link taxes – Techdirt (original) (raw)

How The Cowardice Of The LA Times And Washington Post Highlights The Danger Of The Link Taxes They Demand, And Their Hypocrisy

from the we-won’t-and-we’ll-make-it-so-you-can’t-either dept

As Mike and others have pointed out, the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have utterly failed the public. While it is of course their right to endorse, or not endorse, anyone they choose, the refusal to provide any such endorsement in an election with such high stakes abandons the important role the press plays in helping ensure that the electorate is as informed as it needs to be to make its self-governance choices. They join the outlets like the New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and others who have also pulled their punches in headlines and articles about the racist threats being made in the course of the presidential campaign, or inaccurately paint a false coherence between the candidates in their headlines and articles, and in doing so kept the public from understanding what is at stake. The First Amendment protects the press so that it can be free to perform that critical role of informing the public of what it needs to know. A press that instead chooses to be silent is of no more use than a press that can’t speak.

The issue here is not that the LA Times and Washington Post could not muster opinions (in fact, one could argue that its silence is actually expressing one). The issue is more how they’ve mischaracterized endorsements as some sort of superfluous expression of preference and not a meaningful synthesis of the crucial reporting it has done. In other words, despite their protests, the endorsement is supposed to be reporting, a handy packaging of its coverage for readers to conveniently review before voting.

If it turns out that the publication can draw a conclusion no better than a low-information voter, when it, as press, should have the most information of all, then it can no longer be trusted as a useful source of it. While both the LA Times and Washington Post have still produced some helpful political reporting, their editorial reluctance to embrace their own coverage makes one wonder what else they have held back that the public really needed to know about before heading to the ballot box. Especially when it seems the Times in particular also nixed the week-long series of Trump-focused articles it had been planning, which would have culminated in the editorial against him – the absence of that reporting too raises the strong suspicion that other relevant reporting has also been suppressed.

This crucial educative role that the press plays to inform public discourse so necessary for democracy to successfully function is now going unserved by the publications who have now abdicated that important job. Which is, of course, their choice: it is their choice in whether and how to exercise the editorial discretion of what to cover and what to conclude. The press freedom the First Amendment protects includes the freedom to be absolutely awful in one’s reporting decisions. No law could constitutionally demand anything otherwise and still leave that essential press freedom intact.

But if these incumbent outlets are not going to do it, then someone else will need to. The problem we are faced with is that not only are these publications refusing to play this critical democracy-defending role, but they are also actively trying to prevent anyone else from doing it. Because that’s the upshot to all the “link taxes” they and organizations they support keep lobbying for.

As we’ve discussed many times, link taxes destroy journalism by making that journalism much more difficult to find. The link sharing people are now able to freely do on social media and such would now require permission, which would necessarily deter it. The idea behind link taxes it would raise revenue if people had to pay for the permission needed to link to their articles. But all such a law would be sure to do is cut media outlets off from their audiences by deliberately cutting off a main way they get linked to them.

While the goal of the policy, to support journalism, may be noble, the intention cannot redeem such a counterproductive policy when its inevitable effect will be the exact opposite. It is, in short, a dumb idea. But if link taxes are imposed it will be a dumb idea everyone has to live with, no matter how much it hurts them. And it will hurt plenty. Because even if it manages to generate some money, the only outlets likely to ever see any of it would be the big incumbents – the same ones currently failing us. Smaller outlets, by being smaller, would be unlikely to benefit – compulsory licensing schemes such as this one rarely return much to the longtail of supposed “beneficiaries.” Yet for those smaller outlets keen to build audiences and then monetize that attention in ways most appropriate for it, these link tax schemes will be crippling obstacles, preventing their work from even getting seen and leaving them now without either revenue or audience. Which will make it impossible for them to survive and carry the reporting baton that the larger outlets have now dropped. Which therefore means that the public will still have to go without the reporting it needs, because the bigger outlets aren’t doing it and the smaller ones now can’t.

Laws that impose regulatory schemes like these are of dubious constitutionality, especially in how they directly interfere with the operation of the press by suppressing these smaller outlets. But what is perhaps most alarming here is the utter hypocrisy of these incumbent outlets to claim link taxes are needed to “save” journalism while not actually doing the journalism that needs saving, yet demanding a regulatory scheme that would effectively silence anyone interested in doing better.

