Re: Right to Link vs proposed Australian “link fee” legislation

Micropayments are an obvious answer, and perfectly compatible with the web
architecture. Once again it's a political and economic problem. The
payments business is a nice business and the cartel that controls it has no
interest in allowing micro payments to disrupt their rental income.

On Sat., Jan. 16, 2021, 11:52 a.m. Henry Story, <henry.story@bblfish.net>
wrote:

>
>
> > On 16 Jan 2021, at 20:14, Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> wrote:
> >
> > It’s obvious on the face of it that this is profoundly hostile to the
> way the Web is supposed to work.
> >
> > Just in case it's not obvious, a few words on why this is happening.
> >
> > In a sane world, places like Google and Facebook would publish links to
> whatever out there on the Web, sell advertising beside those links, and
> then the linked-to parties would sell advertising on the destination
> resources, and everyone would be happy.  De facto, what's happening is that
> Google and Facebook are getting more or less all the money and the
> newspapers and so on are getting more or less none.  Thus the collapse in
> the publishing industry and, increasingly, more and more locations having
> no access to quality local journalism.  Thus the publishers are clutching
> at straws, this being one of them.
> >
> > One response is for publications to pivot to the subscription model but
> unfortunately, for most publications it's too late; subscription fatigue
> has set in and people are increasingly unwilling to give more parties
> monthly access to their bank account.
>
> Another response is to make it easy for them to deploy micropayments, so
> that
> users coming from search engines can easily pay per article read, and then
> subscribe if they find themselves reading articles from that paper very
> often.
>
> I regularly land on newspapers via search engines, twitter, blogs, …  and
> these ask me for
> a monthly or yearly subscription which I don’t really want. I can’t
> possibly subscribe to
> all newspapers I come across, for lack of time. But I would be happy to
> pay a
> small amount per article read if it were a one click affair and secure.
>
>
> >
> > Now, as to *why* Google and Facebook are getting all the money, this
> gets deep into politics and antitrust policy and regulation of the
> advertising market very quickly. I have strong opinions about it but I'm
> not sure whether that discussion belongs here. Having said that, Data
> Lords: The Real Story of Big Data, Facebook and the Future of News from
> 2018 is an article that really influenced my understanding of the dilemma
> that the publishing industry is facing.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Jan 16, 2021 at 9:38 AM Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org> wrote:
> > Has anyone noticed this call
> >
> https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/news-media-bargaining-code
> > from the Australian government for comments on a plan to force Google
> and Facebook to pay money to news media businesses for content they display
> on their services?  This is a final call of a proposal whose first versions
> came out in July.
> >
> > The web architecture issue here seems to be the right to link. The code,
> if it became law, would force Google search and Facebook Newsfeed
> [specifically]  to pay a fee to the owner of the destination content (news
> publisher) when the link is displayed, not even necessarily followed.
> >
> > The architecture of the WWW generally involves the right to link to
> something with impunity -- is this proposal in direct with that right?
> >
> > What do folks, and the TAG, think?
> >
> > Tim
> >
> >
> >
>
> Henry Story
>
> https://co-operating.systems
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> Twitter: @bblfish
>
>