Facebook unfriends Australia: news sites go dark in content row | Reuters 📦

6    18 Feb 2021 09:54 by u/Retrofire

6 comments

4 u/BigDoode 18 Feb 2021 11:25
I know we all like to hate on facebook (I do as well) but this is clearly a case of a retarded law. Requiring big tech to pay companies for news simply means, that they will strike deals with the biggest news outlets and block everyone else, because going through the hassle of making thousands of deals for every independent or niche media isn't economically worth it to the company. Or, as in the case of facebook, they just won't bother at all. They can afford to lose a few millions of users. tldr: More media monopolization, yay!
2 u/Retrofire [OP] 18 Feb 2021 11:30
have to agree :/ as much as it pains me to agree with anything big tech does. It's quite a concerning exercise of how much power they have though, even over governments
1 u/secur3gamer 18 Feb 2021 12:57
They're both wrong IMO. It just highlights that Facebook has too much power over the Internet, and governments are retarded (which is fairly well established everywhere).
1 u/BigDoode 18 Feb 2021 13:24
Agreed. But I would add that the fact that big tech has the power it has is largely due to governments all around the world passing regulations which benefit them to the detriment of competition. Meaning a big company like facebook can deal with regulation better than much smaller competition (due to economies of scale), they can lobby much more effectively etc. See [here](https://www.gdpr.associates/another-report-shows-the-gdpr-benefited-google-and-facebook-and-hurt-everyone-else/) for a concrete example.
2 u/None 18 Feb 2021 10:37
Good. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
1 u/None 18 Feb 2021 11:43
That's good, but I guess facebook could have negotiated with at least some news companies to deliver their news for free. I mean, a lot of news sites traffic comes from social media, so probably many news companies, especially smaller ones, are losing a lot of money because of this.