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Australia’s testing of Big Tech’s willingness to pay for news it uses has produced a split decision.
Its proposed law being debated this week to establish licensing arrangements has led to Google agreeing a spate of licensing deals with Australian media companies including Nine, one of the country’s largest such groups and publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald. More significantly, a global agreement has been reached with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Google caved after earlier threatening to quit the country and cede search to rivals such as Bing.
In contrast, Facebook has banned the sharing of content on its platform in Australia, the most far-reaching restrictions it has ever placed on publishers in any part of the world. William Easton, Facebook’s managing director in Australia, said the company would restrict news “with a heavy heart†because the law “fundamentally misunderstands†its relationship with publishers. “It seeks to penalise Facebook for content it didn’t take or ask for,†he said.
Paul Fletcher, Australia’s communications minister, said Facebook was stopping news from reliable sources where facts were checked at a time when it is facing questions about the credibility of the information it presents. Jemima Kelly writes that some of Facebook’s own fact-checking is questionable.
Lex says the stakes were not as high for Facebook. News makes up less than 4 per cent of the content in people’s feeds — even though it is the most important source of information for many. For Google, by contrast, news plays an integral role in search, even if the ad revenues sold against it are relatively small.
In a climate where misinformation abounds and the news industry is in decline with advertising flowing to the online giants, Australia has shown that lobbying by the major media groups can force Big Tech to pay for news, either begrudgingly or through legislation. Whether this will filter down to smaller and more local media groups in other parts of the world remains to be seen (Full disclosure: The Financial Times has reached licensing agreements for news with both Google and Facebook).
The Internet of (Five) Things
1. Facebook internal emails reveal ad disquiet
A Facebook employee warned that the social network reported revenues it “should have never made†by overstating how many users advertisers could reach, according to internal emails revealed in a newly unsealed court filing. Alphaville highlights the key allegation in the filing.
2. Reddit day trader urges Wall Street probeÂ
Keith Gill, the day trader at the centre of the short squeeze on GameStop stock, urged Congress to investigate “potentially manipulative shorting practices†ahead of its hearing on Thursday in which he will appear alongside the hedge fund manager who lost billions on the other side of the bet. Here’s our explanation of what’s happening on the hill, and you can follow our live coverage here.
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3. North Korean hacks, Czech war gaming, ransomware negotiators
Three computer programmers thought to be based in North Korea have been charged in the US with conspiring to steal and extort more than $1.3bn from banks and other companies through state-sponsored cyber hacks. The Czech Republic is carrying out war-gaming exercises with companies to strengthen its critical industries against cyber attacks by hostile states such as China and Russia. Hannah Murphy in San Francisco reports on the negotiators helping firms deal with rampant ransomware attacks.
4. Tackling climate change and techno-optimism
If you don’t have time to read Bill Gates’ new book on averting a climate disaster, you can listen to it on BBC Sounds this week, in five episodes. In his latest column, John Thornhill says the trouble with the philanthropist’s techno-optimism is that it might encourage inaction and distraction: “If we believe that ingenious inventors are going to save us tomorrow, why bother agonising over contentious environmental accords today? If we think that nuclear fusion is just around the corner, why build wind farms?â€
5. Old and new life: mammoths and Mars
Scientists have for the first time collected and analysed DNA that is more than 1m years old after extracting genetic material from the remains of mammoths buried in the Siberian permafrost. Meanwhile in outer space, the largest and most sophisticated vehicle ever sent to Mars is set to land today, beginning a two-year mission to search for signs of life on the red planet and prepare the way for human visits.
Forwarded from Sifted — the European start-up week
Three venture capital firms that invested in the Romanian software start-up UiPath back in 2015 are on track to make what is likely to be the greatest ever return on a European venture bet. They are set to generate more than a 2,200 times return on their money when the company lists in New York in the coming months, turning $1.6m into more than $3.5bn in just six years, according to calculations by Sifted. While this was likely the best ever return on a European deal, there have been better ones globally. The US accelerator Y Combinator made an estimated 112,500 times return on its investment in rental marketplace Airbnb, for instance.
Elsewhere in European start-ups, Sifted this week looked at the top fintech start-ups on the continent and their plans for 2021, while Berlin-based trading app TradeRepublic distanced itself from its larger US competitor Robinhood. In other news, travel start-up GetYourGuide hailed an “inflection point†in the travel sector and investor Nicolas Colin asked why Europe cannot build its own social media business to rival the might of new popular US audio app Clubhouse.Â
Tech tools — Nvidia’s crypto mining cards
Nvidia gaming processors (Graphics Processing Units) have been adapted to do the donkey-work of miners of cryptocurrencies, to the extent that it has created shortages of the chips for its core audience. Today, Nvidia said it would hobble its new GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, released on February 25, so that its cryptocurrency mining efficiency would be reduced by around 50 per cent. “To address the specific needs of ethereum mining, we’re announcing the NVIDIA CMP, or, Cryptocurrency Mining Processor, product line for professional mining,†it said. The alternative line-up comes in four flavours, with the more powerful cards available in the second quarter.
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