If you believe everything you read the newspapers the stoush between Australia and Facebook over the right to link to media sites for free is about the evil US corporation crushing investigative journalism while promoting right wing hate crimes.
Which is why nobody should believe everything they read in newspapers.
In fact this is a battle between two equally dreadful right wing corporations: News Corp and Facebook. Why did Australia of all nations take this stance? Because the Australian Liberal party is terrified of its home grown media. News Corp, which was revealed to have a inappropriate grip on UK politics after the News International scandal, grew up in Australia, and what Australian government investigation into its influence has been made in that country is not pretty. So the fact that the Australian government has come out on the side of traditional media should be read less as a matter of strong principle and more as a matter of deep cynicism.
The problem of media, both social and traditional, is it relies on large near monopolistic corporations. These organisations are quick to wrap themselves in the flag of democracy but actually only serve their own commercial interests.
Perversely the only organisations that truly care about democracy are governments themselves. In many democracies it is state owned news agencies acting independently of politics which undertake the investigation s which keep democracy's wheels lubricated and turning.
Of course the problem with this is that most state owned news agencies are starved of resources by their political masters mistrustful of their ability to cause political havoc. In the worst case this leads to increasing levels of intervention ultimately leading the state owned broadcaster to become a propaganda agency.
Scuttling around the feet of these dinosaurs are the small mammals of independent journalists. Small companies or partnerships with tiny audiences producing special interest investigations or news sites living from sponsorship to sponsorship. These organisations tend to rely on both state owned and social media organisations to obtain what audiences they can reach.
The difference between these organisations and traditional media (from which they have usually spun off), is they don't expect someone to simply pay them for existing, the way many in traditional media do. But at the same time they cannot afford to invest time in boring journal of record work that traditional media (and politicians) have operated around.
Personally I have very little time for the notion of the government as a safeguard of yesteryear's corporations whether they drape themselves in democratic colours or the self interest of cynical politicians. I don't see any merit in newspaper barons over social media barons with respect to democracy.
To my mind the role of government here is to create property rights which fit the criteria of natural justice and provide the social education facilities necessary for the structure of government polity to function.
Because what many internet community corporations are doing is gaining a free ride on the contributions of their users. Without users communities like auction sites, social sites and similar are simply empty shells. There are plenty of alternatives to Facebook which have the same technology but no users and are basically desert islands.
So who should own the content? I, like others, say the users. But more to the point they should own it in an industry standard format. Standards empower users to switch platforms as easily as changing any other supplier. So that the data node is owned by the user and they can plug into different service providers as they see fit. Some of these are international corporations but some are state run.
This means that each digital citizen is in control of their own authentication, their own identity, their own data and their own subscriptions. We have domain name registrars, why not internet user registrars? There is no reason a person should not have multiple digital registrations or identities (people may not want their daytime and nighttime identities to be the same, for example) - this is not a call for a Chinese style digital monitoring system. But having registered an identity a real or legal person and payment account will still be responsible for it.
The benefit of this is your posts, pictures, reviews, ratings, become yours to move from platform to platform. In addition users could place prices on their content so that if they share a popular video each viewer pays them a fraction of a cent to view it. The platforms would extract a transaction price for the charge. Platforms could innovate but standardisation would inexorably follow preventing monopolies.
Where do traditional media corporations fit in this world? Obviously as legal persons. The only difficulty will be the relationship between paid content providers and private persons in their own capacity.
This is part of the issue. The other part is the education of citizens to deal with this digital world. To my mind this is clearly the role of government. It means equipping citizens to deal with the legal, ethicaltechnical and commercial aspects of this world, preferably before they start thrashing around in it. That is quite young, in my experience, but there is no doubt that this is where traditional education needs to head anyway if it is to maintain any semblance of connectedness to the actual world it holds. And of course because the digital world moves so fast this educational facility must also be available to adults as well.
I confess this is idealism. It's not that this hasn't been tried. Jimmy Wales tried Wt.Social which frankly did not take off. The Auth0 offering is up against powerful corporates like Facebook and AWS. Up against a well funded, profit motivated corporation it is hard to create competitive open standards. Just ask Tim Berners-Lee or Linus Thorvalds. So while I think what would be just is clear, I think what will happen will not be. What will actually happen is an unholy political mashup that favours politicians, corporations and vested interests. Just as political revolution flowed when the gun democratised force, a digital revolution would require equality of access to information technology. And I don't see that happening any time soon.
