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0 pointsseryoiupfurds1y ago0 comments

Yes! The only argument I could ever get out of supporters of this law was "but they're billion-dollar corporations, they should pay their fair share!"

Well fine, then adjust the corporate tax rate however you like -- but don't be surprised when the corporations you just described as self-interested and greedy react in the obvious way to a brand new, explicitly created economic disincentive.

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nemothekid1y ago· 3 in thread

>"but they're billion-dollar corporations, they should pay their fair share!"

I don't think this is an invalid argument. This is arguable how YouTube works. One thing that is very interesting about Meta is that they have side-stepped the need to actually invest in content. There's nothing wrong with saying "my content drove eyeballs to your platform, so give me a cut of the ad revenue".

I think the bigger issue is, we have decided the marginal cost of journalism is nearly 0

Spivak1y ago

YouTube pays because they're displaying copyrighted works. I don't think even the worst case— displaying opengraph tags that sites have to opt into, meets the bar for reproduction of a copyrighted work. I mean we're talking about linking here.

It's not that the marginal cost of journalism is a pittance, but that the marginal value to a social network of links to a few news sites is actually zero. I would take a bet that if social networks just up and banned all external links period it would be at worst revenue neutral.

nemothekid1y ago

>YouTube pays because they're displaying copyrighted works.

I think this is a distinction without a difference. YouTube paid for content long before they got serious about IP. Similarly, TikTok had to adopt the same mindset with the Creator fund.

More seriously, the reason why Google pays for content is not because they are billion dollar content, it's because the marginal cost for video is greater than 0, and if they didn't pay for it, the content simply wouldn't exist. However, news article pretty much spawn out of thin air. It exists despite the tech giants not paying for it.

hackerbeat1y ago

Pro photos cost a lot of money to use and FB just gets them for free. Why?

Also, big news corps have lots of correspondents and offices around the globe, which are expensive too.

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