>"That third part cant possibly be constitutional."
The Californian legislative mindset appears to be based on passing bold and far reaching laws and then letting the courts determine constitutionality. They don't seem to have reservations about their own authority.
> This is not limited to California, it happens in virtually every state with majority rule, left or right.
Did you mean majority rule or did you actually mean one-party rule?
Because California is a one-party rule state, and the mindset you're talking about seems to better fit for the situation where the politicians are unreasonably secure in their jobs/power.
Both probably. I’ve lived in Utah and California (among other states) and I would characterize both as having the majority of their politicians unreasonably secure in their jobs and power. In Utah, most of the politicians were more at risk of losing your seat due to a primary challenge from someone further right than you than general election. In California they have at least fixed that a bit with open primaries, so at least the moderate people can make it to
the general election. In both states, at least, the governors tend to be slightly more moderate than the rest of the politicians.
It is possibly true that the unreasonably secure don’t make up more than 50% of the votes, I’m not sure.
"This section does not prohibit a covered platform from, and does not impose liability on a covered platform for, enforcing its terms of service against an eligible journalism provider."
They were saying that if TOS supercedes this law, then you could get around the de-linking retaliation by updating your TOS to forbid charging for link sharing.
It was an extension of your statement applied back onto the law, not a rebuttle against your claim that content would no longer be moderated-able.
The part that gets me is that just linking to a news source is enough to trigger the payments.
If the trigger was displaying content from the news source's articles, that would be one thing. But just linking to a news source? That's a bit too far.
3273.63. (a) (1) "For each month, a covered platform shall track and record ... the total number of the covered platform’s internet websites that link to ..."
It's not _just_ linking. You can still "just link." You'd have to link AND display the eligible content.
"..., display, or present that eligible digital journalism provider’s news articles, works of journalism, or other content, or portions thereof, and that the covered platform has displayed or presented to California residents."
The key here being the final piece, which is part of it. That the platform links to and displays the eligible work (news articles, works of journalism, or other content, or portions thereof).
The "and" is attaching a caveat that the (link|headline|content) has been shown to someone from California; it's restricting the scope of the law to California.
In other words, they type of content is collected using "or", and the scope restriction is the "and".
So in theory, one could start a bogus spam news org, post links to facebook or wherever, and then demand money? Maybe you could get chatGPT to create some plausible sounding news based on other news sources. Then sit back and collect money for doing almost no real work?
Legal or not, it's the only way for such a law to have any effect.
Something similar happened over here in Europe (I believe it was in Germany?) where news media were allowed to demand payment from Google for being listed in their news sections/search results.
Google obviously decided to stop listing them, because there are plenty of news media that don't demand payment. As a result, the flow of visitors collapsed and the news media was very happy to go back to the way things were before.
I think forcing companies to pay for something and then taking away any control they have over that entire market sets a bad precedent. I don't know a better solution, but if this sticks we'll see other ways in which companies can be drained for money from basic internet services as well, only getting worse over time.
I imagine stock photo hosts demanding payment for memes posted on social media are waiting next in line. Imagine having to pay these platforms for your users' memes without being allowed to filter out the offending material. Stock photo companies could even start to artifically hype meme formats to get a bigger cut!
I like how everybody's suddenly a constitutional expert here.
I'm skimming legislature.ca.gov, I can't seem to find the definition of "covered platform", but speaking charitably, I'm guessing they basically narrowly defined a social media recommendation algorithm and are trying to regulate what it can do. Saying an algorithm can't penalize on X criteria doesn't seem like compelled speech to me.
IANAL, but it sounds like they're allowed to avoid linking to things, just not punitively. You'd have to sue them to find out whether it's punitive, but that's what discovery is for.
I would not mind a bill that required contributions towards long, well researched, investigative pieces. However 99% of "news" articles I see these days are just re-writes of government/corporate press releases without question or "He/She said" pieces. I understand why, we're in an attention economy, and baseless nonsense with shock factor is quicker and more profitable than complex analysis. However encouraging such BS is bad enough, requiring people to fund it is actively harmful.
I'm not sold on the direct compensation from platforms to journalists just because as a mechanism it seems murky but the underlying rationale is I think correct. I'd prefer tech companies just get taxed much more aggressively and local news can draw and apply for public funds in some transparent way.
