Rupert Murdoch is ruining the Australian internet, again.
Today Facebook users in Australia were greeted with this message if they tried to share articles from some Australian newspapers.
Why is this happening? The answer, as is usually the case when the internet is being broken in Australia, is Rupert Murdoch.
Last year Murdoch’s news company News Corp lost US$1.5bn. They are losing money on Newspapers, as people turn to the internet for their news, and they are losing money through Foxtell, their subscription TV service, as people are moving to internet streaming services for entertainment.
The internet is a huge threat to News Corp, and, like any other company deriving profit from centuries old technology (e.g. fossil fuels) they are incapable of innovation. Instead they attempt to minimize their losses by purchasing governments and through them enacting legislation that will cripple their competition.
Murdoch tried to solve the streaming media problem in 2013. He used his News Corp newspapers to get Tony Abbott elected and then the Liberal Party enacted legislation to cripple Australian internet speeds.
The opposing Labor party had already begun the rollout of their National Broadband Network plan. This Labor NBN plan called for the majority of homes in Australia to have a fibre-optic cable connected directly to their premises, enabling speeds of 1 Gigabit per second or greater. This would have allowed Australians to watch multiple 4k video streams on Netflix and YouTube at the same time and to download 100GB games to their consoles in a matter of minutes — who would pay for Foxtell if this was possible?
The Liberal Party proposed an alternative NBN scheme. The fibre-optic cable would end at the street corner, and individual houses would connect to a common node over the existing Telstra copper phone lines, which at the time were providing ADSL connections. While the NBN rollout is still ongoing, this is how the majority of homes in Australia connect to the internet, sharing a connection to a neighborhood node via decades old copper phone lines. This crippled version of the NBN ensured most Australian’s internet connections are capped at around 50 Megabits per second, at least 20 times slower than they would have been on a direct fibre-optic connection, and due to neighbors all sharing the same connection node, the service becomes congested and slower at peak times.
This crippling of Australian internet speeds was enough to partially stem the flow of Foxtell subscribers fleeing to Stan, Netflix and other streaming services. But the problem of declining newspaper revenues remained.
Again, completely unable to innovate or compete fairly, News Corp instead looked to its political branch, the Liberal Party, to enact legislation that would prop up its failing newspaper business by forcing companies to pay for links to newspaper articles.
Let that sink in for a moment.
The very principle of the internet is that everything is connected. Webpages can freely link to each other to create a network of information. Murdoch wants to change this so that when Google or Facebook link to a News Corp website, they have to pay him.
This violates the principle of Net Neutrality — a core concept of the internet that states that all data should be treated equally. No type of data should be favored over any other type, for example — YouTube should not be able to pay your ISP to deliver their content faster than Facebook. And links should not be treated differently depending on where they go, or who is hosting them. The legislation the Australian government is proposing would mean that if you post a link to a News Corp article to a friend in an email, nothing will happen, but if you share that link via Facebook then Facebook will have to pay News Corp. Similarly if you post a link to an article on your blog there is no consequence, but if a link to the same article shows up in a Google search, Google will have to pay the article author.
This legislation does not protect or benefit the Australian public in any way, its sole purpose is to damage News Corp’s online competitors and prop up its failing newspaper business.
Of course many other Australian news media companies have come out in support of this legislation, because they see an opportunity to extract profits from Facebook and Google without having to do any additional work. Even the supposed ‘opposition’ party, the Labor Party supports the legislation. Displaying a staggering and disappointing lack of understanding of technology, the Greens have endorsed the legislation and gone further to suggest that the ABC should be added to the list of news providers and that Google and Facebook should give News Corp direct access to their search and ranking code so that News Corp can optimize their profits!
Initially Google threatened to pull their services in Australia if this legislation was passed. However unlike Facebook, Google do not enjoy a 100% monopoly — other search services like Microsoft’s Bing are available in Australia, and Microsoft seized this opportunity to announce that they back the legislation.
Bing currently sits at 3.6% market share for online search in Australia, but if Google were to pull their search service, or even to reduce it so that it didn’t show Australian news, Bing would be poised to take over. Google have since begun negotiations with individual news providers, including News Corp, to try to reach amicable terms whereby Google would pay news providers for content.
(Thankfully I didn’t have to pay for the above link to the Sydney Morning Herald, because the Nine Network does not consider me a competitor… yet)
Facebook however have no competition in Australia, unless you count WeChat, but that is primarily used by Chinese speakers. So Facebook are free to modify their services to avoid paying news providers without suffering any loss of market share. And they have decided to do so pre-emptively, before the legislation has even passed, probably as an experiment to gauge the level of outcry/apathy of their Australian user-base. This legislation has passed the House Representatives and is expected to pass the Senate and become law in about a week.
That is why you can’t share articles from certain Australian news providers on Facebook.
If you are Australian and you care about a free and open internet then vote for the Pirate Party in the next election.
