The Week - USA (2021-03-05)

“Do tech companies need publishers

more than publishers need tech compa-

nies?” asked David Pierce in Protocol

.com. We might be closer to getting an

answer. Australia introduced a bill last

week that will make Google, Facebook,

and other tech platforms pay for news

links. The tech industry initially saw the

proposed law as little more than an ex-

cuse to force them to write “a big check

with Rupert Murdoch’s name on it.”

Facebook even thought it could simply

tell the Australian government “to shove

it,” blocking Australians from posting any

news links on its site (see Best International Columns, p. 15). But

after a few days of brinksmanship, both Facebook and Google

are at the bargaining table, negotiating how much they will pay

to Australian news outlets after the law’s enactment.

This is not new territory for Google, which just last month set

up a similar deal in France, said Mathieu Rosemain in Reuters

.com. Google “agreed to pay $76 million over three years to a

group of 121 French news publishers” to license content and

settle copyright claims. Annual payments range from $1.3 mil-

lion a year for France’s top daily, Le Monde, down to $13,741

for La Voix de la Haute Marne. Three top publishers negotiated

an extra $3.6 million each, in part by agreeing to sell subscrip-

tions through Google. All these numbers are a drop in the bucket

compared with Google’s $183 billion an-

nual revenue. Google can afford to lose

some battles to win the war, said David

Fickling in Bloomberg.com. “The real

mother lode for these businesses is their

ability to act as intermediaries for a digi-

tal advertising market that’s increasingly

swallowing the world’s marketing bud-

gets.” By ceding some ground in France

and Australia, Google keeps its hands on

the bigger prize: “Control and distribu-

tion of the world’s online information.”

“If Facebook does not want to pay for

news links, and the links are not core to its business, it should

not have to,” said Kara Swisher in The New York Times. Face-

book says that news links make up less than 4 percent of its

News Feed content, and publishers don’t have a right to demand

special access to its platform. But the company’s clumsy response

backfired and “played right into the hands of those who want to

rein in the company for more legitimate reasons.” Google, for its

part, just “invited every other country to pursue a similar protec-

tion racket,” said Casey Newton in TheVerge.com. Its fear was

that removing links would “break the search engine in Australia,

opening it up to rivals” such as Microsoft. But Google’s capitu-

lation means other countries will follow suit. “A basic tenet of

the Open Web—that hyperlinks can be freely displayed on any

website—just took a body blow.”

Media: Should Google, Facebook pay for news?

Re

ute

rs,

Ne

ws

co

m

Amazon games India’s online market

Amazon has been using a small number of

friendly large sellers to “circumvent increas-

ingly tough regulatory restrictions” in India,

said Aditya Kalra in Reuters.com. In India,

unlike in the United States, Amazon can’t sell

goods directly to customers and can only act as

a middleman between buyers and sellers. The

restriction is aimed at protecting small retail-

ers, and Amazon has long contended that it is

a “friend of the small business.” But Amazon

gave two of its largest sellers in India, Cloud-

tail and Appario, subsidies and “access to its

global retail tools” that helped them account

for 35 percent of the platform’s online sales. In

early 2019, just “35 of Amazon’s more than

400,000 sellers in India accounted for around

two-thirds of its online sales.”

Still no ‘right to repair’ for farmers

Farmers say John Deere and other equipment

manufacturers haven’t lived up to their pledge

to let farmers repair and maintain their own

equipment, said Jason Koebler and Matthew

Gault in Vice.com. For years, farmers com-

plained that “their tractors were becoming in-

creasingly unrepairable.” Sensors and onboard

computer software put a malfunctioning ma-

chine into “limp mode,” no matter how small

or serious the issue, until it was brought to an

authorized dealer. But fearing potential “right

to repair” legislation, a trade group promised

in 2018 to “make repair tools, software, and

diagnostics available to the masses” starting

Jan. 1, 2021. That date passed, and nothing

changed. We called nine dealerships in seven

states and were told “the things promised by

manufacturers are not available.”

Next, the virtual foosball table?

New virtual-meeting startups have set out to

counter work-from-home limitations, said

Yiren Lu in The New York Times, and they’re

taking their cues from video games. Gather

.town, a new online-meeting platform, hosts

parties within “a virtual map” rather than “a

fixed grid of floating heads.” Participants can

“move around by hitting arrow keys.” You

can congregate together or break apart into

groups, and “the farther you walk away from

people” the softer their voices get. Another

startup, Kumospace, hosts events in a “virtual

living room,” where participants can “inter-

act directly with the surroundings,” playing

a piano or grabbing a virtual drink. Kumo-

space’s founder said he was “particularly in-

fluenced by massively multiplayer online role-

playing games such as World of Warcraft.”

Bytes: What’s new in tech

Apple is

already

moving

on to 6G,

said Mark

Gurman in

Bloomberg

.com. Just

months

after launching its first 5G- enabled

smartphones, Apple posted job ads

last week “seeking wireless system

research engineers” to “design next

generation (6G) wireless commu-

nication systems.” The standards

for 6G are still “loosely defined, but

some analysts say the technology

could enable speeds more than 100

times faster than 5G.” To reach that,

signals would likely have to attain

higher frequencies than are used

for wireless communications today.

This would take them past the milli-

meter wave bands used for 5G and

push into the terahertz (or infrared)

spectrum, potentially unlocking

wide swaths of unused bandwidth.

The technology, though, remains

largely untested, and “industry

watchers don’t expect a 6G rollout

until about 2030.”

Innovation of the week

22 NEWS Technology

Other countries could copy Australia’s approach.