A Link Tax Won't Bring Back Journalists; It Will Do Even More Harm To Them

from the this-is-a-bad,-bad-idea dept

While most of the attention on the upcoming votes around the EU Copyright Directive is on the mandatory filters found in Article 13, we should be just as concerned about the link tax in Article 11. European publishers have been flat out lying about the proposal, which is little more than an attempt to just demand cash from Google and Facebook.

We've already explained why this is a bad idea. And it's not a theoretical issue either. This very same proposal has been tried in Germany and Spain and it failed miserably in both places, to the point of doing serious damage to traffic to news sites, without increasing revenue.

Unfortunately, it appears that at least some journalists don't want to hear about the facts. AFP's Baghdad Bureau Chief, Sammy Ketz has pieces in the Guardian and La Stampa (and possibly elsewhere) making an impassioned -- if somewhat confused -- plea in support of Article 11.

The reasoning is fuzzy, because there is no legitimate basis for Article 11, but Ketz basically says "there are fewer reporters these days, because news orgs are failing, but Google and Facebook have lots of money, so Article 11 is important, because they'll give us money." Really.

The media have endured a lot of pain for a long time before reacting to the financial drain, struggling with the consequences rather than the cause. They have laid off staff almost to the point of absurdity. Now they are demanding that their rights are respected so they can carry on reporting the news. They are simply asking that the sales revenue is shared with those who produce the content, whether they are artists or journalists. This is the meaning of “neighbouring rights”. We can no longer swallow the lie spread by Google and Facebook that an EU directive on such rights would threaten people’s ability to access the internet for free. Free access to the web will endure because the internet giants, which now use editorial content for free, can reimburse the media without asking consumers to pay. Difficult? Impossible? Not at all. Facebook made $16bn in profits in 2017 and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) $12.7bn. They simply have to pay their dues. That is how the media will survive and the internet titans will be contributing to the diversity and freedom of the press they claim to support.

Notice no other justification is given other than "the news business is struggling, the big companies have made lots of money, therefore, they should give that money to news orgs."

There are a number of problems with this -- ones you would think an experienced reporter like Ketz would have at least explored before publishing such a thing. First off, the experiments with similar proposals in Germany and Spain showed that it did not lead to news organizations getting more money. Instead, the reverse happened, and it harmed news organizations. Second, the clear implication of Ketz's articles is that Google and Facebook are somehow to blame for the problems news organizations have had. That's simply false. It ignores large technological shifts to an internet age in which we don't actually need every major newspaper sending reporters to cover the same things, because that's inefficient. It also ignores the massive failures by the big new organizations to actually change and adapt to the internet era.

I've pointed this out for over a decade now, but the news business has always been a "community" business. Historically, newspapers aggregated communities of local readers, and sold their attention to advertisers. Unfortunately, many publishers (and journalists) incorrectly thought they were in the "news" business, rather than the community business. But the internet opened up many new communities, and the ones that formed around old school news businesses flopped -- in part because those businesses did nothing to cultivate community. In fact, they often went the other direction with paywalls, intrusive advertising, pop-ups and the like to actively push the community away... to sites like Google and Facebook.

And now they want Google and Facebook to pay them, when they were the ones who failed, and Google and Facebook succeeded? How does that make sense at all?

Finally, Ketz completely brushes aside the very real concerns about how a link tax would fundamentally change the underpinnings of how the World Wide Web works (links) by falsely claiming that it's just a "lie spread by Google and Facebook." And he even misstates what he thinks the concern is. It's not that people wouldn't be able to "access the internet for free." It's that it would fundamentally change how linking can occur on the web, which is the single biggest feature to making the web work. If we're going to make that change, shouldn't we take some time to actually understand what it would do? Shouldn't we look at how this has already been tried and failed in two major European countries?

Apparently, to Ketz, that kind of reporting isn't necessary. Instead, he sees fewer reporters, he sees big tech companies making money, and he thinks that Article 11 magically changes both of those things. He's wrong about why there are fewer reporters, he's wrong about why internet companies have been successful and he's doubly wrong about how Article 11 should work.

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Filed Under: article 11, copyright, eu copyright directive, journalism, link tax, linking, neighboring rights, sammy ketz

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