As loath as I am to defend Facebook, the Australian news organisations crying about how this will harm them have done this to themselves. By pushing for this absolutely terrible wrong-headed law that our government so dutifully passed (with both Labor and the LNP supporting it), they’ve basically discouraged Facebook from sending them traffic at all.

Facebook and Google do not host news content. They provide free marketing for news organisations in the form of hosting links to that content and algorithms that surface that content to the people most likely to be interested in it. They make money on that free marketing not by leeching off of the news providers, but by selling advertisements against their own users. There’s room for debate about the ethics of their data collection and advertising, but that’s not the news orgs’ concern. These kinds of policies just fundamentally misunderstand what these companies are actually doing. Probably on purpose, as the dying right-wing media desperately scrambles for relevance.