How to save the new from Big Tech
This Saturday (May 20), I’ll be at the GAITHERSBURG Book Festival with my novel Red Team Blues; then on May 22, I’m keynoting Public Knowledge’s Emerging Tech conference in DC.
On May 23, I’ll be in TORONTO for a book launch that’s part of WEPFest, a benefit for the West End Phoenix, onstage with Dave Bidini (The Rheostatics), Ron Diebert (Citizen Lab) and the whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri.
It’s no longer controversial to claim that Big Tech is a parasite on the news business. But there’s still a raging controversy over the nature of the parasitism, and, much more importantly, what to do about it.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/18/stealing-money-not-content/#beyond-link-taxes
This week on EFF’s Deeplinks blog, I kick off a new series on the abusive relationship between Big Tech and the news, analyzing four different dirty practices and proposing policy answers to all four:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech
The context here is that various governments around the world have taken notice of the tech/news problem, and are chasing a counterproductive “solution” — the “link tax,” where tech firms are required to pay for the links and short snippets their users or news search-tools make to news-stories. In some cases, the “tax” is indirect: tech is required to negotiate a payment to make up for other misdeeds (like ripping publishers off with ad fraud).
You can argue that this isn’t a link tax, it’s just pressure to bargain, but because these rules typically ban platforms from simply blocking publishers’ content if they can’t reach an agreement, they become link taxes: “You must carry links, and you must pay the sites you link to” isn’t meaningfully different from “You must pay for linking to those sites.”
This “must-carry” dimension — requiring tech firms to publish links to sites they don’t want to link to — has lots of things wrong with it, but in the US, must-carry has a showstopper bug: it contravenes the First Amendment and any law with a must-carry provision is unlikely to survive a court challenge. So people who care about protecting the news from Big Tech predators — like me — need to try other approaches.
But no matter where you are, requiring tech to pay fees to news is the wrong approach. For one thing, it’s a solution that only works for so long as Big Tech stays big: that means that efforts to break up Big Tech, force it to pay taxes and fines, and limit its profits (say, through privacy laws that end surviellance ads) are incompatible with link taxes and adjacent proposals.
The big risk here is that news outlets will become partisans in the fight against shrinking Big Tech, because news companies’ destinies will be linked to the tech giants’ own fate. More immediately, there’s the risk that news companies that depend on negotiating payments from Big Tech will not act as the effective watchdogs we need them to be.
That’s not just a hypothetical risk: in Canada, Big Tech entered into negotiations with the Toronto Star — the country’s widest-circulating paper — ahead of a proposed “news bargaining code” that was working its way through Parliament. Once that settlement was reached, the Star abruptly killed “Defanging Tech” its excellent critical series on the tech giants it had just climbed into bed with:
https://www.thestar.com/news/big-tech.html
Another important risk from “bargaining codes” and link taxes is that they tend to favor the largest and/or most sensationalist news companies, who have the leverage to bargain for the highest sums. In Australia, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp bargained for a sizable payment from the tech sector — but then it laid off its news workers. Merely transferring money to media giants doesn’t mean an increase in investment in news. That’s especially true in the Canadian context, where a US vulture-capitalist fund bought out the National Post and its nationwide affiliates and then loaded the chain up with debt, while hacking newsroom staff to the bone and beyond. There’s no reason to think that tech payments to the Post will go anywhere except to the financial speculators who are its major creditors.
Meanwhile, the proposed US version, JCPA, has a payout schedule based on the number of clicks a news outlet generates for each platform — a metric that will see the lion’s share of money going to the far-right clickbait sites that push conspiracy theories, disinformation, and culture-war nonsense — and see floods of social media traffic as a result.
Any solution to the tech/news conflict should benefit the news, and the workers who produce it — not the shareholders of the giant companies whose short-sighted consolidation, mass firings, and sell-offs of physical plant created the hyper-concentrated, brittle news sector of today:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print
Luckily for the news, there’s a whole bushel of policy levers we can yank on to make the news better, stronger, and more sustainable, even as tech monopolies and the surveillance they rely on are consigned to the scrapheap of history.
In this series — which will publish weekly over the next four weeks — I’ll dig into four policy prescriptions for making a better news that is free of Big Tech, not dependent on it:
I. Break up ad-tech: Following the lead of Senator Mike Lee’s AMERICA Act, we must end the ad-tech sector’s self-dealing. Ad-tech scoops up 51% of every ad-dollar. That’s thanks to the ad-tech companies practice of offering marketplaces in which they represent both advertisers and publishers: that’s like a game where the referee pays the salaries of the head coaches for both teams. If we pare back the ad-tech tax to, say 10% and split the difference between advertisers and publishers, then every publisher will see an immediate 20% increase in their top-line revenue, without having to “bargain” for a “voluntary” payment from tech companies.
II. Ban surveillance ads: America is long overdue for a federal privacy law with a private right of action. When we finally get such a law, surveillance advertising is dead. Ad-tech has long argued that people like ads, so long as they’re “relevant,” a state that can only be attained through continuous, invasive surveillance. In reality, no one consents to surveillance — which is why, when Apple gave its users a one-click opt-out from spying, 94% blocked spying (unfortunately, Apple only blocks its competitors from spying on Apple customers; even if you opt out of spying on your Apple device, Apple will continue to spy on you).
The natural successor to surveillance ads is context ads: ads based on the content you’re looking at, not the surveillance data an ad-tech platform amassed on you without your consent. Context ads are intrinsically better for publishers: no publisher will ever know as much about a reader’s behavior than a spying ad-tech platform, but no ad-tech platform will ever know as much about a publisher’s own content than the publisher does.
