It's incentivising a form of optimization of news production that is exactly what we don't need,

one that's data-centric, that's based on monetisation, that aligns news media organisations

with platforms against users to further exploit them for their data.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Lizzie O'Shea.

Lizzie is a human rights lawyer and the founder of Digital Rights Watch.

She's also the author of Future Histories, what Ada Lovelace, Tom Payne, and the Paris Commune can teach us about digital technology. Lizzie is also the first repeat guest on the show.

I won't be doing repeat guests very often, but for this topic that we're talking about today,

I really wanted to get Lizzie back on and get her opinion on what's happening down in Australia.

So in this episode, Lizzie and I talk about the news media bargaining code that's been

introduced in Australia with the plan to make Google and Facebook and in the future more digital

platforms pay news publishers for linking to their news stories. On its face, this might sound like a good idea,

taking money from the tech giants and giving it to struggling news organizations. But as we

discuss in this episode, there are a lot of issues with this proposal. Ultimately, it's not

designed to serve the public interest, but rather to serve powerful, consolidated media organizations

that are often serving the interests of their powerful owners and controllers and not the public

good. The bill that would put this bargaining code into place is working its way through

the Australian Parliament right now. And in this episode, we talk a little bit about

Google's response to the plan, but we don't really talk about Facebooks. And since recording, there has

been some updates, some new developments. So I just wanted to lay those out for you before we get

into the episode. We'll talk about how Google is making deals with news publishers, but on the morning of Thursday,

February 18th in Australia, Google and News Corp, which is the media conglomerate controlled by

...