This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 14th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. In an effort to help boost the ailing

newspaper industry, some members of Congress want to emulate Australia's link tax.

It would be disastrous for local independent journalism according to Cato's

Paul Matzko. He details the evidence. Years ago a friend of mine who had an email address and would receive

emails that he did not want and he decided that he would send invoices to the people who had

sent him those emails because this was at a time when you know the amount of storage that you had on a

think about a green and black CRT screen that's what you're logging into to access your email and you're using keystrokes to move around

within your email box.

This is primitive, primitive technology by today's standards.

And he thought, well, I'm just charged these guys,

you know, a penny and nickel for the emails that they send not the arrest

can't, you know you can just have a white list of people who can send you

email the rest they cannot the rest cannot the rest cannot it's like well

no what if I what if there's an email I want to get?

And it just seems to me odd to charge people for a lot of things that we ought to just sort of take for granted in the internet.

Like, spam is an annoyance, but we deal with it. This link tax seems to be trying to

generate revenue from exactly what?

Well, it's an attempt to turn a category of information into quasi-property, to use the legal phrase.

So properitization or enclosure,

you're taking something that's in the Commons

and information is something that Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis used to say that

...