That means that the benefits of a ban on surveillance ads wouldn’t just be an end to creepy internet spying — it would also transfer power from tech companies to news companies, online performers and other creative workers.
III. Open up app stores: 30% of every dollar spent on app-based digital subscriptions is claimed by two companies, Google and Apple, the mobile duopoly. This app store tax is a pure transfer from news to tech. The EU’s Digital Markets Act and the proposed US Open App Markets Act are both designed to kill the app store tax. Dropping mobile payment processing fees from 30% to the industry standard 2–5% will instantaneously make increase the revenue from every subscriber by 25% or more.
IV. Make social media end-to-end: Tech platforms’ predictable enshittification strategy always ends with publishers no longer being able to reach their subscribers unless they pay to “boost” their content. Social media companies claim to be facilitators of the connection between publishers and audiences, but in reality, they take those audiences hostage and ransom them off to publishers. An end-to-end rule for social media would require platforms to reliably deliver material published by accounts to their own followers, who asked to see that material.
The debate over news and tech starts from the erroneous — and dangerous — assumption that the platforms are stealing the news media’s content, by letting their users talk about, quote and link to the news. This isn’t theft: if you’re not allowed to talk about the news, then it’s not the news — it’s a secret.
The platforms are stealing from news, though: they’re not stealing content, they’re stealing money. Between sky-high ad-tech rakes, app store taxes, and ransom demands to reach your own subscribers, the tech companies have grabbed the majority of money generated by news workers and the companies they work for.
Ending this theft will produce a more sustainable and robust source of funding for the news — without compromising news companies’ ability to aggressively hold tech to account, and without propping up financialized, hollowed-out media monopolies at the expense of an independent press.
Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/18/stealing-money-not-content/#beyond-link-taxes
[Image ID: EFF's banner for the save news series; the word 'NEWS' appears in pixelated, gothic script in the style of a newspaper masthead. Beneath it in four entwined circles are logos for breaking up ad-tech, ending surveillance ads, opening app stores, and end-to-end delivery.]
Image:
EFF
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
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Okay fuck it I'm making this post.
So, we all know the dsmp fandom, especially on twitter, has a bit of a problem with leaktwt and often lots of controversy springing from stuff obtained by kiwifarms. I'd like to talk about this, because it's been pissing me off for months and it's getting ridiculous.
Please stop trusting information like this, or at the very least be cautious with how you interact with it, take it with a large grain of salt or maybe even a handful, don't take it at fucking face value and consider to yourself: why did they obtain this information and how did they obtain it.
Especially the how, because I've noticed the amount of illegally obtained data, from information unobtainable without some form of hacking to a lot of cases of spear phishing. Spear phishing, for those who don't know, is a targeted form of phishing against a specific person; phishing is often described as trying to obtain personal or sensitive information, and here the definition is applicable as digging through years worth of information otherwise inaccessible to the average user without purposefully searching everywhere for it, specifically information from or about a specific person.
This happens a lot, we see many cases, from the people who keep doxxing ccs, to the more recent things with certain information from Steam about Wilbur being made public despite the fact it's inaccessible without some sort of digging or manipulation, and now with (I believe, idk i've not really been looking at it for obvious reasons) the whole Tubbo thing and I believe that was leaked private messages of a friend, I could be wrong there. Either way, there's been so many cases of doxxing, leaked private messages, information inaccessible on the front end of things and it's getting to a genuinely worrying point.
And this isn't because I care about content creators, but I do care about upholding data privacy. Yes, even if they've said shit in the past, please don't go digging and digging because that does fall into spear phishing, and at the end of the day it is very dubiously legal at best. This is something we're taught about in fucking cyber security courses, for even further perspective on how bad it is. Not to mention, often this information is dug up by infamous leaktwt or kiwifarms, which are pretty known for bad faith digging up of shit.
These people dig it up for clout, they dig it up for attention, they do not care who gets fucking hurt and often bringing up old shit is going to harm more people than it fucking helps. It's even worse when you try to hold someone accountable for something someone else did, especially years in the past like it's their fault.
Just, please, stop supporting this, stop circulating this shit like morning gossip, because you're not only hurting people for no good reason, it's also often spreading illegally obtained information from people who commit cybercrimes on the regular. It breaks data protection laws, it breaks someone's fucking privacy.
Content creators are people. Respect their privacy, for fuck's sake, and stop egging on leaktwt/kiwifarms, because at the end of the day you're just telling them it's perfectly fine.
And their campaign of digging things up and harming people in bad faith doesn't end at your favourite cis white boy. They will harm minorities, and they already do, just for clout and fun. Stop it while you can before it gets out of hand, and make it clear they aren't welcome, because the fandom doesn't make it clear enough.
This isn't, of course, to say you cannot be critical of information found about ccs, but please don't allow a side effect to be encouraging or inadvertently making leaktwt/kiwifarms believe it's safe for them here, and that they are supported. Be critical when your fav is found to have said awful shit in the past, give them time to clarify, but also just... be a little critical about how accurate that info is, and who is supplying it. If you find yourself thinking 'now is this really legitimately obtained?' then maybe don't spread it, because it could be fake but a lot of the time it's already been addressed and is simply spread in bad faith.
And sure, they're exposing shitty stuff right now, but what happens when they doxx someone's address for fun?
Data privacy is important, it affects everyone, and even the worst people deserve to keep it. Sure, law enforcement and courts might be able to obtain this stuff, but you're not law enforcement nor a court and you're not entitled to personal data whenever.
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