If they wonder why journalism is struggling, then the thing they need to do is look in the mirror. The way to save journalism is to actually practice journalism. No link tax is going to make the LA Times or Washington Post play the role they have chosen not to play anymore. But they will make it so that no one else can play it either. And that’s no way to save journalism; that’s how you kill it for good.

And with it the democracy that depends on it.

Filed Under: cjpa, endorsements, jcpa, journalism, link taxes, politics
Companies: la times, washington post

Google’s California Hush Money Won’t Fix Journalism’s Woes

from the not-how-these-things-should-work dept

Link taxes are bad, m’kay? They harm the public. They harm the open internet. And they harm the news orgs themselves. There is no reason to support them at all. But, many (thankfully not all!) media organizations and politicians love them. Media orgs like them because they think it will bring them free money (though, often enough, it just brings them less traffic and no money).

This year, California brought back an old proposal for a link tax from state Rep. Buffy Wicks, along with a separate proposal from state Senator Steve Glazer to just tax the digital advertising business, claiming that it’s a form of pollution, and proposed using that tax to fund journalism.

While getting more funding for journalism is obviously a good idea, the plan to tax internet companies is tremendously problematic for all the reasons we discussed above. On top of everything else, it also takes away the incentive for media orgs to come up with sustainable, working business models for themselves, encouraging them, instead, to wait until the legislature deigns to force tech companies to funnel money in their direction.

As almost always happens whenever these kinds of bills get close to passing, Meta promises to stop links to news (and mostly seems to follow through). Meanwhile, Google says it will do so, but then blinks and cuts a deal to pay off everyone, such that even if the law passes, they have already paid the vig. Google did it in Australia, and it did it in Canada. Both times it agreed to cough up a bunch of money. And even though in both countries a link tax came into effect, both payments were made outside of the link tax, and basically acted as a “here, take this money, don’t try to enforce the link tax on us” move.

This time, it looks like Google made the payoff earlier, to stop the law in California. A few weeks back, Wicks announced that her office and Google had come to an agreement to fund a bunch of journalism orgs with money from both Google and the state, and that she wouldn’t continue pushing her link tax bill.

Today, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks announced the establishment of a first-in-the-nation partnership with the State, news publishers, major tech companies and philanthropy, unveiling a pair of multi-year initiatives to provide ongoing financial support to newsrooms across California and launch a National AI Accelerator.

Together, these new partnerships will provide nearly 250millioninpublicandprivatefundingoverthenextfiveyears,withthemajorityoffundinggoingtonewsrooms.Thegoalistofront−load250 million in public and private funding over the next five years, with the majority of funding going to newsrooms. The goal is to front-load 250millioninpublicandprivatefundingoverthenextfiveyears,withthemajorityoffundinggoingtonewsrooms.Thegoalistofront−load100 million in the first year to kick-start the efforts. The total investment could increase over the next several years if additional funding from private or state sources becomes available.

That link has a lot of people coming out in support of the deal, including some smaller publishers, claiming that this is “a win” for everyone. However, I doubt that very much.

But, more to the point, the whole appearance of this is ridiculous. It looks like Google paying the state of California to not pass the link tax law, with a bunch of that money then being handed off to some journalists. It’s very unclear at this point how the money will be distributed, but I’m going to take a wild guess and suggest that sites like Techdirt will likely be ineligible, because we always are.

More importantly, though, these kinds of deals never last. A few years back, you may recall that a very rich real estate developer with no understanding of privacy law pushed a very bad privacy law as a referendum across California. The companies cut a deal with him, rushing a very poorly drafted privacy bill through the California legislature in exchange for him dropping the ballot initiative. And it worked. For two years. Then he put another terrible referendum back on the ballot because he didn’t like how things were working out.

Already, Glazer (the author of the “tax all digital advertising” bill) is complaining about the deal, suggesting he’s not likely to stop pushing his additional tax bill.