But journalistic institutions have important functions. To pick a fairly modern example look at John Carreyrou at the WSJ blowing wide open the Theranos scandal despite the fact that Rupert Murdoch had significant financial stake in the company and owns the newspaper. There is a level of investment into investigative journalism and integrity and firewalls there that you do not have at social media companies. Most of them don't care at all, and if they pretend to you get the 'Twitter Files'.
I was reading Weaving the Web, the story of Tim Berners Lee and the creation of the web, there's a section on misunderstanding about links. In 1999. Wish this were still not a misunderstanding today.
Myth Two: "Making a link to an external document makes the first document more valuable, and therefore is something that should be paid for." It is true that a document is made more valuable by links to other relevant, high-quality documents, but this doesn't mean anything is owed to the people who created those documents. If anything, they should be glad that more people are being referred to them. If someone at a meeting recommends me as a good contact, does that person expect me to pay him for making reference to me? Hardly.
This is ridiculous, and it passed 46-6 which is quite baffling but not surprising given it's California. I worked at a local newspaper in the past and I can't tell you how many people they employed for things not central to core journalism.
Reflecting back now, it's not wonder they eventually downsized significantly and had to vacate the large building they'd been in for decades. They could have cut huge swaths of people, just focusing on journalism, and saved a ton of money.
> I worked at a local newspaper in the past and I can't tell you how many people they employed for things not central to core journalism.
At least try to tell us. Give examples.
> Reflecting back now, it's not wonder they eventually downsized significantly and had to vacate the large building they'd been in for decades. They could have cut huge swaths of people, just focusing on journalism, and saved a ton of money.
That kind of sounds unrealistic. Your ideal sounds like an army with only front line troops. It'll get defeated because those troops won't get fed and will quickly run out of ammunition. Support functions are important in viable organizations.
Sure, here's one. At the time (~12 years ago), Groupon was a booming business. This newspaper (and many others) decided to try and get in on the action by creating their own local versions of daily deal sites. That team just focused on the local newspaper's version of daily deal probably employed at least 20 people, including resources from the web team that had to build and maintain a deal site akin to Groupon.
All of that in sum likely had a high price tag, and like Groupon itself, eventually puttered and faded away.
Is it their fault for trying to find a way to increase revenue? I don't know. At the same time they were doing that, the newspaper itself (both print and online), was bloated with advertising, to the point where the website was almost unusable.
It's hard to say of course, we don't have all the information, but I can tell you it was very resource intensive, and at the same time the core product (newspaper/website) was bloated and burdened with ads.
Honestly to me it felt like the historical newspaper model just simply stopped being as effective, and rather than face that reality, downsize, and innovate, these companies sold their souls to the devil (advertisers).
The online platforms did the same thing but found a way to be more effective.
> It's hard to say of course, we don't have all the information, but I can tell you it was very resource intensive, and at the same time the core product (newspaper/website) was bloated and burdened with ads.
> Honestly to me it felt like the historical newspaper model just simply stopped being as effective, and rather than face that reality, downsize, and innovate, these companies sold their souls to the devil (advertisers).
What now? Are you somehow suggesting the newspapers shouldn't have been running ads, or decided to run fewer ads, when their other revenue was likely drying up (e.g. classified ads)?
The historical newspaper model has always been to use news to get eyeballs, them make money showing ads. If that's selling "their souls to the devil (advertisers)," they were doing it from the start.
Maybe that model no longer works? I don't recall an option to pay for an online account and not have ads, or pay for a print version without ads. Why not? My points is they were lazy (my experience) or simply just not innovative enough.
Times change, behavior changes, technology changes. I don't see how forcing the marketplace to subsidize a failing business model simply because "freedom of the press" is codified in the Constitution is a good idea.
Maybe the press needs a rethinking? Sites like Substack are showing that's the case.
Lastly, I do want to see local newsrooms survive and thrive, I'm just stating my experience in hindsight gave me a perspective where I'm not entirely sympathetic to ideas like the one core to this thread.
It sounds like the law has a requirement for a qualifying news org to spend most of the revenue on journalism? Are you sure you're opposed to the actual contents of the law?
I'm against gov overreach and have serious doubts the government could even properly audit a paper to see whether those funds were used directly for journalism.
