{"id":1700,"date":"2021-02-18T16:03:27","date_gmt":"2021-02-18T05:03:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scriptorum.imagicity.com\/2021\/02\/18\/block-this\/"},"modified":"2021-02-18T16:03:27","modified_gmt":"2021-02-18T05:03:27","slug":"block-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/2021\/02\/18\/block-this\/","title":{"rendered":"BLOCK THIS"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The underside of the world woke up today to find their world turned upside down. Facebook made good on its threats, and then some. Faced with legislation that would require it to pay for sharing news content on its platform, the company didn\u2019t just take their ball and go home. They tore the sandlot up, too.<\/p>

They didn\u2019t just block the flow of Australian news to Australians on their service. They blocked Australian news globally. <\/p>

Their definition of \u2018news\u2019 was construed in a childishly literal way. Caught in the blast radius were government-run public health and safety sites, literary publications, travel sites, and a broad swathe of material by and for people in the Pacific islands.<\/p>

This scorched earth strategy is astonishingly short-sighted. <\/p>

Before we go further though, let\u2019s dispense with a few arguments:<\/p>

Some have argued that the Australian government\u2019s law is nothing more than a shakedown driven by Rupert Murdoch, whose malignant silhouette looms even larger across the Australian media landscape than it does the American.<\/p>

That\u2019s partly true. It is hard to imagine the Murdoch-backed Coalition government enacting this sort of thing at anyone else\u2019s behest. In fact, early drafts of the bill left Murdoch\u2019s lifelong nemeses, the public broadcasters, out in the cold.<\/p>

But the current legislation has the support of all major media companies, large and small, public and private. It\u2019s also backed by the majority of Australians. <\/p>

There\u2019s no question: This FB-Bomb will be a public relations disaster Down Under. <\/p>

Some say the government\u2019s intervention is unprecedented and unconscionable. It may indeed be novel. But it\u2019s not nearly as controversial as it\u2019s portrayed. <\/p>

Government regulation in the media sector is hardly new. There isn\u2019t a nation in the world that doesn\u2019t do it. Taxes are used in a number of jurisdictions to subsidise media. Calling this a shakedown is only true if you\u2019re one of a group of internet libertarians who haven\u2019t yet come to terms with the fact this we\u2019re done homesteading the Noosphere. The Internet\u2019s been staked and fenced for a while now. This battle\u2019s between the Land Barons<\/a>.<\/p>

Some have claimed the Mandatory Bargaining Code is an unworkable mess. It ain\u2019t pretty, that\u2019s true. But it is workable. <\/p>

It\u2019s awkward, though. The whole premise that media companies should negotiate a fee with platform companies is\u2026 novel. I suppose if this were the EU, the government would have set a fee per thousand clicks and run the payments through its taxation service. That would have been a much blunter\u2014and heavier\u2014instrument, but more equitable. And (justifiably) likely to make the libertarian crowd bark even louder. <\/p>

But here\u2019s the thing: The bill outlines a well-defined process that enforces an even-handed and equitable approach to the matter. This lever pulls in both directions. Much moreso than a top-down tax. <\/p>

In a move that Kara Swisher accurately described as \u2018cloddish<\/a>\u2019, Facebook reacted to bill by reaching straight for the Big Red Button. Only a few sentences in, we\u2019ve reached the La La La Can\u2019t Hear You stage of the argument.<\/p>

They could have targeted their anger. <\/p>

The Bill requires that news organisations register themselves with the Australian Communications and Media Authority and express their intent in order to be eligible for mandated negotiation. If Facebook had simply said, \u2018If you register, we will block you\u2019<\/em>, they\u2019d be entirely within their rights. <\/p>

Nobody\u2019s questioning their right not to pay. <\/p>

Instead though, Facebook grabbed a general definition of a news source from the prefatory matter in the legislation, and axed everything even remotely resembling that definition. In the process, they made it harder for millions of Australians and Pacific islanders to receive cyclone warnings and weather updates, vaccination information, bush fire alerts, and community notices. They even blocked their own media page. <\/p>

Amy Remeikis adds that even the North Shore Mums<\/a> group has been silenced, for heaven\u2019s sake. <\/p>

And we here in the Pacific islands are sitting here bemused. Learning once again that when whales go to war, it\u2019s the minnows that suffer. <\/p>

Facebook has a de facto social media monopoly in most, if not all, Pacific island countries. Telcos used free Facebook as a loss leader to lock users into their platforms. As a result, millions of cash-poor mobile users use the platform as their primary interface to the internet. News, alerts, current events all begin\u2014and sometimes end\u2014with Facebook. <\/p>

Social media content is cached locally, too, reducing costs for telcos, who pay some of the highest bandwidth prices in the world. Video and image content from other sources is often much, much slower. <\/p>

In the minds of many islanders, it\u2019s just too time-consuming and too costly to load even a single web page on spec. People are so accustomed to Facebook, it\u2019s likely that most wouldn\u2019t even know what to type into the address bar. You may think I\u2019m exaggerating. I wish I were. A disturbingly large number of people do not know how to use Google search. They access everything online through social media. <\/p>

I\u2019m not blaming Facebook for these problems. I\u2019m blaming them for not caring about the damage they\u2019re doing. They have options. There are absurdly easy ways to target a service block if that\u2019s what they insist on doing. <\/p>

But with the way they\u2019re acting now, they\u2019re harming millions of people who didn\u2019t need to be harmed. As the Ms Swisher<\/a> said, \u201cIn the war between whom do you like least, FB will inexplicably lose to Murdoch.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The underside of the world woke up today to find their world turned upside down. Facebook made good on its threats, and then some. Faced with legislation that would require it to pay for sharing news content on its platform, the company didn\u2019t just take their ball and go home. They tore the sandlot up, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}