Enlarge / News is still very much happening both around the world and in Australia… but you wouldn’t know it if you’re one of the tens of millions of Australian Facebook users. (credit: Brent Lewin | Bloomberg | Getty Images)
A long-simmering battle between tech firms and the government of Australia became explosive yesterday when Facebook announced that it would block all linking of news publications inside the country. Not only has this change affected Australian and international news publishers, but Facebook’s wide net has also caught up governments, nonprofits, and basically anyone else in Australia who posts non-news content to the platform.
Australian lawmakers have been considering a bill that would require Internet platforms such as Google and Facebook (“digital platform corporations”) to negotiate in good faith with news outlets (“registered news business corporations”) to link to their content. If the outlets and the platforms can’t reach a deal on their own, they would have to go to baseball-style arbitration, where a neutral third-party arbitrator would decide whose offer is the better one.
The bill would at first apply to only two companies: Google and Facebook. Both, as you might expect, have expressed consistent opposition to the bill. (Microsoft, operator of remote second-place search engine Bing—which captures between 2 and 3 percent of the market—does not oppose the rules that would apply to its largest competitor.)
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