The Australian Government for ages has been trying to get the news organisations and the social media giants to come together and establish a voluntary media code that addresses concerns of multiple parties in a reasonable way. I’m sure each of you will be shocked to hear that Google & FB each have been hostile to the process form the start and have missed meetings and general behaved poorly and arrogantly in their dealings. This is a cynical late stage comms from Fb.

The government literally stated that with a heavy heart they were putting in a crude approach towards forcing both giants to finally step up and start to discuss this. That oblique reference to the new “Facebook news tool and their announcement of it in the last month or so” is part of this, and will be rolled out depending how their hand is forced from here.

The essence of the case against the social media giants is that journalism is dying. Not just newsprint but paid journalism itself. The profession is under massive attack and papers worldwide are being affected and it’s clear there is a value extraction occurring with the social media giants, who are in one framing benefiting from the content produced by news outlets and show it in their “listings” (feeds/search results) and further compete directly with the news organisations for advertising dollars all without having to include any remuneration to the content creator, in this case professional news outlets who still have an important social function to provide and are providing less and less due to the market dominance of these two ‘aggregation advertising companies’.

The Australian government is firstly fighting around this principle of ensuring fair competition in the advertising space, two large companies are exploiting newspapers due to their market dominance, ok excuse me, you folks need to adjust your market practices so that everyone can play. Their dominance is like a duopoply and is being criticised as such even though this economoic language has become foreign in recent times where dominance of American mega corporations is assumed as somewhow right and therefore fair. Google & Fb know they are very powerful with limited obligations to Australians and so they are acting arrogantly and oppressively in their approach.

The other side of this humerously is that while in principle it’s important to have an open and fair press and to ensure healthy competition and a healthy media space in the digital era, Australian media is largely owned by two major media moguls. I’m sorry to say that Rupert Murdock began his life right here in Australia. These moguls having done very poorly with their own digital strategies over the years are also pressuring the government to take action in this space, and while no-one loves these companies either, the prospect of the total breakdown of the local newspaper and media landscape and the related loss of local journalism jobs drives the government to get involved.

There’s more nuisance and moves and details on this but that’s the gist as best I can capture it.

I’m in support of the social media giants being forced to the negotiation table and working out platform options that do provide a content producers fee to media companies both big and small that might be a great model to help us move back away from crap spam content back towards a modern from journalism. Facebooks new newstool is headed this direction if they feel pressured in the right way to have to roll it out and create a Spotify of news redirecting some of the insane advertising revenue the receive.