Facebook’s Australian news ban could be the wrong thing for the right reasons

Facebook’s sudden move on Wednesday to isolate Australians from news (and the rest of the Australian news world) was as surprising as it was draconian. It prevented Australians from sharing news links, from Australian news publications hosting their content on the platform and the rest of us from sharing links to Australian news sites. It can also be a preview of how the platform will respond to almost certain future attempts to regulate its business – not just in Australia, but around the world.

Now that we have had a few days to see how it is doing, it seems that the general consensus of the media experts is that no one is a winner here, but Facebook at least is right. Many experts also dislike the Australian law proposal that inspired Facebook’s move. So while Facebook was right to oppose the law, the way it proceeded to file its objection was very abrupt, clumsy and potentially harmful.

By also demonstrating the considerable role the platform plays in keeping users informed, Facebook is doing what can be a big gamble. On the one hand, it could lead the Australian government to propose a law preferred by Facebook, to reverse the blocking of news – a result that Facebook almost certainly prefers than there being no new law. But the situation could easily prove how much market power Facebook has. This, in turn, may justify the need for regulations to verify Facebook’s power much more strongly.

The Mandatory Negotiation Code for News Media and Digital Platforms – which is currently pending in the Australian parliament and is likely to be approved before the end of its session on February 25 – will require Facebook and Google to negotiate payment agreements with news organizations if they allow users to share news content on their respective platforms. If they do not, an arbitrator will draw up a payment agreement for them. Google and Facebook initially threatened to withdraw their services from the country if the law was passed, but as this passage seemed increasingly likely, their responses were very different. Google started making deals with publications. Facebook, “with a heavy heart”, brought the country to its knees by totally banning the media.

Australians suddenly found themselves unable to share news links on their timelines, and publications found their pages practically without content. There was a global impact as well: Australians were unable to share international news links, as international news publications were blocked in the country, as were native ones.

The ban didn’t just affect the news, however. Although Facebook told Recode that it intended to adopt “a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted,” the company appears to have been overly zealous in its ban. Facebook blocked many pages and links that were not news, including charities, bike paths, Facebook itself and government agencies, including health websites, as the country prepares to start launching the Covid-19 vaccine. Either the Facebook block was hasty and careless, or it was spiteful – or it was a combination of both. In any case, it was not a good appearance.

“Facebook was able to divert attention from a flawed piece of legislation to its own reckless and opaque power,” wrote Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Journalism School. “Even for a company that specializes in public relations disasters, that was quite an achievement.”

Techdirt founder and media analyst Mike Masnick, on the other hand, felt that Facebook was perfectly within its rights to do what it did. He even argued that the news ban serves the best interests of a “free and open internet”, as Australian law will force Google and Facebook to pay a “link fee” that he considers “inherently problematic”.

“A bunch of lazy newspaper executives who have failed to adapt and discover better business models on the Internet not only want traffic, but also want to be paid for it,” wrote Masnick. “This is like saying that not only should NBC have an ad for Techdirt, but it should pay me for it. If this seems totally meaningless, it is because it is. The link tax is meaningless. “

Many of those who criticize the new Australian law to point that Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp dominates the Australian media, is likely to earn more from it. After all, when enacted, the law would require Google and Facebook to pay Murdoch, who used his considerable influence in the Australian government to push for legislation like this for years. Case in point: News Corp has already entered into a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal with Google (the Facebook ban was announced and implemented just hours after the announcement of the Google-News Corp deal). Other Australian media giants, Seven West Media and Nine Entertainment, have also closed big deals with Google. But it remains to be seen how the law – or its threat – would benefit smaller publishers who do not have the same resources or power to negotiate deals with one of the largest companies in the world.

Among those who have problems with the law itself, many agree with the motivation behind it: Google and Facebook have benefited from the news industry. Platforms get traffic from users who are reading and sharing news, but most importantly, they dominate the digital ad industry. Since most news outlets rely heavily on digital ads for revenue, they are almost forced to agree to Facebook and Google terms and prices. So the tech giants get a fair share of those ads, while news publications have effectively lost their business model.

This dominance – and the decline of the media – is why the law was recommended by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which has been analyzing Google and Facebook for years. Commissioner Rod Sims said he believes the two have a lot of market power and that the law is necessary for media companies to have a chance of a fair deal for part of the profits these platforms make from their content.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison strongly urged Facebook to reconsider and “make us friends again”, saying the blockade “was not a good move” and may well have ramifications for the company across Australia’s borders. Canada, France and the European Union are believed to be considering similar laws, and the United States is seeking antitrust lawsuits against Facebook, Google and other high-tech companies, both at the state and federal levels.

“There is a lot of worldwide interest in what Australia is doing,” Morrison told the Associated Press. “That’s why I invite, as we did with Google, Facebook to get involved constructively, because they know that what Australia will do here is likely to be followed by many other Western jurisdictions.”

Morrison added: “It is not normal to stop being friends with Australia because Australia is very friendly.”

But some of Australia’s 13 million Facebook users were not feeling very friendly after the block. Several of them told Recode that they saw the Facebook change as an abuse of power, and feared that they would now miss important news or emergencies, or that the news vacuum caused by the block would be filled with more misinformation. But a Recode reader had a different view: he expected people to search for news on their own, instead of just reading headlines shared by friends.

“I would be much more comfortable if all Australians received the news directly from the source,” he said. “I think that would be better for quality journalism and for the strength of our democracy.”

It appears that some Australians are trying to do just that: the Australian Broadcast Company app was the most downloaded app from Australia’s App Store in the days following the ban.

Let’s see how things go. And if you live in Australia, you will have to go directly to your favorite news site for updates.

Rebecca Heilweil contributed by reporting this story.

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