While waiting to understand who really won in the challenge between the Australian government and Big Tech – according to Joshua Benton of the Nieman Lab at Harvard there are no good and bad, but only a competition to see who is the worst – a first concrete result was reached up: Facebook, through the mouth of Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, has announced an investment plan of $ 1 billion over the next three years to support world publishing, in addition to the 600 million already spent from 2018 to today.
But how does the agreement that will allow Australian citizens to return to read and share the links of information sites on Facebook work? What prompted Mark Zuckerberg’s social network to retrace its steps after the sensational decision to block journalistic content? The immediate answer is that Australia has accommodated some of the social network’s requests, agreeing to change the law and make it less disadvantageous for Silicon Valley. But to understand how this compromise was reached, we need to take a step back and recap what happened in the last year.
Australia vs Big Tech
For some months the Australian government and parliament have started a legislative process to oblige the giants of the network, starting with Google and Facebook, to remunerate publishers who produce content shared on social media or found on the search engine. It is a similar path in the aims but different in the modus operandi of the one started in the European Union with the so-called copyright directive.
In essence, Australia has ruled that Google and Facebook must enter into commercial agreements with Australian publishers, led by the TV tycoon Rupert Murdoch, in exchange for sharing links to the news available on the two platforms. If the agreement is not reached, the law says, the state activates a sort of arbitration that has the task of settling the dispute and setting the price deemed fair.
Australia and Canada against the giants of the web, but Facebook should reopen the deal
by Andrea Iannuzzi
The two Silicon Valley companies fought against this approach, also supported by the US government which hypothesized violations of international trade treaties and limitations on the freedom of enterprise. As the final approval of the law approached, in recent weeks Google has begun to enter into agreements with various publishers, to prevent the scarecrow of arbitration from materializing. It looked like a victory for the Canberra government and the media industry, but Facebook – in a poker game of sorts – decided to revive, putting into practice the warning from previous months, when the Menlo Park company announced that, had the law not been amended, it would have been forced to block news on the platform across Australia.
Thus, from one day to the next, millions of users no longer had the opportunity to open or share the links of the main information sites, but also of some essential public services, as a result of too heavy a technological intervention, for which Facebook itself admitted the mistake and made up for it. It seemed the final act of a wall against wall that could change the structure of the Internet forever, based on the free and availability of the link, as the inventor of the World wide web pointed out. Tim Berners Lee.
Facebook’s move
Instead, after a few days of negotiations continued away from the spotlight, Facebook announced the step back: the law has been changed and therefore the sharing of news will be restored. In particular, Zuckerberg has obtained the affirmation of two principles considered indispensable: the first is that he will be able to choose the publishers with whom to enter into commercial agreements, including minor and local ones. The second is that, by demonstrating that they have supported journalism with funds and initiatives, digital platforms will be able to escape the feared state arbitration. The law therefore remains, establishing the principle that publishers must be paid, but the weapon considered most dangerous by Big Tech is ticked, as it could have triggered a chain reaction forcing the giants to compensate millions of beggars around the world and to do so with a price decided by a third party, that is, by the government authorities.
What Facebook wanted was to overturn a concept deemed misleading and wrong, which was at the basis of the first draft of the law and that is the idea that the social network uses editorial content for its business. This interpretation has always been contested by Menlo Park: the publishers themselves freely choose Facebook as a platform for sharing their content, receiving in exchange traffic on their sites and therefore advertising revenues (the estimate made by Facebook for the Australian market is 5 billions of clicks directed to news sites in 2020 alone, for an economic value of AU $ 407 million that ended up in the coffers of the media industry).
The objection of the publishers, supported by an alliance of governments that in addition to Australia already includes Canada and numerous European states, is that in a monopoly regime there is no alternative to sharing content on Facebook and that Facebook itself, thanks also to the links on the news, you feed your business model based on the permanence of users on the platform, on their profiling and on the “sale” of customers to advertisers.
All winners, no winners
The story actually shows that the interest between the contenders is to find a compromise. Governments want to affirm the principle that the giants of the web, despite being supra-national structures, must submit to the laws and rules established democratically by the individual states. Publishers, who over the years have seen their revenues dwindle facing an unprecedented structural crisis, want Big Tech to compensate at least in part for lost revenues, not as a charity but on the basis of the recognition of the value of the journalistic product.
The digital giants have an interest in offering their users a complete service from a qualitative and quantitative point of view and they know they cannot renounce the presence of news, but at the same time they do not accept halter laws that can limit their freedom of commercial action and downsizing. of your business model. What is happening in Australia, in the current state of affairs, seems to satisfy all these needs. But the balance is fragile and the feeling is that the game is destined to continue, on other tables and in other latitudes.
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