An interesting analysis of the #LinkTax.
To be fair, for as much as I like to lash against #BigTech, I've always criticized the link tax in the format it's often implemented.
Taxing another website, no matter how big, for sharing a link to yours (or for letting theirs users share a link to yours) is a violation of everything that the Web is supposed to be.
It's a desperate attempt from news outlets to get money out of tech giants that focused on the wrong problem and proposed the wrong solution.
Their argument was flawed from the very beginning: it assumes that readers that see the title of a page on Facebook or Google won't click on the link to read more because they've already read the title on Facebook or Google. And they ignore that, even if they click on the link, users will be welcome by a paywall that hides the content anyway.
And such laws completely miss the point too. Big Tech doesn't cannibalize media outlets because it allows its users to share links to NYT or The Guardian on their platforms, while rendering the titles of the Web pages on user timelines. Big Tech cannibalizes media outlets because it caches and scrapes their content and uses it to feed AI models that compete with them. While media outlets were complaining for Facebook users sharing links on their timelines without Facebook paying them any dividends, Microsoft and Google have trained models exposed through chat bots on years of those outlets' content, and they can reproduce it in hundreds of ways - and none of them requires the user to ever click on the link to the source.
It's also interesting to see how such laws have backfired on the long run.
As a response to Canada's link tax, Facebook has decided that it'll simply prevent links from major Canadian news outlets from being shared on the platform.
The result? People have got very creative on how to share news (including screenshots and links to cached/reproduced articles), the void left by professional news outlets on the platform has been filled by disinformation/misinformation, many outlets have seen their traffic drop by a third or more, while Facebook hasn't been affected at all.
Of course we need to have a serious discussion on how sustainable it is for people to consume news articles from 2-3 private platforms with algorithms designed to enforce their biases. But that's unfortunately the reality we're in now. Slamming a tax on the links and hoping that it would fix things by redistributing revenue (only to those outlets large enough to get a deal with Big Tech btw) was a solution doomed to fail from its very inception anyway.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/05/16/canadas-law-to-help-news-outlets-is-harming-them-instead
Fabio Manganiello /
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2024-05-26 13:48:52
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2024-05-26 13:48:52Event JSON
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"content": "An interesting analysis of the #LinkTax.\n\nTo be fair, for as much as I like to lash against #BigTech, I've always criticized the link tax in the format it's often implemented.\n\nTaxing another website, no matter how big, for sharing a link to yours (or for letting theirs users share a link to yours) is a violation of everything that the Web is supposed to be.\n\nIt's a desperate attempt from news outlets to get money out of tech giants that focused on the wrong problem and proposed the wrong solution.\n\nTheir argument was flawed from the very beginning: it assumes that readers that see the title of a page on Facebook or Google won't click on the link to read more because they've already read the title on Facebook or Google. And they ignore that, even if they click on the link, users will be welcome by a paywall that hides the content anyway.\n\nAnd such laws completely miss the point too. Big Tech doesn't cannibalize media outlets because it allows its users to share links to NYT or The Guardian on their platforms, while rendering the titles of the Web pages on user timelines. Big Tech cannibalizes media outlets because it caches and scrapes their content and uses it to feed AI models that compete with them. While media outlets were complaining for Facebook users sharing links on their timelines without Facebook paying them any dividends, Microsoft and Google have trained models exposed through chat bots on years of those outlets' content, and they can reproduce it in hundreds of ways - and none of them requires the user to ever click on the link to the source.\n\nIt's also interesting to see how such laws have backfired on the long run.\n\nAs a response to Canada's link tax, Facebook has decided that it'll simply prevent links from major Canadian news outlets from being shared on the platform.\n\nThe result? People have got very creative on how to share news (including screenshots and links to cached/reproduced articles), the void left by professional news outlets on the platform has been filled by disinformation/misinformation, many outlets have seen their traffic drop by a third or more, while Facebook hasn't been affected at all.\n\nOf course we need to have a serious discussion on how sustainable it is for people to consume news articles from 2-3 private platforms with algorithms designed to enforce their biases. But that's unfortunately the reality we're in now. Slamming a tax on the links and hoping that it would fix things by redistributing revenue (only to those outlets large enough to get a deal with Big Tech btw) was a solution doomed to fail from its very inception anyway.\n\nhttps://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/05/16/canadas-law-to-help-news-outlets-is-harming-them-instead",
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