Wired: Facebook Freeloads Off Newspapers. This Plan Might Stop It
October 3, 2022
Imagine you have an app that, when downloaded, does extraordinary things in your zip code. People with this app have higher median incomes, so you find yourself richer. It lowers air pollution, so it makes your air cleaner. It reduces partisan polarization, so your town’s elections are more pleasant affairs. Among other things, it lowers your taxes.
Such an app exists, in a sense: It’s called journalism. At scale, it delivers enormous benefits to society—as a prophylactic on government waste, by weeding out corruption, and by helping democratic communities cohere—and especially at the local level.
But the app, along with its benefits, is rapidly disintegrating from American life.
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“Google and Facebook don’t want to start a precedent where they have to pay for content,” says Mike Davis, director of the Internet Accountability Project, a conservative think tank that has joined liberals in Washington in pushing for antitrust reforms that would curtail Big Tech. “This is small potatoes for them—it’s a couple billion dollars, right? But it’s life or death for your hometown newspaper.”
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Read the full article HERE.
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Unlike the Big Tech monopolies, the Internet Accountability Project pledges to never sell or share your personal information, which is your property.