always-lurking

kirklennon, 9 months ago

Summary of events:

Facebook makes a service and it gets really popular. People start sharing everything on there, including links. The ability to freely link to anything with a public address is one of of the foundational principles of the open World Wide Web.

Facebook comes up with "Open Graph" metatags that websites can embed in the code on the webpages. Facebook (and others) can use this to automatically generate rich previews of the link. Facebook isn't taking anything from these websites; they are adding extra code specifically for Facebook so that instead of just a URL, the link can automatically include the article title, lede, and a photo.

For many reasons, some of which involve the internet and some of which are entirely self-inflicted, advertising revenue craters for most newspapers. Facebook is profitable.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and some other big media companies decide they want to convince the Australian government to create a new tax on Facebook and just give the money to them instead. Canada decides to copy this idea.

Facebook tells Canada that links to news articles represent a very small percentage of the content being shared on Facebook (despite Facebook inversely representing a large percentage of the source of traffic of these websites) and that ads near news links are extremely low value. The news links are of effectively zero commercial value to Facebook and they'd rather just block them entirely rather than pay some arbitrary tax.

And now tiny indigenous publications are suffering from a lack of visitors all because some billionaires wanted to squeeze some money out a politically-convenient target.