this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
355 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
58303 readers
13 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's the traditional model, but I don't think it applies anymore. We seem to be living in a post-nation state era. People are fully reliant on the top dozen or so companies, so those companies have tremendous power over government. Some governments are only just now realizing that fact and are trying to push back, but it's way too late.
I think it's a little easier and less complicated than that.
The government wants to give money, specifically Facebook's money, to the publishing industry. The industry lobbying the government.
The government has the ability to tax Facebook directly. That's well established. But the government has a trouble giving money to the publishing industry. That would be a subsidy. People have trouble paying subsidies to failing businesses. From the government. Usually. It's anyway it's a very difficult discussion to have in public.
So the government and the publishers got together and are trying to force Facebook to pay the publishers and not the government.
Facebook gracefully said no, they don't want to pay the publishers.
So now if the government forces them to use the publisher data, they can't logically also force them to pay a fee to use the thing they're forced to use... The government could always tax Facebook... But the goal isn't to tax it's to give money to publishers...
I think this demonstrates we are not in a post-government age, this particular lobbying attempt to keep the horse and buggy industry irrelevant isn't working as planned, it's backfiring in a funny way.