Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia
I live in Australia and while I&#x27;m excited to see less Facebook use, I see a lot of comments saying things like, &quot;good, Facebook monetized an addiction model and this curbs that&quot;. While true, the proposed law that has pushed them to do this is incredibly dangerous. The law doesn&#x27;t just apply to Facebook, it applies to whoever the Treasurer of Australia[0] says it applies to - it isn&#x27;t metrics&#x2F;rules based: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;7RSqXDJ.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;7RSqXDJ.png</a><p>This means you as a business owner may wake up one day to find that you are now classified as a designated digital platform corporation and are on the hook to now negotiate contracts with every registered news business corporation, AND provide each of them with the secret sauce behind your ranking algos. The only thing that needs to be done to do this is for the Treasurer to file a decision in the Federal Register of Legislation[1]. It&#x27;s a shocking amount of overreach, lack of visibility to the process, and a single point of failure in the system.<p>Overall I&#x27;m very curious to see how this plays out. Facebook took the nuclear option here, and I highly suspect that news corporations will feel quite a sting from the loss of traffic &#x2F; platform. I truly feel like Facebook &quot;winning&quot; here and having the law dropped is the lesser of two evils.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Treasurer_of_Australia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Treasurer_of_Australia</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.legislation.gov.au&#x2F;Browse&#x2F;Results&#x2F;ByRegDate&#x2F;LegislativeInstruments&#x2F;Asmade&#x2F;201&#x2F;0&#x2F;0&#x2F;Principal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.legislation.gov.au&#x2F;Browse&#x2F;Results&#x2F;ByRegDate&#x2F;Legi...</a>