I earlier cited Kate Crawford on AI research, but this bit on corporate-government warfare caught my eye as well:
Are we also seeing government pushback? Like when the Australian government drafted legislation for big tech firms to pay for content from news organisations and Facebook responded by briefly turning off all news for Australians on its platform?
It was horrifying to see that. This was a signal being sent by Facebook to the world that says: “If you pass laws that we don’t like, we will simply take our toys and go home.” And given how many countries right now are looking to produce much stricter forms of regulation on the tech sector, it seems like a troublesome type of strongman tactics.
Are tech companies any different to powerful companies that have gone before them?
Tech companies have taken on the roles of states in terms of things like providing civic infrastructure. Facebook, for example, has spent huge amounts of money to convince populations that they are the place where you can communicate with family, where student groups can put up their information. This is where you connect with your communities. What was so extraordinary to see was that this civic infrastructure can be switched off any minute. The power of technology companies has in some ways leapfrogged the power of states and this is very unusual.
But I have to wonder: why did Australia back off? I think this may have been an opportunity to push Facebook out of the news delivery service, and either force them of of the news area completely, or to invest in the news collection business as well – thus generating jobs.
And if they hadn’t? Local demand might have allowed Australian news services to regain jobs. Indeed, if Australia had insisted that Facebook pay for all news, from both foreign and domestic sources, it could have started an Australian renaissance in the news business.
And if they had worked with other countries, such as the behemoth United States, on this insistence, Facebook may have had to put up the cash to buy the rights to broadcast all that news – from their obscene profits (2020: $29.1 billion with a B).
That could have proven very interesting.
