It's no longer controversial to claim that #BigTech is a parasite on the #news business. But there's still a raging controversy over the nature of the parasitism, and, much more importantly, *what to do about it*.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/18/stealing-money-not-content/#beyond-link-taxes
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This week on @eff's Deeplinks blog, I kick off a new series on the abusive relationship between Big Tech and the news, analyzing four different dirty practices and proposing policy answers to all four:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech
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Download this whole series as a single PDF.Media is in crisis: newsrooms all over the world are shuttering and the very profession of journalism is under sustained ideological and physical assault. Freedom of the press is a hollow doctrine if the only news media is written or published by...
The context here is that various governments around the world have taken notice of the tech/news problem, and are chasing a counterproductive "solution" - the #LinkTax, where tech firms are required to pay for the links and short snippets their users or news search-tools make to news-stories. In some cases, the "tax" is indirect: tech is required to negotiate a payment to make up for other misdeeds (like ripping publishers off with #AdFraud).
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You can argue that this isn't a link tax, it's just pressure to bargain, but because these rules typically ban platforms from simply blocking publishers' content if they can't reach an agreement, they *become* link taxes: "You *must* carry links, and you *must* pay the sites you link to" isn't meaningfully different from "You must pay for linking to those sites."
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This "must-carry" dimension - requiring tech firms to publish links to sites they don't want to link to - has lots of things wrong with it, but in the US, must-carry has a showstopper bug: it contravenes the #FirstAmendment and any law with a must-carry provision is unlikely to survive a court challenge. So people who care about protecting the news from Big Tech predators - like me - need to try other approaches.
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But no matter where you are, requiring tech to pay fees to news is the wrong approach. For one thing, it's a solution that only works for so long as Big Tech stays big: that means that efforts to break up Big Tech, force it to pay taxes and fines, and limit its profits (say, through privacy laws that end #SurviellanceAds) are incompatible with link taxes and adjacent proposals.
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Inserting a business's activities into taxation is risky. It makes government complicit in the harms caused by that industry.
Examples:
1. Gas taxes make government reluctant to reduce fossil fuel consumption.
They won't risk the loss of tax revenues.
2. Forestry & Drilling licenses on public lands.
Governments become reluctant to reduce deforestation or fracking because of the loss of revenue.
3. None of the tax on rewritable CD's & DVD's went to...
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... artists directly. It went to industry-government affiliates.
4. Excise taxes on alcohol made government part of a system of lax liquor licensing practices that saw the mass production of alcoholics in the 19th century.
Towns with more saloons than schools, stores, or churches combined before Prohibition.
Prohibition and the law of unintended consequences.
Prohibition is a three-part, five-and-a-half-hour documentary film series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that tells the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the entire era it encompassed. Full film now streaming.
Cory Doctorow
Nicole Parsons