Link Tax & The Slow Death of Small Businesses...
It's been only 6 days since the news that Facebook page owners will now be held responsible for Facebook's data protection breaches, and already the EU strikes again:
Link Tax
Imagine you’re sharing a link with a preview (like the one below) and next you’ll receive a bill for that: “Link Tax”. Yap, that’s what the EU is proposing.
Bots and web crawlers will spy and invoice us or delete our content before it’s being seen. This the height of censorship and the end of freedom of speech.
This is what a link tax will mean:
The link tax is a proposal to apply a new copyright to the snippets of text that automatically accompany news links. It will mean licensing fees and unaffordable contracts for sites that share news.
Imagine your favourite websites are stripped of links, or forced out of business because they can’t afford the hyperlink fees. The web as we know it will be taken away.
The Link Tax will also stifle innovation and ensure the dominance of entrenched players, to the detriment of smaller publishers and smaller news sites. Only major websites will be able to pay these fees and only major news sites will get linked to.
But there is a bright side
There always is one. Even if it's invisible in the dark. (@juanmiguelsalas I can hear you disagreeing with me over here XD )
I believe that every single one of these strikes is also a nail in the coffin of the old centralized paradigm. It's a last attempt to stay in power. It's the final roar of the beast.
Because every single one of these moves will cause more resistance and more creativity from the new decentralized paradigm. (I'm seriously getting more and more excited about the upcoming launch of ONO. The timing couldn't be more perfect!)
The more our wings get cut, the more our desire for bigger wings will grow.
It always gets worse before it gets better.
I guess the political bureaucrats will idiotically add new taxes to the centralized systems, securing the success of the dectralized social networks. I’m pretty sure though some clever programmer will be willing to go to work for the bureaucrats to build a way to tax businesses using even a decentralized network. The leviathan gets its tentacles into every part of society.
Yeah I was thinking about the fact that they'll need someone to build this thing for them. Hopefully all the clever people will have moved to the other side already... ;)
Why are you shilling for Facebook and Google? They don't need your help, they can lobby for themselves. It's not a tax and it doesn't ban links. Snippets are a sneaky way to copy an image from the original article, without paying the photographer or the publisher.
You are aware that these types of platforms that allow snippits, do so automatically -- because it's built into their code base -- right? The end user has zero control over whether or not a snippit will appear once they post a link.
If these centralized platforms want to tax what is automatically appearing because of something built into the code (the user has zero control over) then they need to make a code change so that images don't appear by default or they at least allow the end user to choose whether or not the image appears.
Otherwise it's the death of these platforms if this garbage comes to pass and is enforced.
You are so right @miklkent, I keep forgetting about the IT aspect. If the authorities have a problem with previews they should just ask those platforms to switch the preview function off. The internet would become uglier, but the problem would be solved. Of course if they do that, they remove their opportunity to charge us taxes, so that's not gonna happen.
I'm afraid lots of small businesses will die before those large platforms do.
OK, targeting the end user isn't the most elegant method, but you still have the choice whether or not you use platforms that create snippets.
It's not targeting the end user (maybe I'm misunderstanding you.) From a programming standpoint, I just know from a programming stand point, making this optional is possible. And I think it would be wrong to force people to be subjected to it after the fact. The people have no control over it.
As you said, you can choose at that point to not use the platform that creates it. But it's just a crappy choice in my opinion. It's crappy to be put in that position in other words.