Glazer in a media call said he wasn’t satisfied with the deal and faulted the agreement as too small to help independent news organizations, as well as lacking involvement from Meta or Amazon.com Inc. Meta declined to comment on the announcement, according to a spokesperson.

“These platforms, along with Google, have captured the intimate data from Californians without paying for it,” he said. “The use of that data in advertising is the harm to news outlets that this agreement should mitigate and which it does not.”

So even if Google thought it was buying off the legislature here to drop these bills, it seems highly likely that something like this will return either way, because it’s never going to be “enough.”

Again, I’m strongly in favor of figuring out more and better ways to fund journalism. But this one comes across as a cynical attempt to stop a bad law by investing in a fund with few details on how or where that fund will be deployed. It seems ripe for corruption, and even journalists who are in favor of link taxes are calling it out as an unfair backroom deal.

The problem in all of this is that people are rushing to see where they can extract money from to transfer it around, rather than figuring out ways to build actual long-term, sustainable business models that aren’t reliant on politicians pointing to this or that company and saying “you, hand over some money to these journalists I like.”

Filed Under: buffy wicks, california, journalism, link taxes, steve glazer
Companies: google

from the wrong-approach dept

A few weeks ago, Mike was the moderator on a panel hosted by CCIA all about link taxes — the various problematic efforts around the world to force internet companies to pay media outlets for sending them traffic. The panel featured Public Knowledge Policy Director Lisa Macpherson, Lion Publishers Executive Director Chris Krewson, and lawyer Cathy Gellis who we regularly work with here at Techdirt. You can listen to the whole discussion here on this week’s episode of the podcast.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Filed Under: cathy gellis, chris krewson, journalism, link taxes, lisa macpherson, podcast, public knowledge
Companies: Lion Publishers

from the what-a-surprise dept

As California (and possibly Congress) are, again, revisiting instituting link taxes in the US, it’s worth highlighting that our prediction about the Canadian link tax has now been shown to be correct. It didn’t harm Meta one bit to remove news.

The entire premise behind these link taxes/bargaining codes is that social media gets “so much free value” from news orgs, that they must pay up. Indeed, a ridiculously bad study that came out last fall, and was widely passed around, that argued that Google and Meta had stripped $14 billion worth of value from news orgs and should offer to pay up that amount.

$14 billion. With a “b.”

No one, who understands anything, believes that’s true. Again, social media is not taking value away from news orgs. It’s giving them free distribution and free circulation, things that, historically, cost media organizations a ton of money.

But, now a study, in Canada is proving that social media companies get basically zero value from news links. Meta, somewhat famously, blocked links to news in Canada in response to that country’s link tax. This sent many observers into a tizzy, claiming that it was somehow both unfair for Meta to link to news orgs AND to not link to news orgs.

Yes, media organizations are struggling. Yes, the problems facing the news industry are incredibly important to solve to help protect democracy. Yes, we should be thinking and talking about creative solutions for funding.

But, taxing links to force internet companies to pay media companies is simply a terrible solution.

Thanks to Meta , not giving in to Canada and blocking links to news, we now have some data on what happens when a link tax approach is put in place. Some new research from McGill University and the University of Toronto has found that Meta didn’t lose very much engagement from a lack of news links. But media orgs lost out big time.

Laura Hazard Owen has a good summary at Nieman Lab.

“We expected the disappearance of news on Meta platforms to have caused a major shock to the Canadian information ecosystem,” the paper’s authors — Sara Parker, Saewon Park, Zeynep Pehlivan, Alexei Abrahams, Mika Desblancs, Taylor Owen, Jennie Phillips, and Aengus Bridgman — write. But the shock appears to have been one-sided. While “the ban has significantly impacted Canadian news outlets,” the authors write, “Meta has deprived users of the affordance of news sharing without suffering any loss in engagement of their user base.”

