Just for the record. I’ve read the proposed legislation and skimmed Facebook’s initial response during the consultation period – and I think they are right to disable the sharing of Australian news on their platform.
In my view, the proposed legislation appears to be saying:
1. We’ll created a government process, administered via the ACCC, to allow news companies to be formally registered
2. Once a news company is registered it can enter into a mandatory bargaining agreement process with a digital platform company (such as Facebook) to resolve issues – including issues relating to renumeration for sharing news content
3. During this mandatory negotiation consideration must be made for how much it costs to produce the news content and that might become part of a proposed compensation paid by the digital platform provider to the news organisation
4. If they can’t negotiate a renumeration between themselves a mechanism exists in the legislation to have both parties submit a proposal and then one of those proposals its chosen and must be complied with
5. There are a number of other obligations for digital platform provides to notify news organisations if they are going to change their algorithms or anything else that might impact how the posts of news organisations are are displayed, the control the news organisations have over comments, and to respond to various information requests from news organisations
Facebook appears to be saying in response:
1. Facebook aren’t using the content of newspapers unless it is shared – either by the news corporation itself or by another Facebook user linking to external content on the news providers website
2. If a news corporation wants control over what is shared that functionality is available on the Facebook platform if they set up a page – and they can choose not to share if they don’t want to
3. If other Facebook users are sharing content owned by a news organisation then this content isn’t scraped or taken from the news site except to show a preview, and all pay walls are respected – so they are sharing a link to the news organisation’s site and they can prevent access to the content if they want
4. Facebook and news organisation are competing for advertising revenue and this legislation is taking sides in that competition
5. It’s not clear that Facebook benefits from the sharing of news; and it believes that it drives traffic to news organisation’s websites to their benefit
So, Facebook has said the wording of the legislation appears to mean that any any point they might be forced to negotiate payment to news organisations even though they don’t believe they get a benefit from sharing. So they choose not to share so they don’t risk being forced into mandatory negotiation.
I might change my mind as I learn more. But at the moment I think they are making the right decision and a decision within their rights.
Update: Good discussion and thoughts from clever folks on LinkedIn where I shared this post.
Update 2: This article and this article are both better than my blog above. 🙂