The Government claims the legislation is about taxing tech giants such as Facebook and Google that indirectly profit from content created by mainstream news organisations. It is true that journalists have rediced in number in recent years and the quality and quantity of news content has suffered as a result.
However, the legislation is unlikely to bring about any increase in revenue for mainstream news organisations. Users have shown an unwillingness to pay for news content that is shared online; preferring to shop around for free content rather than spend their hard earned money to pass through a pay wall. Paywalled news publications such as The Australian have seen enormous declines in readership over the past decade. Whether the news articles are located through a search engine like Google or shared by friends through a social media platform like Facebook has no demonstrable bearing on this phenomenon.
Indeed without these means it is unlikely that news content would be located and read by anywhere near as many readers as currently occurrs. Smaller media organisations have complained in the last 24 hours that Facebook's ban on news posting has taken away their main source of readers. If any are still reaching them it is almost certainly by means of a seatch engine such as Google that they are doing so. The government's legislation, by the way, makes no attempt to compensate small media organisations at all. It is solely focussed on the large media corporations whose obviously biased agenda has helped them to power.
So we know that large media organisations are probably deluding themselves if they think the legislation will gain subscribers for them. On the contrary, it will redice readership for them and thereby reduce their advertising revenue. We know that meanwhile it will strangle small media organisations out of the market and offer them no compensation in return. So what is the legislation actually going to do, if anything?
The true agenda is clear. The legoslation is about setting a precedent that will violate and undermine one of the most fundamental and assential principles of the free internet; the right to link to content in the public domain.
Why is this right important? Why should internet users be able to link to publicly available content, for example, on blogs, on library pages, on websites, within the text of their own artocles or, as the case in point, on social communication media? Because without this right, the majority of what makes the internet meaningful, its interconnectedness, would be gone.
Linking enables a piece of content to ve discussed equitably and in context. It enables arguments to be based on published evodence that can be cross-checled effortlessly by readers. No, it is not as rigorous as a scholarly citation style, but it is instant and accessible and feasible for the average internet user with only basic digital literacy.
The principle that linking does not equate to reprodiction is a line that has so far never been crossed. It is a orinciple that must be defended if the internet is going to remain a meaningful and democratic public sphere. The soread of internet access brings with it the potential for the realisation of that great enlightenment ideal of a public sphere that is truely accessible to all. That accessibility equates ro democracy. Linking is essential to the democratoc function of holding power to account. Without it, the internet is rendered inept at doing so.
Facebook, for all its users, is not popular. Many use it grudgingly because it os the space our friends inhabit. But like it or hate it, Facebook is the one entity that, right now, represents our only realistoc chance of thwarting the government's effort to set the utterly unacceptable precedent of imposing a cost on linking. Today they target a tech goant, but once the precedent is set we are all fair game and nobody else will have the power to fight back the way Facebook does, right now.
So before you get outraged at Facebook for not paying taxes or supporting journalists, think of what is really at stake right now. No, it is not journalism. It is the free internet as a public sphere. It is every student and library and citizen and theor right to freely direct each other's attention to content that has been placed in the public sphere, willingly and without coersion, by its creators. That is what matters here. So even if you hate Facebook, now is the time to put differences aside and stand with them, just this once, for a pronciple that truely matters.
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