Episode Notes
- Spain passed a law in 2014 where google had to pay publishers for inclusion on Google News. So google news closed in Spain and then publishers complained and forced Google to return.
- Australia, and France, are trying to get google and facebook to pay publishers for their content on google news.
- Austriala is also trying to say that Google has to share any changes in the algorithm with publishers with at least 30 days notice, which is insane
- Facebooks issue is its largely users posting links to news articles.
- There’s a strong argument that the government should be setting up a tax on google and facebook to give the money to the publishers. But this is a strange inversion of reality just to do what you really want to do which is take money from tech and give it to journalist. Taxes would be a much better way to do this.
- Laws should based on common sense but this one just comes down to “Waaa”
- It’s not that google and facebook stole ad revenue from publishers, the internet broke the geographic monopolies and thats what took the revenue, then google and facebook came along and found a ad based business model that DOES work on the internet but they didn’t cause this change, they just responded to it better.
Tech and the government
This is a topic that I have to admit I dont care as much about as some of the other ones but I understand how its potentially one of the most important issues. Governments around the world continue to not really understand the impact that technology is having on society and thats a real problem.
For government to be effective it needs to not only understand this issue but really be at the fore front of it. I feel like there is a whole world of policy proposals out there that I’d be curious to read more about. Are there sites that cover this kind of thing specifically or is it just about following certain journalists more closely?