Re Australia and its requirement that tech companies subsidize journalism. Start by understanding what this does. It is a tax on linking. It breaks the open Internet.

No one should have to pay to link to someone else's public web page. If news organizations want to stop inbound links, they can add a tiny snippet of code. They will never, ever do this.

What the media companies -- led by transcendentally cynical people, Rupert Murdoch at the front -- want is a replacement for the money they once collected when they held substantial control over where advertising appeared, and what it cost.

Their anti-tech propaganda campaign would have you believe that they have a righteous, god-given claim to advertising revenues. Why is that?

Because ads once supported *some* of the journalism that *some* media owners offered to *some* demographics in *some* communities. That's their logic (a word that belongs in scare quotes).

That support came at a cost of its own: a market failure represented by the news owners' monopoly/oligopoly that they ruthlessly exploited. Advertisers got royally screwed in the good old days. Who paid for that? Their customers, eventually.

The news orgs' advertising dominance also screwed the general public in a direct way. If you ever placed a classified ad in the good old days you paid extortionate prices for a crappy service.

It is absolutely true that some news organizations used some of their monopoly rents to produce something of public value in some places for some of the people who lived there: journalism. That was a good thing, and we still need journalism, more than ever.

And we need to do more, much more, to support journalism. We also need to limit the power of the tech giants, in any number of arenas and in any number of ways. These are SEPARATE issues.

Political manipulations to support journalism by taxing the tech industry are just another kind of market-rigging. Australia and other governments in thrall to Murdoch et al would be much more honest to simply tax tech and give the money to the media companies.

I'm not a big fan of direct taxpayer support of journalism, but if that's what people want to do, go for it. Just be straightforward about it. But the Australian scheme is such a con, and not solely because the beneficiaries are boundless hypocrites.

For one thing, transferring money from new robber barons to old ones won't do much, if anything, to boost the kind of local journalism we need everywhere, in all communities. And it ignores the much more serious platform issues.

If this becomes the norm, it will entrench the tech platforms even more. If they become the financial lifelines for (some) media businesses, those enterprises will become the platforms' most ardent defenders. Tech journalism is inept enough already, but this will make it worse.

I'm disappointed that Google has given into the pressure not just in Australia but -- as now seems to be company policy -- globally when Big Media have enough clout with local governments.

Facebook (disclosure: it has funded some of our work) acted with surprising clumsiness in Australia. Yet its stance is closer to the right one than Google's.

Taxing links breaks the Internet. Don't do it.

Supporting journalism is essential. Do it, but do it the right way.