What the researchers found is that users are still using Meta platforms just as much, and still getting news from those platforms. They’re just no longer following links back to the sources. This has done particular harm to smaller local news organizations:

This remarkable stability in Meta platform users’ continued use of the platforms for politics and current affairs anticipates the findings from the detailed investigation into engagement and posting behaviour of Canadians. We find that the ban has significantly impacted Canadian news outlets but had little impact on Canadian user behaviour. Consistent with the ban’s goal, we find a precipitous decline in engagement with Canadian news and consequently the posting of news content by Canadian news outlets. The effect is particularly acute for local news outlets, while some news outlets with national or international scope have been able to make a partial recovery after a few months. Additionally, posting by and engagement with alternative sources of information about Canadian current affairs appears unmoved by the ban. We further find that Groups focused on Canadian politics enjoy the same frequency of posting and diversity of engagement after the ban as before. While link sharing declines, we document a complementary uptick in the sharing of screenshots of Canadian news in a sample of these political Groups, and confirm by reviewing a number of such posts where users deliberately circumvented the link-sharing ban by posting screenshots. Although the screenshots do not compensate for the total loss of link sharing, the screenshots themselves garner the same total amount of engagement as news links previously had.

I feel like I need to keep pointing this out, but: when you tax something, you get less of it. Canada has decided to tax news links, so they get fewer news links. But users still want to talk about news, so they’re replacing the links with screenshots and discussions. And it’s pretty impressive how quickly users switched over:

Image

Meaning the only one losing out here are the news publishers themselves who claimed to have wanted this law so badly.

The impact on Canadian news orgs appears to be quite dramatic:

Image

But the activity on Meta platform groups dedicated to news doesn’t seem to have changed that much:

Image

If “news links” were so valuable to Meta, then, um, wouldn’t that have declined once Meta blocked links?

One somewhat incredible finding in the paper is that “misinformation” links also declined after Meta banned news links:

Surprisingly, the number of misinformation links in political and local community Groups decreased after the ban.

Political Groups:

Though the paper admits that this could just be a function of users recognizing they can’t share links.

This is still quite early research, but it is notable, especially given that the US continues to push for this kind of law as well. Maybe, just maybe, we should take a step back and recognize that taxing links is not helpful for news orgs and misunderstands the overall issue.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the approach taken by Canada and other countries to force platforms like Meta to pay for news links is misguided and counterproductive. These laws are reducing the reach and engagement of news organizations while doing little to address the underlying challenges facing the industry. Instead of helping news organizations, these laws are having the opposite effect. Policymakers need to take a more nuanced and evidence-based approach that recognizes the complex dynamics of the online news ecosystem.

Filed Under: c-18, canada, link tax, link taxes, news links
Companies: meta

An Only Slightly Modest Proposal: If AI Companies Want More Content, They Should Fund Reporters, And Lots Of Them

from the so-stupid-it-could-work? dept

In Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” he satirized politicians who were out of touch and were treating the poor as an inconvenience, rather than a sign of human suffering and misery. So, he took what seemed like two big problems, according to those politicians, and came up with an obviously barbaric solution to solve both problems: by letting the poor sell their kids as food. This really only was designed to highlight the barbaric framing of the “problem” by the Irish elite.

But, sometimes, there really are scenarios where there are two very real problems (not of a Swiftian nature) that might actually be in a position to be combined such that both problems are actually solved. And thus I present a non-Swiftian modest proposal: that AI companies desperate for high quality content should create funds to pay for journalists to create high quality content that the AI companies can use for training.

Lately, there have been multiple news articles about how desperate the AI companies are for fresh data to feed the voracious and insatiable training machine. The Wall Street Journal noted that “the internet is too small” for AI companies.

Companies racing to develop more powerful artificial intelligence are rapidly nearing a new problem: The internet might be too small for their plans.

Ever more powerful systems developed by OpenAI, Google and others require larger oceans of information to learn from. That demand is straining the available pool of quality public data online at the same time that some data owners are blocking access to AI companies.

Some executives and researchers say the industry’s need for high-quality text data could outstrip supply within two years, potentially slowing AI’s development.

The problem is not just data, but high-quality data, as that report notes. You need the AI systems trained on well-written, useful content:

Most of the data available online is useless for AI training because it contains flaws such as sentence fragments or doesn’t add to a model’s knowledge. Villalobos estimated that only a sliver of the internet is useful for such training—perhaps just one-tenth of the information gathered by the nonprofit Common Crawl, whose web archive is widely used by AI developers.