> The bill is intended to shore up California’s struggling media outlets, including ethnic media and media serving so-called “news deserts.”
I think that this illustrate well the shameful impact of lobbying. Because of their mediocrity, media are dying. This is normal free market that is working well. Instead they use of their influence to steal income from other business.
Media is dying because of consolidation. My local town newspaper used to employ 400-600 people, and have a big building downtown. Since we are a capital city, it had great coverage of government, politics, etc. It got bought by USA Today, and now my newspaper has 15 or so employees, all printing is done at their other local newspaper they bought and gutted 60 miles south, and our newspaper consits of 3-4 articles a day of actual, local content, and then a bunch of AP and USA today syndicated stories.
They also raised the prices for the papers, and wonder why people are stopping their subscriptions.
That’s all because the economic model has almost completely collapsed. Classifieds used to be a huge source of revenue, Craigslist gutted that for them. And to news sites, they lost most of the market power they had in terms of reaching news readers.
When local newspapers close (or stop doing real investigative journalism) political and corporate corruption increases which causes a financial drag on the region. Given that we tend to bail out failing cities with state funds and failing states with federal funds the rest of us have a vested interest in ensuring that the other regions we're bound to maintain basic levels of functional governance.
Setting aside the specifics of the strange law in the article, I would not be opposed in principle to spending $X a year propping up journalism to avoid spending $100X a year propping up corrupt cities and states.
I don't think that it is true that the newspaper that are dying are the one that are doing the useful investigation s. Quite the opposite: the trend is to make easy money by cutting staff and just printing AP or Reuters click baity news.
They are complaining that people just take the titles and don't pay for articles, but articles are empty block of rephrasing the content they got from AP.
I think the trend is even having IA and co generating these contents, like for sport newspapers.
And if you notice, also a big quantity of major newspaper ( like tv channels) are bought by moguls or the richest businessmen of most countries and then they clearly avoid doing dangerous investigation about the government and powerful persons because it is bad for business.
But if you look carefully, the media that are still doing real investigative journalism and the one that are fighting corruption are not the one that are trying to racket Facebook.
At the opposite most of them are independent, and they are proud to be funded by readers. And it works. People pay when they see that they get quality work.
For example, in France, the is an online newspaper (Mediapart) that exposed most of the recent corruption cases and still they give the option for subscribers to share the articles that they want with friends for free. It works and I think that a lot of people like me are very happy to continue funding this media with our subscriptions.
> the trend is to make easy money by cutting staff and just printing AP or Reuters click baity news
A "newspaper" that stops doing journalism and just reprints AP/Reuters articles and blog posts has already died. Whether they actually go out of business or continue on as a zombie is irrelevant since they have stopped producing journalism in either case.
To reiterate my earlier comment, I am not arguing in favor of this strange California law. And I agree with you that reader-supported journalism (and other media) is the best approach, and I subscribe and donate to several organizations I feel do good work in this area.
I'm solely responding to the earlier comment that the "media are dying. This is normal free market that is working well" to point out that we should not be so sanguine about the death of media like journalism. I am skeptical that democracy and free markets can survive without it.
Not sure I agree. Local journalism is a social good. How else will you find out what your city council is up to? It's not like that's reported on CNN or Fox.
And if there are no journalists asking questions, how will you know they've been selling permits to their cousin developer for cents on the dollar while jacking up your taxes?
Go to the meetings or talk to people in town or follow your neighbors who care on Twitter/Facebook? If you really care what happens at your city council, and you live in a city of less than 1 million people, you can generally meet all of them and know what's happening. Cities greater than 1 million often support a regional-level paper which also covers city news.
So everyone in the city of less than a 1 million should go? What about the meag cities? How are people supposed to have time, energy or resources to achieve that? The news has always been about democratizing information that impacts civic life, hence why a "free press" was written in the constitution. Its a civic service that needs supported and the current model of incentives no longer supports adequately. There are no easy answers to address the dying of newspapers but saying that people should just go to the meetings is not an answer.
Presumably if more than the 30 people who show up care about the city council, then there will be someone who reports about it and writes something up, maybe like a substack, about it. Maybe they will call it something pretentious like "The $city Times" or "The $city Chronicle" and combine that newsletter with other topics of local interest. Maybe they will innovate a physical delivery format, too, that delivers the news on paper. Then they can really charge people for it.
