The European Union backs Italy's right to make Meta pay for news

ggiuliomagnifico about 4 hours ago 41 commentsRead Article on niemanlab.org

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Discussion (41 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

neksn•about 1 hour ago

The demographics of this site have changed so much that people here are applauding… that it is now illegal to embed opengraph information on Facebook? This is deranged. And it only happens because the government is in bed with legacy media. The government being in bed with the media is awful for the common person.

Embedding opengraph data is a clear case of fair use, and it’s sad to see all of this coming from a community that has long been against copyright.

lokar•43 minutes ago

I think they should be able to show the link, and like a normal one sentence link text, but not a large snippet, images, etc

neksn•21 minutes ago

They only show what the website gives them through opengraph tags. If the site doesn’t want to give up that information they can remove the opengraph tags. Even still, fair use should allow Facebook to summarise the contents of the link if they wanted to (but they don’t do that).

miohtama•11 minutes ago

They are displaying the snippet and image the website is giving them for a preview.

bilekas•about 2 hours ago

It so nice to see megacorps not being allowed to whatever they like as in the US. The EU has regulations and standards. If you don't follow them you can't just try to sue the body. Just follow the rules like you're supposed to. It's quite simply really.

pjc50•about 2 hours ago

You certainly can sue: "The ruling comes after Meta sued Italy’s national telecommunications regulatory agency (AGCOM) in Italian court in 2023"; that's the normal process for disputing regulatory rulings. Doesn't mean you'll win though.

I'm very much in two minds about this because "news" is not a morally neutral category in itself, such as with similar laws benefiting News Corp in Australia, but it's clear that Meta/FB is a much worse unrestrained actor.

lokar•about 1 hour ago

But there is real, broad competition between news outlets.

werhf•about 1 hour ago

I'm also not happy that news organizations get special exceptions. It is very easy to construct cynical motives:

- Politicians need the news so journalists are protected.

- If news organizations get paid, they have no incentive to be AI critical.

The article says that "news are vital". So is open source, films, images, art, and the authors do not get paid by the thieves.

lokar•about 1 hour ago

I view it as protecting a group of producers from a monopoly (or at least dominant) buyer.

dataflow•about 1 hour ago

> The article says that "news are vital". So is open source, films, images, art, and the authors do not get paid by the thieves.

"Vital" does not merely mean "important".

paulddraper•about 2 hours ago

They already did this with Canada.

Meta decided to stop showing news links in Canada. [1]

Presumably, it would choose the same thing here.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/sureshsingaratnam/posts/so-meta-is-...

nradov•about 2 hours ago

Yes, that was a great move. I wish Meta would do the same in all countries. I don't go to Facebook to read news.

josefx•about 1 hour ago

I am not a facebook user, but going by that post they seem to go a step further and outright block any links pointing to news sites. The article mentions some provisions in the Italian law that prohibit restricting visiblity of the news sites, at least during negotiations, so that kind of salted earth move could backfire .

buellerbueller•about 2 hours ago

Yes, meta took the salt-the-earth approach. Rather then allow users to post links and meta not summarize the content, meta is now destroying its own value for Canadians.

These hypercorps and their CEOs act like giant fucking children, and rather than abide by a ruling being told to play fair, they just decide to take their ball and go home.

Good riddance. The sooner social media dies, the better off humanity will be.

maxdo•about 2 hours ago

Good for these news corps , bad for consumers. Free News websites almost 100% consist of ads trash .

0rbiter•about 1 hour ago

What a perverted logic. Like Meta won't bury you in ads and spy the living shit out of you while you're using.

close04•about 1 hour ago

Isn’t Facebook just as full of ads that can’t even be blocked by uBO? When I log into the FB account I haven’t really been using in more than a decade, it’s 99% “sponsored” stuff, ads and reels. Really I could scroll through pages and pages of things I never chose to have in my feed before I see any post from a friend.

At least on a news website I get to read just the news and can block the ads.

nozzlegear•44 minutes ago

My Facebook feed is like 90% posts from local news and radio stations that I don't follow. I rarely see ads, just people posting ragebait comments under those local news articles.

GenerWork•about 2 hours ago

Why won't Meta just stop showing Italian news now?