The NY Times also published a similar-ish story, though it framed it in a much more nefarious light. It argued that the AI companies were “cutting corners to harvest data for AI” systems. However, what the Times actually means is that AI companies believe (correctly, in my opinion) that they have a very strong fair use argument for training on whatever data they can find.

At Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, managers, lawyers and engineers last year discussed buying the publishing house Simon & Schuster to procure long works, according to recordings of internal meetings obtained by The Times. They also conferred on gathering copyrighted data from across the internet, even if that meant facing lawsuits. Negotiating licenses with publishers, artists, musicians and the news industry would take too long, they said.

I’ve discussed the copyright arguments repeatedly, including why I think the AI companies are correct that training on copyright-covered works shouldn’t be infringing. I also think the rush to rely on copyright as a solution here is problematic. Doing so would only enrich big tech, since smaller companies and open source systems wouldn’t be able to keep up. Also, requiring all training to be licensed would effectively break the open internet, by creating a new “license to read.” This would be bad.

But, all of this is coming at the same time that journalism is in peril. We’re hearing stories of news orgs laying off tons of journalists. Or publications shutting down entirely. There are stories of “news deserts” and how corruption is increasing as news orgs continue to fail.

The proposed solutions to this very real problem have been very, very bad. Link taxes are even more destructive to the open web and don’t actually appear to work very well.

But… that doesn’t mean there isn’t a better solution. If the tech companies need good, well-written content to fill their training systems, and the world needs good, high-quality journalism, why don’t the big AI companies agree to start funding journalists and solve both problems in one move?

This may sound similar to the demands of licensing works, but I’m not talking about past works. Those works are out there. I’m talking about paying for the creation of future works. It’s not about licensing or copyright. It’s about paying for the creation of new, high-quality journalism. And then letting those works exist freely on the internet for everyone.

It was already mentioned above that Meta considered buying a book publisher. Why not news publishers as well? But ownership of the journalists shouldn’t even be the focus, as it could raise some other challenges. Instead, they can just set up a fund where anyone can apply. There can be a pretty clear set of benefits to all parties.

Journalists who join the programs (and they should be allowed to join multiple programs from multiple companies) agree to publish new, well-written articles on a regular basis, in exchange for some level of financial support. It should be abundantly clear that the AI companies have no say over the type of journalism being done, nor do they have any say in editorial beyond the ability to review the quality of the writing to make sure it’s actually useful in training new systems.

The journalists only need to promise that anything they publish that receives funding from this program is made available to the training systems of the companies doing the funding.

In exchange, beyond just some funding, the AI companies could make a variety of AI tools available to the journalists as well, to help them improve the quality of their writing (I have a story coming up soon about how I’ve been using AI as a supplemental editor, but never to write any content).

This really feels like something that could solve at least some of the problems at both ends of this market. There are some potential limits here, of course. The AI companies need so much new content that it’s unclear if this would create enough to matter. But it would create something. And it could be lots of somethings. And not only that, but it should be pretty damn up-to-date somethings (which can be useful).

There could be reasonable concerns about conflicts of interest, but as it stands today, most journalism is funded by rich billionaires already. I don’t see how this is any worse. And, as suggested, it could be structured such that the journalists aren’t employees, and it could (should?) have explicit promises about a lack of editorial control or interference.

The AI companies might also claim that it’s too expensive to create a large enough pool, but if they’re so desperate for good, high-quality content, to the point of potentially buying up famous publishers, then, um, it seems clear that they are willing to spend, and it’s worth it to them.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it sure seems like one that solves two big problems in one shot, without fucking up the open web or relying on copyright as a crutch. Instead, it funds the future production of high-quality journalism in a manner that is helpful both for the public at large and the AI companies that could contribute to the funding. It also doesn’t require any big new government law. The companies can just… see the benefit themselves and set up the program.

The public gets a lot more high-quality journalism, and journalists get sustainable revenue sources to continue to do good reporting. It’s not quite a Swiftian modest proposal, in that… it actually could make sense.

