Meta threatens to pull all news from California rather than pay El Reg a penny Here we go again: Meta has threatened to block journalism content for California users after the US state's legislature read a bill that would require it, and other large internet organizations, to pay publishers for using their work. The proposed California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), like similar bills before it, …
> Anyone that knows what a search engine does...
FYI there is a astonishingly large part of the population (mostly 50+) for whom "Internet" is a very vague notion mostly encompassing Google (the Entry, where you enter "www.somesite.com" to go to that site!) and Facebook/YouTube. Yes, they usually have noticed there are lots of other sites to be found, but they prefer to stay on mapped territories, "there be dragons" and all that.
Don't forget that many of these were indoctrinated into believing that IE (As in Internet Explorer) was the whole Internet.
Ok, those who didn't use AOL would have believed a slightly different story.\
Now.? Google is their home page and that's it as far as they are concerned.
Me? google.com is marked as 'untrusted' in all my browsers.
That's not how most people "consume" news. They - and I have a lot of sympathy with this - want one App they can look at, not multiple websites. News aggregators are nothing new, I've used various programs for doing that for years and years. Facebook is like an automated version of that - it figures out what your interests are and shows you items from the profiles of news publishers who "align" with those. Which is both a blessing and a curse. I don't use it as a primary source iof news but I certainly do see a lot of news articles I'd never have read otherwise.
one of the reasons the Rohinga genocide was that in Myanmar, Facebook IS the internet, preloaded onto phones usually. They released facebook in a language that had no moderators and were surprised by the result.
How many people use Google for everything. It's their home page, they do all their searches, get news, even buy bloody plane tickets now from it?
Personally I think the tech firms have had it too good. They get to steal other peoples content, republish it, layer their adverts on top of it, strip out the ad content that pays for the staff that actually DID the job and get away with it.
Facebook, Youtube, Insta etc should ALSO be labelled as publishers. No more getting away with, "well just because someone on our platform live streamed a Mosque or Synagogue shooting incident and we gave them ALL the technology they needed to do it AND we made money from the advertising on it; doesn't make us bad people" excuses.
As another Californian the only reason I can think for caring about Facebook is that it is -- or rather, was -- a major employer in the Bay area. Apart from that (and the taxes it pays) its irrelevant. If it disappeared tomorrow all that would happen is that I'd cease to be updated daily about a friends Wordle score (just something to delete in my inbox).
"If it went away tomorrow, the cost of housing would plummet in the Bay Area."
The cost of housing and office space has been falling. It's at the point now where the mayor is considering hiring back the police they got rid of and putting money back into the fund for the police. Funny how much people miss not having the police show up when they call when they don't. I suppose they could get rid of paying for all of the free crack pipes, syringes and Narcan.
"There is no mayor of the Bay Area."
San Francisco. Sorry. The surrounding towns are very similar to SF and often just follow along with anything that SF is doing.
I see the same thing in the city I live in. They copy/paste codes and regulations from other towns and the codes turn into 8th gen Xeroxed forms where nobody knows what they mean anymore since there had been no discussion or supporting material. I had a company that represented movie locations and the city where I live has regulations surrounding the use of 'tents'. When I asked the city what the definition was for what constituted a tent, they had no clue. They wouldn't/couldn't say if a shade canopy was a tent or not. I did find another city where they did have some definitions and what they were interested in were circus marquees. The odd thing was a marquee set up for dining off-camera wasn't an issue with getting the film permit. The same went for things like a 'practical oven/hob' or smoking. The whole crew could be puffing away all day long but if they filmed anybody smoking, they were required to have the fire brigade standing by and a line of certain types of fire extinguishers handy. The same for those ovens unless they were just being used to make lunch.
TL:DR The Mayor of SF can be considered the Mayor of the "Bay Area" as they mostly march in lock step.
Media companies do all the work of research and writing the article, which Facebook then take a lot of the revenue from. How would you feel if somebody else was profiting from your work and not paying you while you watched your income plummet?
I'm not honestly sure Facebook is the villain here, people just expect to get news for free these days and there are plenty of places where they can do that. Facebook I think is just a big wealthy target that can afford to share, so why shouldn't they?
Presumably those sites already have the ability to enforce their copyright, i.e. they can simply say "don't copy/publish our articles?"
I remember there was some legal disagreement around whether headlines were protected by copyright, but I don't think there is any ambiguity around ownership of article contents.
Facebook would probably be ok if they just showed the headline and a very short précis, all clickable to the source. From experience, quite a few people would still treat Facebook as the entire news source because the have such a short attention span they can barely get past even that much text before moving on to the next item, buy it would generate a lot more links to original article. On the other hand, I know people with very warped views of the world of new because they rarely, if ever, read beyond the first paragraph and as we all know, headlines + first paragraph is 99% clickbait that often implies the opposite of what you find when you read the full article. That plus Facebooks algorithms only showing what it thinks or wants you to see is still a recipe for a distorted world view.
Funny you should mention copyright, that's specifically the problem with Canadian version of the law and it had carve out a "fair use" exemption to avoid contradicting our copyright law. If instead we had updated our copyright law to recognise copying has evolved then we wouldn't have needed a law requiring FB et al. to become the masters of our news industry.
Because Faceplant could just stop being both so f&cking lazy and selfish, and publish a preview of the article then [properly and legally] link to the full article for the full read. But no, Faceplant thinks that it gets to stake claim on anything and everything it wants to (all your personal data, your browsing history, your purchase history via cooperative business links, and now journalism) simply because they can.
It's someone else's work and property. You need to ask permission if you intend to use it for your own purposes.
Given Facebook pays no tax, and the destruction of housing market near their offices, it would actually be a good thing if they left California for the vast majority of people there.
Facebook hasnt done much if any good for the local nobody in SF, so why would they care, they would actually be happy.
The Australian, Canadian, etc politicians love to beat their chests and claim to have protected their national culture against US internet tech giants.
But follow the money, if FB is bankrolling the news then it's controlling the news. The Australian law is quite explicit: only pay if you link, so who do you think FB is going to choose to link to? In Canada, most small independent news publishers, who would benefit most, aren't even eligible to claim compensation under the news law.
Do you really think the politicians are going to admit they screwed up and actually handed the keys to their country to a foreign corporation?
I clicked on the Edge icon the other day out of curiosity. Its default is MSN.com (naturally). What a hoot! It’s like the National Enquirer of the digital age (my favorite headline from them years past was "woman cuts off nose to spite face"). Other than an occasional article from a reputable sports feed it’s splashed with fluffy, empty, non news items from dozens of ??? “news” sources. Quite entertaining for a few minutes, actually.
Though I do find getting news more of a PITA than it used to be.
Way back I had a whole lot of RSS feeds configured in my RSS reader app, and then would inspect the "summary" and click through to read those of interest.
These days many sites have scrapped their RSS feeds (El Reg is one of the few that has retained them) and so this is getting less useful and most days tend to skip teh RSS app and just visit a few "favourite" web sites & get news that way, Shame RSS feeds have declined - I probably miss out on some potentially interesting news these days & probably shoudl sort out a (non social media related) news aggregator.
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