MattDamonSpace•about 1 hour ago

Yes

iso1631•about 2 hours ago

Why do they show Italian news before?

Because it makes them money.

rick_dalton•about 2 hours ago

Canada passed a similar bill a few years ago causing meta to stop showing Canadian news content on their platforms. It didn’t really impact them financially or user wise. So the same thing will probably happen in Italy.

einszwei•about 1 hour ago

Canadian news might've been easier to replace with American news outlets due to the deep ties between the two and the shared language. I doubt this would be the case for Italian news.

MattDamonSpace•about 1 hour ago

No, ads make them money. Users see the ads because they view their feeds.

It’s been proven in other markets that removing News from the feed doesn’t decrease engagement. Meta will continue to make money, and Italian news sites will see their traffic vanish.

Turns out they’re simply not valuable in the way they used to be, and country after country is learning this

forestingfisher•about 2 hours ago

Does this mean HN will have to pay for all the links too? Tired of this overregulation

bilekas•about 2 hours ago

> Tired of this overregulation

Why ? When the alternative is to let companies to whatever makes the number go up at the expense of everyone else, regulation is the only thing to protect normal people.

this_user•about 2 hours ago

You are not protecting "normal people". These types of laws are nothing but attempts at rent seeking by dying legacy media companies that were too incompetent to figure out working digital strategies on their own. And they would already be dead without the traffic that big platforms like Meta and Google are sending their way.

If you send traffic to some e-commerce platform through an affiliate link, you are the one who gets paid. These companies are instead trying to rig the system in such a way that the affiliate would be forced to pay them. It's an absurd and desperate proposal that deserves to be rejected.

bilekas•about 1 hour ago

While you might not like the legacy media, the fact is they're still doing some work. That work needs to be reimbursed?

If Meta and co create their own content, they're free to do with it what the like. I need to pay google maps for a certain amount of useage etc. Why should Meta and co get an exception on content ?

buellerbueller•about 1 hour ago

>If you send traffic to some e-commerce platform through an affiliate link, you are the one who gets paid. These companies are instead trying to rig the system in such a way that the affiliate would be forced to pay them. It's an absurd and desperate proposal that deserves to be rejected.

This isn't what is happening. People read the summarized headline/article on meta's turf and then don't go to the source article. If meta were just posting the link, it would be fine, but that isn't what is happening here.

cromka•about 2 hours ago

Do you think Meta is asked to pay for the titles?

stephen_g•about 2 hours ago

They are in Australia, and it’s probably safe to assume this law would be pretty similar to ours. In our version, Part 52B explicitly renders these three things as being exactly the same for the purposes of the law:

(a) the content is reproduced on the service or is otherwise placed on the service; or

(b) a link to the content is provided on the service; or

(c) an extract of the content is provided on the service.

Which quite literally means that they consider a post that only contains hyperlink (b) or a link and only a title (even just the title would fall under (c)) to be as bad as a social media site ripping off the whole article!

This was the same conflation used by the supporters of the law and pretty much every news article about it before it was passed, basically all of which dishonestly claimed that social media sites were doing (a) when they were mostly only posting a title and sentence or two synopsis (that is supplied by the news site itself in its meta tags!!)

cromka•about 2 hours ago

Fair enough. Wonder what Italians want to do. I searched briefly and all I could find was "content", which I assumed were actual extracts.

buellerbueller•about 2 hours ago

Meta doesn't have to pay for the links. It's the summaries. I suspect the publishers would welcome the links, as they'd drive traffic and ad revenue. Instead, Meta is siphoning the revenue by summarizing the content.

tekla•about 2 hours ago

Why not? We the posters are providing free content and views and exposure for a VC fund worth billions of dollars.

Why are we not getting kickbacks?

Scarblac•about 2 hours ago

Because you're doing it voluntarily.

dotcoma•about 1 hour ago

Agree. But, sadly, we live in a world in which so often what is obvious needs to be stated.

tekla•about 1 hour ago

Did I hallucinate several years of discourse about volunteer work on the internet should be paid? And that lefty types were yelling about how billionaire corps should compensate volunteer work because they clearly had money?

Something starting from Reddit mods?

notrealyme123•about 2 hours ago

Sounds ridiculous, but yes. They earn "something" via their exclusive advertisement spots here.

I guess the daily active users are something else though.