I'm on the fence with this one.
In EU we had a discussion about link tax and some related areas regarding remuneration for content providers by content distribution platforms (search engines - prominently Google and social media sites like FB, Twitter, etc.). Back then I was strongly against this new laws as some of the newly proposed regulations bundled with link tax I considered potentially harmful for e.g. opensource software managed in GitHub repos.
When I think of the link tax now and after reading this rant defending FB, I lean towards the link tax.
Quotes like make me shiver:
"First is the link tax. This is fundamentally against the principles of an open internet. The government saying that you can't link to a news site unless you pay a tax should be seen as inherently problematic for a long list of reasons."
I don't think we should put FB and open internet in the same sentence. Sharing the news is available all the time, through e-mail, slack, SMS or any other mean of electronic communication. It has just stopped being available through FB (a private, global corporation) who will STOP benefiting from it.
In EU we had a discussion about link tax and some related areas regarding remuneration for content providers by content distribution platforms (search engines - prominently Google and social media sites like FB, Twitter, etc.). Back then I was strongly against this new laws as some of the newly proposed regulations bundled with link tax I considered potentially harmful for e.g. opensource software managed in GitHub repos.
When I think of the link tax now and after reading this rant defending FB, I lean towards the link tax.
Quotes like make me shiver: "First is the link tax. This is fundamentally against the principles of an open internet. The government saying that you can't link to a news site unless you pay a tax should be seen as inherently problematic for a long list of reasons."
I don't think we should put FB and open internet in the same sentence. Sharing the news is available all the time, through e-mail, slack, SMS or any other mean of electronic communication. It has just stopped being available through FB (a private, global corporation) who will STOP benefiting from it.