Andrew Holdon is making a copyright argument. If the NPA really thought it would fly, they'd take the DataFarms to court for copyright violation on behalf of their members. But they know as well as I do that it wouldn't.

Because what the FDNBB does is not the news equivalent of making retail stores pay for the music they play. More like making a handful of the most profitable retail chains pay, for music people that people play to their friends on their own devices as they shop.

(2/?)

Sharing news is a thing people do on DataFarming platforms. But it's not primarily why people use them. If they stopped allowing the posting of links to news sites, it would have no impact on their ad business at all.

But for reasons given in my last thread on the subject, it would be catastrophic to the news companies themselves. Who now depend on traffic from the DataFarms to have an audience. Partly due to their own shortsighted decisions to outsource their comment sections to them.

(3/?)

So the comparison to playing familiar music to make shops more attractive to customers doesn't stand up to the most basic scrutiny. It's almost the opposite.

Shops outsource music discovery and curation to the music streaming DataFarms. The news media are trying to make their shopfront more attractive, by outsourcing content discovery and comment moderation to the social streaming DataFarms. Making the DataFarms pay for links is like making the music streamers pay the shops for listens.

(4/?)

In case it seems like I'm taking the DataFarmers' side here, imagine the FDNBB applied not just to them, but to any online social tool where people might link to news sites. Including the fediverse server you're reading this on.

The companies that benefit most from laws that create link taxes know that would never fly. So instead they narrow the scope to the DataFarms, relying on the techlash to get the public on their side.

(5/?)

But the FDNBB isn't the media corporations that own all our major news platforms trying to heal the enormous gaping wounds that DataFarming inflicts on our society. Instead of trying to fix any of those problems;

eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save…

... they're just trying to use regulatory capture to make sure they get a cut.

As I said in my last thread on the subject, we need community-controlled news media and social media, to replace the parasitic corporations currently running both.

(6/6)

Addendum: I wish I could get all news media publishers, large and small, to listen to this episode of the DotSocial podcast;

'How Decentralization Benefits Publishers, with 404 Media’s Jason Koebler and ProPublica’s Ben Werdmuller':

dot-social.simplecast.com/epis…

#podcasts #DotSocial

I just had my first tentative experiment with writing a post using Ghost. I like it!

The interface is beautifully minimal. So much less visual noise to wade though compared to SubStack, and so much less clicking and waiting when moving from page to page. It does pretty much everything useful that SubStack does, plug they're actively working on ActivityPub integration, so we can follow Ghost publications from the fediverse.

activitypub.ghost.org/

#blogging #newsletters #Ghost #ActivityPub