来源：《华盛顿邮报》
日期：2021年2月22日
As of last week, you can’t share a link to this editorial on Facebook in Australia. That’s thanks to legislation expected to pass the country’s Parliament that would force platforms to pay news organizations for hosting links to their content. The measure looks less likely to level the playing field than to tear it up.
从上周开始，在澳大利亚，你就不能在Facebook上分享这篇社论的链接了。这要归因于预计将在澳大利亚国会通过的一项立法，该立法将迫使平台为存储新闻机构的内容链接付费。这项措施似乎更有可能破坏竞争环境，而非创造公平竞争的局面。
The News Media Bargaining Code would require digital services, specifically Google and Facebook, to cut a deal with publishers to determine the price they must pay to display their content. Google has responded by preparing to comply: contracting with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, among other conglomerates, to feature their output in a special section of its news tab, apparently in exchange for the freedom to include links in search. Facebook, on the other hand, has held firm — too firm, even, as its abrupt deleting of all news content led to the removal of various government pages and nonprofits — including public health resources amid a pandemic.
《新闻媒体议价规则》将要求数字服务商，特别是谷歌和Facebook，与发行商达成协议，确定它们显示发行商内容必须支付的价格。谷歌已经做出回应，准备遵守规定：与鲁珀特?默多克旗下的新闻集团等大企业集团签订合同，在新闻标签页的一个专区中以这些大集团的内容为主要组成，作为交换，谷歌可以自由地在搜索中加入链接。另一方面，Facebook一直坚持己见——甚至过于坚定，因为它突然删除所有新闻内容，导致多个政府页面和非营利组织页面被删除——包括新冠大流行期间的公共卫生资源。
Is this a good result? It may be good for Mr. Murdoch, at least as far as the Google deal is concerned. It’s not good for Australians who got most of their news on Facebook, and who may be unlikely to seek it out elsewhere. It’s not good for publishers who benefited from having their content shared on the site. And neither is it good for smaller publishers on Google who don’t qualify under the law to extract payment from platforms, and whose output may end up subordinate to the already powerful players who can do just that.
这是一个好结果吗？这可能对默多克有利，至少就谷歌交易而言是这样。这对在Facebook上获取大部分新闻的澳大利亚人来说不是好事，因为他们可能不太可能从其他地方获取新闻。这对发行商来说不是好事，他们通过在Facebook上分享自己的内容获益。对于谷歌上的小型发行商来说，这也不是件好事，因为根据法律，他们没有资格从平台上索取报酬，他们的内容可能最终会从属于大发行商，因为他们可以从谷歌那里获得报酬。
The measure seems to get reality backward. Certainly, Facebook and Google’s dual dominance of the digital advertising market helped smash journalism’s business model in the first place. But now that’s done, publishers make more money from the traffic and subscriptions they gain through platforms than platforms do from monetizing the material publishers put there. What platforms gain is high-quality content and a healthier information ecosystem. That’s why voluntary agreements in which platforms, for a fee, repackage publishers’ journalism for fuller integration into their product have become increasingly popular.
澳大利亚的立法措施似乎让现实倒退了。当然，Facebook和谷歌在数字广告市场的双重主导地位，首先打破了新闻业的商业模式。但这些都过去了，现在，发行商从平台上获得的流量和订阅中赚取的钱，比平台从发行商投放的内容中赚取的钱要多。平台获得的是高质量的内容和更健康的信息生态系统。这就是为什么自愿协议——平台收费，将发行商的新闻内容重新打包，以便更全面地整合到他们的产品中——变得越来越流行的原因。
These agreements are likely not enough to save a devastated industry. Governments everywhere, including in the United States, may want to ask whether they can play a role in reviving local journalism without compromising journalistic independence. They may also want to ask whether Google and Facebook should give back, via taxation, more of the money they are taking in. Those are two separate questions, however. Australia’s decision to fuse them will not produce one sound answer.
自愿协议可能不足以拯救一个遭受重创的行业。世界各地的政府，包括美国的政府，也许都想问问自己，他们能否在不违背新闻独立的前提下，在振兴地方新闻业方面发挥作用。他们可能还想问谷歌和Facebook是否应该通过税收的形式返还更多的收入。然而，这是两个不同的问题。澳大利亚将它们融合在一起的决定不会产生一个合理的答案。