Filed Under: a modest proposal, ai, copyright, generative ai, journalism, link taxes, llms, training, training data
Companies: google, meta, openai

The Journalism Competition Preservation Act Is Lose-Lose Legislation

How many times have you shared a link today? How many times have you used a search engine to look for information? We use links and snippets to gain and share information so often that we don’t even think about it. It’s an essential component of the internet, so intrinsic that an internet without links simply doesn’t work. For this reason, it’s alarming that certain members of Congress are pushing “link tax” proposals, like the Journalism Competition Preservation Act (JCPA), that will monetize links in a way that changes how this essential internet infrastructure works.

The JCPA would permit news sites to band together and “negotiate” with platforms like Google and Facebook — presumably to withhold their content via link and snippets (also known as the short previews of the articles) until the platforms have paid up. Presumably, the intent of this proposal is to shift the balance of power away from big tech platforms and back to news publishers. This goal is laudable because, with the rise of Big Tech, the loss of sources for local news and information is certainly concerning. However, the JCPA is irredeemably flawed legislation that will destroy public access to information and create loopholes to alter how copyright works in our country – all while failing to achieve its stated goal of “saving” the news industry and only making problems worse for small publishers and libraries, whose goals of access to information are sometimes in conflict with large media conglomerates.

Libraries have been one of the primary victims of the ever-expansion of copyright, since copyright law limits the ability of patrons to interact with intellectual property as they wish. The increasing scope of copyright, combined with the ease with which something falls under copyright protection, has resulted in a decrease in the availability of free information. Expansive copyright nearly always equals closed intellectual property systems, which in turn limits libraries’ ability to provide equitable access to information for all. In this case, a link tax would specifically harm libraries because links cannot be copyrighted. A link and snippet tax would be the equivalent of adding a tax to every book you check out from a library.

Research shows that access to accurate, high-quality local news is important to community health, and libraries have long-standing systems in place that increase the public’s access to information. Costly and restrictive “link taxes” like the JCPA will break these systems and penalize the public institutions that should be focused on providing high quality information resources to their communities. As trained information professionals, librarians are uniquely suited to provide access to and evaluation of the news for their communities – this proposal would take that discretion out of the hands of libraries and public institutions and place it in the hands of corporations and media conglomerates.

The relationship between libraries and publishers, including news organizations, has a long historical precedent, and libraries and publishers should work together to create a more equitable and profitable news landscape. Even so, we recognize that publishers are well within their rights to place content behind subscriptions and passwords – a route that at least 69% of media outlets have taken with great success. However, paywalls and licenses should not be not the only route for publishers moving forward, and libraries can help pave that future. A recent collaboration between Library Futures, New York’s Albany Public Library, and Hearken proved that it is indeed possible to support communities through citizen participation in the news process. In coordination with news partners and libraries, we demonstrated an increase in subscriptions and reporting power as well as built invaluable connections. With the majority of consumers accessing news through their smartphones or social media, the link to content is inviolable—as well as critical—for the publishers to reach consumers, for consumers to access the information, and for libraries to provide access to consumers.

Small and medium publishers raised concerns about how a link tax would disproportionately hurt smaller news publishers and local news outlets who can’t afford to lose any more traffic. There are also many news sites, like ProPublica, Global Voices, The Conversation, El Diario and Al Jazeera, that purposely use Creative Commons licensing to make their articles more available to the public. These news outlets want to be readily accessible to the public and to other news outlets. As organizations and institutions committed to open access to information, libraries are invested in the future of nonprofit, openly licensed and public news sources. A link tax would jeopardize these sources, which provide crucial reporting and opinion for patrons.

American policymakers should not export bad ideas from foreign countries at the expense of publishers’ and libraries’ ability to provide high-quality news and information to American readers.They should instead carefully consider how legislation like the JCPA could open up a new loophole that allows news publishers to stop links to their materials which will only restrict access to information. For libraries and other public institutions dedicated to knowledge and education, this issue is of grave concern to our patrons, to the public, and to the continued free flow of information.

Jennie Rose Halperin is the Executive Director of Library Futures, and Juliya Ziskina is a policy fellow with Library Futures.

Filed Under: amy klobuchar, antitrust, creative commons, jcpa, journalism competition preservation act, link taxes, monopoly, negotiations