I don't understand why the govt thought FB were bluffing. They said back in August they would do this. They're incentivised to do this lest other countries start getting ideas that this sort of rentseeking is a good idea.

The Australian market is trivial, the percentage of the FB news feed that's from news sites is a smaller fraction still. They're aided in this by the Australian govt being technically inept and the legislation is so badly written.

Anyway Facebook are fucking awful, but this sort of "extorting money from some companies to hand to our cronies" is a dreadful way to operate a society.

Absolutely close down tax loopholes that let multinationals avoid tax, and use the money to fund journalism if that's what the govt wants to do. But hey that would hit the big miners too.

And they don't want to fund journalism, or else they wouldnt keep cutting the ABC budget.

But passing legislation to extort a couple of companies into paying more favoured companies is gangster state stuff.

Fletcher today was saying any money from the Code that went to the ABC should be used to pay for regional news. The regional news the ABC has had to cut back on because of 7 years of govt budget cuts? That regional news?

And of course the initial version of the Code explicitly excluded the ABC so forgive me if I don't think Fletcher is acting in good faith here.

Re Google signing News Showcase deals (and I have to add I have no idea about the internal deliberations here) I think G's main objection to the Code was about protecting the integrity of Search.

Handing over any details of how Search works to govt favoured companies was never, ever going to happen, nor was requiring a notice period before making changes to Search.

The govt attempting to acquire extraordinarily valuable IP in how Search works would end up in the High Court and the govt would lose.

absolutely, FB not publishing links to reputable news sources is a net negative. It was also an *entirely* *predictable* result of this stupid shakedown attempt by the govt. It's 100% on the ACCC and the govt.

Also as I said earlier, lol it fucks Sky News AU's entire business model of posting crank nonsense to FB for MAGA types to watch.

Anyway it was entirely clear that FB were not bluffing, and I very much doubt they will blink. Why would they? Giving into extortion is never a good long term plan.

And I'm going to need to bathe in bleach after taking Facebook's side in any policy debate. Fuck.

Late addition: of course FB fucked up the block list and did a bad job of it, and relied on folks to let them know about the pages that shouldn't have been blocked. They're Facebook! Half arsed efforts are kinda their thing. They fixed the more egregious errors quickly enough.