SNIPPETS: Some people still haven’t found what they’re looking for

May 11, 2023

Jonathan Stinson

California is working to pass a bill that would require big tech companies to share their advertising revenue with news outlets. But one company, Meta, has pushed back, saying if that happens, they’ll just pull all the news from their sites like Facebook and Instagram.

It's unclear exactly how the math on that would work out.

I’m not going to get into the politics behind this, like the fact you have a government entity imposing a surcharge on what is largely a private enterprise.

But there are some basics we need to go over so you have a complete view of where I’m coming from.

Everyone is so dependent on the Internet that we easily forget that most of the hardware and software that make it work are privately owned. Google, or Alphabet or whatever, is privately owned. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram and some others, is a private company. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and Lumen own some of the largest portions of the "Internet Backbone," which are the fiberoptic cables that transfer the data between computers. Oh, and don't forget about Amazon Web Service.

I will say that I do find it funny that the same people who championed the Internet being "free for all" are the same people raking in billions and billions off of it.

Instead, I’d rather focus on the what-ifs surrounding this bill if it becomes a law and spreads nationwide, either through various states doing the same thing or the federal government passing a law that affects the whole country.

First, let's assume Meta

does what it says it will do and kicks all the news off of its platforms. In the long run, I don't think that's a bad thing for news organizations, especially newspapers, which is where my expertise lies.

Most of your legacy news outlets are really bad at social media, and it's because most of them are trying to monetize a distribution system they don't own. The end goals of the two entities are incongruent.

So, if you take that away, it will force the news business to adapt and probably allow

them to increase their focus on what they do really well, which is the news.

I may have a skewed view of this because at every newspaper I’ve worked at, there's been such a small return on the effort it takes to build a strong social media following and the amount of traffic it actually drives to the news site. Also, social media only accounted for a small portion of the overall web traffic at those papers.

Again, that's because social networks are not designed to be a conduit to somewhere else, but driving traffic is vital to a news organization's survival. In fact, they are designed to be as sticky as possible and keep users on their social sites because that's how they make money.

So, if you removed the news from Meta platforms, I doubt that's going to be a death knell for the news. There have been many prophesized death

knells over the years, and we (the collective news industry) are still here.

In an ironic turn of events, the eviction of vetted, factual information on Meta's platforms could have more of an adverse effect on Meta because it would just strengthen the false information and echo chambers that already exist in droves on those platforms.

To get an idea of what that might look like, head on over to Twitter.

Meta representatives have argued that people put things on their platforms voluntarily, and that is one of the reasons they feel they should be excluded from anything that would force

them to pay for the content that's on their

sites.

You make up your mind how you feel about that.

When you look at this issue, though, you can't just loop all of the tech world together. You have to deal with the socials, and then you have to consider the search engines like Google, and Bing Yahoo, whose main purpose and business model is to drive traffic to other places.

If they all decided one day to kick news sites out of their search results, then that would be a problem, because even though they’ve been around "forever" in tech-years, those companies still drive the most traffic to the largest number of sites on the Internet.

To put it in perspective, looking at all the newspapers I’ve worked at, the majority of the traffic came from Google, followed by people going directly to the paper's website, which was usually a close second, but depending on what was going on that day it could be easily doubled by Google.

Kicking news off of those sites would be detrimental

and it might actually be a

death knell, because you’d effectively be kicking news sites off the Internet.

The funny thing is that would be a result of the way people navigate the Internet and not that people would all of a sudden lose interest in reading the news.

Think about it. When you go to a website, do you type in the whole web address for where you want to go?

Probably not. You start typing it into the address bar of your web browser, which doubles as a search engine interface and usually auto-fills the information for you.

All of this may be an exercise in imagination, but just in case, write this down for me: www.theredstonerocket.com.

Jonathan Stinson

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