The conversation about the proposed Australian law requiring Internet companies to pay for news continues (previously, previously).

Last time around, Google had agreed to pay A$60m to local news organisations, and had therefore been exempted from the ban. Facebook initially refused to cough up, and banned news in Australia — and Australian news sites entirely — but later capitulated and reversed their ban on news pages in Australia. They even committed to invest $1 billion in news.

One particular thread keeps coming up in this debate, which is that news publications benefit from the traffic that Facebook and Google send their way. This is of course true, which is why legislation that demands that FB & Google pay for links to news sites is spectacularly ill-conceived, easy to criticise, and certain to backfire if implemented.

Many cite the example of Spain, where Google shuttered the local Google News service after a sustained campaign — only for newspapers to call on European competition authorities to stop Google shutting its operation. However, it turns out that since the Google News shutdown in Spain, overall traffic to news sites went largely unchanged.

Getting the facts right in these cases is very important because the future of the web and of news media is at stake. The last couple of decades have in my opinion been a huge mistake, with the headlong rush after ever more data to produce ever more perfectly targeted advertising obscuring all other concerns. Leaving aside privacy as an absolute good, even on the utilitarian terms of effective advertising, this has been a very poor bargain. Certainly I have yet to see any targeted ads worth their CPM, despite the torrent of data I generate. Meanwhile, ads based off a single bit of information — "Dominic is reading Wired" (or evo, or Monocle) have lead me to many purchases.

The worst of it is that news media do not benefit at all from the adtech economy. Their role is to be the honeypot that attracts high-value users — but the premise of cross-site tracking is that once advertisers have identified those high-value users, they can go and advertise to them on sites that charge a lot less than top-tier newspapers or magazines. The New York Times found this out when they turned off tracking on their website due to GDPR — and saw no reduction in ad revenues.

Of course not every site has the cachet or the international reach of the NYT, but if you want local news, you read your local paper — say, the Sydney Morning Herald. Meanwhile, if you're an advertiser wanting to reach people in Sydney, you can either profile them and track them all over the web (or rather, pay FB & G to do it for you) — or just put your ad in the SMH.

Hard cases make bad law. The question of how to make news media profitable in the age of the Web where the traditional dynamics of that market have been completely upended is a hard and important one. This Australian law is not the right way to solve that question, even aside from the implications of this basically being a handout to Rupert Murdoch — and one which would end up being paid in the US, not even in Australia.

Let us hope that the next government to address this question makes a better job of it.

🖼️ Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash