Fulcrum7 received a tip yesterday that our platform (along with hundreds of other sites) were now blocked in Australia. Even the Adventist SPD Record is banned. Here’s what’s happening.
A long-simmering battle between tech firms and the government of Australia became explosive Thursday when Facebook blocked all linking of news publications inside the country. Not only has this change affected Australian and international news publishers, but Facebook's wide net has also caught up governments, nonprofits, and basically anyone else in Australia who posts non-news content to the platform.
Australian lawmakers have been considering a bill that would require Internet platforms such as Google and Facebook ("digital platform corporations") to negotiate in good faith with news outlets ("registered news business corporations") to link to their content. If the outlets and the platforms can't reach a deal on their own, they would have to go to baseball-style arbitration, where a neutral third-party arbitrator would decide whose offer is the better one.
Facebook’s sudden move on Thursday to cut Australians off from the news (and the rest of the world from Australian news) was as surprising as it was draconian. It also may be a preview of how the platform will respond to the almost certain future attempts to regulate its business — not just in Australia, but all over the world.
Now that we’ve had a few days to see how it’s played out, it seems like the general consensus from media experts is that no one is a winner here.
It appears that the way that Facebook went about registering its objection was abrupt, clumsy, and potentially harmful. Facebook's botched news ban hits health departments, charities and even some of its own pages. I guess you could say they ‘unfriended’ themselves.
Facebook's actions were "as arrogant as they were disappointing," Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in—of course—a Facebook post. He continued,
"These actions will only confirm the concerns that an increasing number of countries are expressing about the behavior of BigTech companies who think they are bigger than governments and that the rules should not apply to them.”
One possible response is that Australia calls their bluff and bans Facebook from Australia. They could ‘unfriend’ them.
****