Canada is strongly condemning Facebook’s decision to block news-sharing on its platform in Australia as part of an escalating standoff over rules requiring social-media platforms to compensate news publishers.

Facebook made the right choice, they would have to pay every time a user posts a link to news. Effectively they had 2 choices, either ban it outright or build a department to deal with who posted what and when and how many people saw it to contribute to the Aus government. The can of worms this would open is insane and would simply encourage other countries to do the same thing.

Facebook would be forced into a position where if people decided to post a link to an article for any reason they would have to pay. So if the friend of the writer of the article posted it they would pay, if people who hated the article and were mocking it posted it they would pay, if people in a conversation used an article to support or contradict the article they would pay, if a group of users decided they were angry with Facebook and started posting links to article Facebook would pay.

Facebook would pay to drive users to another site which would then collect advertising revenue off the users click. This is a stupid business model and it is in Facebooks best interest to prevent this ever occurring by simply banning these posts.

The Liberal Party is angry because they were planning to do the same thing as a revenue generator and have first hand evidence that this can't work. Facebook is not the enemy of media it is a driving force getting people to read articles. If media want to generate revenue from this beyond the advertising revenue they can setup a paywall and charge for the content. If people copy the article and paste it that is a matter of copyright and the courts we already have laws for that and take down requests for that.

No sane rational individual would believe that Facebook, Google or even reddit would ever pay a penny for allowing these links to be published. This was a stupid idea and as long as it is a link to a publicly available source without modification to prevent the sites revenue streams isn't foul play but in fact free advertising. If anything Facebook should be charging a clickthrough to the news agencies for driving traffic to them.