted this rant: “So Facebook can instantly block @abcperth, @6PR, @BOM_au, @BOM_WA, AND @dfes_wa in the middle of the #bushfire season, but they can’t take down murderous gun crime videos? Incredible. Unbelievable. Unacceptable. The arrogance.”
Within days, the Aussie government discovered that Facebook's media contracts are more complex than they realized. The legislation made several comparatively minor changes in the law, noticeably delaying the onset of contract mediation for two months so that Facebook could negotiate the contracts beforehand.
Still, digital platforms in Australia, including Facebook, will pay media companies to link to their content in news feeds or search results. Chances are, it will cost Facebook less than it would have before the news disappeared from social media.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/23/facebook-to-restore-news-pages-for-australian-users-in-coming-days.html?fbclid=IwAR25G54E6IYV0eXRgndOErwtEBu_HhWAhhXj2D2lpYigNGgD8DXEfRZa0c0
Shira Ovide’s article appeared in an emailed newsletter.
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