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

A major part of the issues isn't payments, it's discoverability, and the fact that for the most part, discoverability is currently pretty much monopolized and monetized via advertising companies. 

There is a disturbing trend in the amount of time people stay on the search engines: click-through rates have dropped significantly because content is repurposed and contextualized in the results, making it even harder for content providers to generate revenue via advertising, micropayments etc. With AI using crawled data to generate models that make the providers somewhat obsolete, it's even worse and really aggravates the issue of discoverability, and thence monetization.

Given the above, it's not surprising to see things like this emerge. Until the discovery problem is solved, it's kind of inevitable.

On Sat, Jan 16, 2021, at 2:58 PM, Tim Bray wrote:
> 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
>> 
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>>