This is literally all just a question of supply and demand. The only people who care show up, and the rest wouldn't even spend $2 on a local newspaper.
Also, you don't have to go to the meeting to know what happened there: all of these councils and committees produce minutes that are accessible from your city's website. I bet out of that city of 1 million, only 2x as many people read the minutes of the city council (which are almost always public) as go to the meeting. The production of those minutes is a public service.
Yeah I used to ardently read the newspaper for the local suburb I was living in a few years ago and felt super connected and informed about issues (which meant I was less confused about all the names on the ballot come election time).
Then I moved to a suburb which didn't have that newspaper and now I have no idea about anything nor are there any avenues for me to learn. And I have kids, so no, I'm not going to all those meetings.
Exactly. And we rarely use regulation to force unwilling parties to produce or pay for them. This is like making a regulation saying that public parks are good, so restaurants have to build parks.
you don't need a metaphor here. the world's largest communications platform is using content generated by journalism organizations to make money, and those orgs are now asking for a piece of it. it's that simple.
"Licensing to link" is a bit different from "licensing content".
And we don't need a license to link. We have never needed a license to link. You published it in public; that's my license to link. The only access restrictions have been robots.txt and restrictions the site itself imposes by technical means.
So if California wants to change that, they're very probably going to lose the court case that is almost certainly going to be triggered by this bill. And then, as others have pointed out, the result will be that nobody links to the news sites, and they lose traffic instead of gaining money.
Licensing implies a choice. At a minimum, social media companies should be able to decide if they want to allow links to news companies and negotiate the rate.
The problem is that "news" is a space where the free market doesn't really accomplish what the theory suggests it should. Consumers don't have a good way to judge the quality of a newspaper, so they end up competing solely on price. Competing solely on price means publishing what's most efficient to produce,
Niche things are generally inefficient to produce, so niche reporting goes away. Goodbye local and special interest news. Regurgitated press releases and coverage of the latest Twitter drama are highly efficient to produce, so you get more of those things.
Unfortunately for California, this measure isn't very likely to help the situation. It doesn't actually address any of the incentives that are killing local and special interest reporting. Even if the law sticks, these outlets are likely to just die anyway unless something else is done.
Media is dying because of lack of funding. Mediocrity comes after the money dries up and they can't afford to pay writers and editors anymore. This in turn drives readers away, causing a spiral. But the initial effect is due to lack of funding
It is not normal in a free market for an entire industry to die. In a free market, if one competitor starts flailing, the other competitors should pick up their slack. If every player in the market is suffering the same disease, that is indicative of a deeper problem that could plausibly be solved via regulation.
Industries have died countless times in a free market. It is an indication that people no longer want to consume what they are making. You can make an argument that local journalism is a public good. In that case the honest response would be for the public to pay for it from the general fund.
People are consuming news media, so its no indication of that. The way these laws are structured, a news organization recieves payment in proportion to how often their articles are read, so they continue to only receive profit when their product is being consumed. If they were funded from a general fund, that might end up subsdizing useless or poor quality news instead of things people actually want to read.
The general fund could pay per click just as easily. The situation as it stands is that the customers aren't willing to pay to click and read. The social media sites aren't willing to pay per click either.
> Who decides which industry should be kept alive and which should die? Let me guess, you do.
Sometimes that's better than letting "the market" decide.
IMHO, it's a mistake to think of the market as some kind of best-decision making machine that should be left to run unattended. It's a effective, but buggy program with a lot of WONTFIX bugs that need to be mitigated through other means.
Aren't those same people now voting directly, with their wallets, to let an industry die? Why do you want to add a middleman politician to the process? Do people not know what's good for them? Why would they then know what's good for them when voting for those politicians?
I’d buy your argument if these media outlets were being replaced by higher quality journalism, but instead is low quality, low effort, click bait/attention seeking headlines with no substance.
(I don’t really think California is going down the right path either, but the “free market” is objectively producing garbage)
If high quantity sold, the market would shift to produce it. As it stands, people are happy with consuming only the headline of an article and moving on.
