Facebook's face-off in Australia

Business Daily

BBC

Business

4.4 • 816 Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2020

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Should Facebook and Google pay for news that appears on their platforms? The Australian government thinks so. It’s drafted a law that would force them to pay - and Facebook is now threatening to ban all news from its Australian site. It’s a high stakes stand-off with potential global repercussions.

Veteran local newspaper publisher Bruce Ellen tells Manuela Saragosa how his business has suffered the past decade as articles are shared online for free. Journalist Zoe Samios of the Sydney Morning Herald says the pushback from Facebook has been especially forceful, while Belinda Barnet of Swinburne University in Melbourne says she thinks they are unlikely to back down.

But consultant Hal Crawford has little sympathy for the news companies, which he says get a lot more value from social media platforms than vice versa. Plus, Peter Lewis from the Centre for Responsible Technology worries that if Facebook follows through with its threat to remove news altogether from its platform in Australia, what will fill the void?

(Image: Facebook logo seen displayed on a smartphone with 100 dollar bills in the background. Credit: Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuela Saragossa. Coming up, should Facebook and Google pay for the news that appears on their platforms? Yes, says the Australian government.
0:13.6	The platforms are pushed back because they're about to face legislative requirements that they negotiate a fair price for news.
0:22.1	In fact, Facebook has threatened to ban all news from its Australian sites in response,
0:26.7	but who would that hurt the most?
0:28.6	The news publishers, Facebook itself, or the public at large?
0:32.4	Facebook is betting we will lose more because they believe it will hurt our news industry more and it will
0:39.2	hurt Australian society more. A standoff with potential global repercussions coming up here
0:45.1	on Business Daily from the BBC. I've been the business for over 40 years, but it's been going on really, I couldn't tell you
0:58.7	how long for, certainly for 10 years I would have thought anyway. Bruce Ellen is a newspaper man.
1:06.1	He lives in the state of Victoria in Australia. He publishes a couple of local newspapers there, the La Trobe Valley
1:12.0	Express and the Gippsland Times. They have a team of 12 journalists and about 75,000 readers. It's hard
1:19.7	making money in his line of work. Doing news properly, and with all the fact-checking and reporting
1:24.0	on location involved, doesn't come cheap. Our newspapers have actually delivered free, so we totally rely on advertising revenue
1:32.2	to support our production of public interest journalism.
1:36.0	We have unique content because the larger metro papers aren't interested in the stories
1:42.0	of our community, but our community are vitally interested
1:45.7	in reading about what's happening in their local area.
1:49.0	So if people read news on his website, he benefits.
1:52.2	More eyeballs means potentially more advertising revenue.
1:55.4	But Bruce isn't happy.
1:56.8	That's because in the past decade or so, the news stories he publishes have increasingly been shared for free on sites like Facebook and Google.
2:04.7	Google and Facebook are using our content to drive traffic to their platforms, but we get no recompense for that.
	...

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