<
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/23/taxing-the-internet-to-bail-out-media-wont-solve-the-fundamental-problems-of-the-media-business/>
"Hey Google, can you spare a few hundred million to keep Rupert Murdoch’s yacht
afloat? That’s essentially what some legislators are demanding with their
harebrained schemes to force tech companies to fund journalism.
It is no secret that the journalism business is in trouble these days. News
organizations are failing and journalists are being laid off in record numbers.
There have been precious few attempts at carefully thinking through this
situation and exploring alternative business models. The current state of the
art thinking seems to be either (1) a secretive hedge fund buying up
newspapers, selling off the pieces and sucking out any remaining cash, (2)
replacing competent journalists with terrible AI-written content or (3) putting
all the good reporting behind a paywall so that disinformation peddlers get to
spread nonsense to the vast majority of the public for free.
Then, there’s the legislative side. Some legislators have (rightly!) determined
that the death of journalism isn’t great for the future of democracy. But, so
far, their solutions have been incredibly problematic and dangerous. Pushed by
the likes of Rupert Murdoch, whose loud and proud support for “free market
capitalism” crumbled to dust the second his own news business started failing,
leading him to demand government handouts for his own failures in the market.
The private equity folks buying up newspapers (mainly Alden Capital) jumped
into the game as well, demanding that the government force Google and Meta to
subsidize their strip-mining of the journalism field.
The end result has mostly been disastrous link taxes, which were pioneered in
Europe a decade ago. They failed massively before being revived more recently
in Australia and Canada, where they have also failed (despite people pretending
they have succeeded).
For no good reason, the US Congress and California’s legislature are still
considering their own versions of this disastrous policy that has proven (1)
terrible for journalism and (2) even worse for the open web."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