There are still many high quality outlets; most have just changed to discussion based formats. Take Joe Rogan for example. He talks to a variety of people, sometimes about current events, sometimes not. Similarly, Tim Pool, Sam Seder, Stephen Crowder, The Daily Wire, Ethan Klein's show, etc. all are daily news shows that produce content in the format people want.
The market shifted. Those working for dying industries can reallocate themselves. That's how the market keeps capital allocation efficient.
Free markets don't allocate capital in the best way measured by societal goodness. They allocate capital in the most efficient way relative to the demands of other participants.
This means that goods/services are regularly not produced because it is unprofitable. If for some reason local news is profitable, then anyone that wants to consume it could easily step in to produce it.
Efficiency doesn't necessarily mean good. But it does prevent or at least minimize wasteful economic activity. Anything outside that realm is a good candidate for a hobby.
I am speaking to the broad media landscape. It’s not that there aren’t business models for some high quality journalism. But the current landscape and incentive structures lean broadly towards low quality content.
Just because it is a market outcome doesn’t mean that it is optimal.
Edit: it is also important to note that substack still hasn’t been proven out in the market. It is being subsidized but VC money, time will tell if it is actually something that would survive in the “free market”.
Seems really silly to only require that 70% of the fee is paid to staff. Why not get at the root of the problem and require the news org to reinvest at least 70% of their profit back into their business in order to even qualify for the fee? Or just provide public funding for public journalism? Or limit the ability of social media to display ads with news content?
I dunno. This seems like a really lazy “solution”.
quick criticism here from the 'vested side of society without showing any alternatives.. where are the other solutions? 'local news dead, stock market goes up' headline for what, ten years now?
In a world where people interact with their friends online more than in meat space, and hardly know their own neighbors at all, local news isn't going to survive very well.
This particular strategy has been tried in various forms in various places, and it never works. Any time you see someone say the phrase "doing nothing is not an option", you know that they are making excuses for doing something that has proven, time and again, to be just as effective as doing nothing at all.
> Any time you see someone say the phrase "doing nothing is not an option", you know that they are making excuses for doing something that has proven, time and again, to be just as effective as doing nothing at all.
No, you're going to far. "Doing nothing is not an option", means "don't wait for a perfect solution." "Doing nothing at all" is rarely "just as effective" as an imperfect solution, at least when it comes to the problem under discussion.
It's also worth noting there are frequently people who benefit from certain problems or who are otherwise uninterested in solving them for selfish reasons. Those people really like to push the "do nothing" option.
This has been done before elsewhere, and it was exactly as effective as doing nothing. I'm not much for gambling, but I'd put money on this attempt ending the same way.
It's a mindset that is action-biased. Results don't matter, being seen to be doing things is what matters, apparently.
> In a world where people interact with their friends online more than in meat space, and hardly know their own neighbors at all, local news isn't going to survive very well.
Local news is alive and well! It just moved to Facebook, NextDoor, etc.
Subsidizing local news isn't a bad idea. It's doing it like that's stupid. Just tax social media use in California and use that to fund a revenue-positive subsidy.
Seems like a good idea, but who do you tax and how do you collect it? I already don't want my ISP monitoring my internet usage. Tax the companies directly?
Sure, I agree it would be exceptional and isn't particularly realistic. I just think that it is more legally and culturally acceptable in the US then forcing one company to pay another company for a good that they aren't the consumer of and they don't want to partner with. It's like forcing coffee shops to pay Disney because people exercise their free speech and discuss Marvel movies under their roof. It's actually worth cuz this bill would do the equivalent of banning coffee shops rules against discussing Marvel movies too.
The whole topic is absurd given legislative inaction on paywall bypass tools and archive sites, which blatantly steal copyrighted content.
"boil the ocean" solutions.. fix a massive, long standing source of yuck, everything is better. "easier said than done" since the "source of yuck" today is the one that passed the filters for fixing similar problems, a decade or more past. rinse and repeat.. government is filled with this kind of band-aid or impossible-quest thinking
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
From my reading of the preamble:
1) A 'digital journalism provider' (DJP, e.g. a newspaper) submits a notice to the platform (e.g meta) each month
2) The platform must then remit to the provider some fraction of all its advertising revenue.
3) The platform is forbidden from 'retaliating' (???) again the DJP by (for example) not linking to it in the future
That third part cant possibly be constitutional.