12 September 2020 | New Scientist | 15Analysis FacebookFACEBOOK has announced that
it will ban users in Australia from
sharing news content, in response
to media regulation laws proposed
by the Australian government.
The Australian Competition and
Consumer Commission (ACCC), a
government agency that regulates
business practices, proposed
a draft of new rules in late July
that would enable Australian
news organisations to ask for
remuneration from companies
such as Facebook and Google for
news shared on their platforms.
Facebook has responded by
announcing a ban on sharing news
content. “Assuming this draft code
becomes law, we will reluctantly
stop allowing publishers and
people in Australia from sharing
local and international news on
Facebook and Instagram,” said
Will Easton, managing director
of Facebook Australia and
New Zealand, in a statement.
It is the first regulatory
legislation of its kind and may
be a test case for potential global
regulation to follow. “Facebook
could well afford to pay for news
in Australia, but they may not be
able to afford to pay for newsglobally,” says James Meese at
RMIT University in Melbourne.
The law is aimed at redressing
what the Australian government
sees as a “significant bargaining
power imbalance between
Australian news media businesses
and Google and Facebook”.
A decline in advertising revenue
across the global news industry
has been accelerated by covid-19,
and more than 50 Australian
news outlets have been shuttered
since the pandemic began.In a statement, the ACCC’s Rod
Sims criticised Facebook’s threat
of a news ban as “ill-timed and
misconceived”, while Australian
treasurer Josh Frydenberg has
said that the government “won’t
be bullied, no matter how big the
international company is”.
Google has also responded to
the proposed legislation, saying in
an open letter that it would lead to
“dramatically worse” search and
YouTube services.
If the legislation is passed, there
is a significant risk that Facebook
and Google will cease to provide
news services in Australia, says
Rob Nicholls at the University of
New South Wales in Sydney.
Facebook’s decision has
troubling consequences for news
media in Australia, a country in
which 39 per cent of people use
the platform as a source of general
news – a figure that is even higher
for younger audiences. Without
trustworthy news on Facebook,
misinformation may spread.
“It’s a common play by
platforms, when they’re faced
with regulation that they don’t
like, to basically withdraw their
services from a particularmarket,” says Meese.
In 2014, Google withdrew its
Google News service from Spain
after legislation was introduced to
make aggregators pay publishers
for snippets of their content.
Negotiations between Google
and news publishers are ongoing
in France, which last year passed
an EU copyright directive into law
that mandates similar payments.
The UK and Canadian
governments are eyeing proposals
similar to the Australian law, which
focuses on fair competition by
forcing tech firms to share ad
revenue with news outlets, unlike
the European regulations, which
are grounded in copyright laws.
Because of the symbiotic
relationship between news
media and online platforms,
Google and Facebook may also
lose out by withdrawing news
services from Australia.
“The quasi-monopoly position
that they’re currently in could be
threatened by their own exit,”
says Nicholls. ❚WI
LL
IAMW
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T/AFP
VIAGETT
Y^ IMAGESAustralian news
outlets have been
hit by the pandemicCould Australia’s clash with Facebook go global?
Internet giants are fighting a proposed law that could see them
pay for news articles shared on their platforms, says Donna LuTechnology
Donna Lu
WINDOWS can act as solar panels
when a layer of nanoparticles is
sandwiched between two glass
panes. This could help us use solar
energy in cities where space for
solar panels may be limited.
“If we’ve done our job, no one
will even know that they’re there,”
says Hunter McDaniel at UbiQD,
a materials manufacturing firm in
the US. He and his colleagues have
developed solar panels that are
indistinguishable from glass.
Test installations involving
panels that are 1 square metre in
size are under way in buildings in
the US and the Netherlands. The
panels have a power conversion
efficiency of 3.6 per cent, a measure
of how much sunlight is converted
into electricity. Opaque solar panels,
in comparison, have efficiencies
between 15 and 20 per cent.
These transparent panels are
made from two layers of glass
glued together with a polymer that
contains nanoparticles known as
quantum dots. With a core of copper
indium sulphide and a shell of zinc
sulphide, these quantum dots are
tiny semiconductors that can
manipulate light.
When the nanoparticles are
excited by exposure to UV light,
they release photons that travel
along the transparent panel
towards its edge. The perimeter is
fitted with solar cells, which convert
the photons into electrical current.
The solar cell edging sits out of sight
in the window frame (ACS Applied
Energy Materials, doi.org/d8cz).
The panels are brownish in
colour, but the team showed it could
also produce panels of a grey or
grey-blue colour by mixing in a blue
dye. It is also possible to customise
the transparency of the glass to
make panels with a darker or lighter
tint. The darker the tint, the greater
the energy output, as more light is
absorbed. “It’s basically an almost
linear relationship,” says McDaniel. ❚
Nanoparticles turn
windows into see-
through solar panels
“Facebook could well
afford to pay for news in
Australia, but may not be
able to afford it globally”