We have something of a natural experiment here on how much FB traffic is worth to news sites. We'll learn the results in a year if Australia repeals or maintains the law.
We already had a natural experiment, in which Australian publishers were free not to share their content on fb.
I’m not sure how discoverability is going to be effected and that may take a while to see the effects given how locals probably know the locals news sources.
I can't see how you could possible argue they do not provide value to the classic media companies by allowing them to be linked and discussed freely on their feeds.
What they want is for Facebook and Google to be forced to list them, but also forced to pay for the privilege. If they failed to craft or pay for legislation to that end, it was nothing more than a mistake.
Most likely this deal benefits the biggest stakeholders only. Small players would cave into opening up to FB/Google.
Such legislation is impossible given that Google/Facebook are not Australian companies. At the end of the day, if the legislation makes their involvement in those countries a net negative for their bottom lines, they can and will take their ball and go home.
Besides, this is obviously a good deal if facebook folds. Publishers seem to be overestimating their position so fb is calling their bluff. Both sides have stuff to lose, but im pretty sure the publishers have a lot more than fb does.
Thus the publishers have already revealed whether they benefit or not, by choosing to allow or disallow the traffic. There is no rational argument that they were being "hurt" by the traffic.
Of course Tech is now politically unpopular, and if you are Australian then it is foreign tech -- even more unpopular -- so why not use this political environment to try to extract some cash payments? Everyone wants to receive cash payments, and I can understand why a for-profit Industry would want cash payments, but what is harder to understand is why the public would view them as victims if they didn't get those payments, as they have already made it clear that they are benefitting from the tech traffic by allowing it and by setting up marketing accounts in Facebook and promoting/ sharing links to their stories there. Yet in addition to that they want to receive cash from Facebook. Well, that's a bit of a fantasy, now, isn't it?
The market dominance of a couple platforms is exactly the problem here. No organization is in a good bargaining position against them and so soon there will be regulation.
It's already working. Google is busy making deals. Facebook will do the same eventually.
Ben Thompson has a nice analysis of the situation: https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargainin...
Miraculously, after the Australian government gets involved, Google is now making deals with news media. Facebook will do the same eventually.
