Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

I see no difference between this and what google/youtube do with paying copyright owners for material posted on youtube.

An issue is the money isn’t going to the copywrite owners - it is being collected by a government; one notorious for being a dangling puppet of Murdoch. FB are not the good guys but neither is this piece of legislation. I’d predict an even greater concentration of news power.

This is incorrect: the Government has let Google and Facebook opt out of the law because they have done secret side-deals wiht the local media companies. Even if you do think we should start paying to make links, that is a terrible model for regulation.

The whole purpose of the legislation was to force FB into making deals with publishing companies. If it’s widely adopted and common place, it’ll likely force more innovative smaller companies. I see it as a win. Likely creating a new industry.

The immediate effect is that no-one will now create any startup that lets people share links to news, for fear of getting hit with the same kinds of extortion. And there is absolutely no way this creates innovation. It locks in incumbency