Oh no, not at all! As I said, "None of this makes it any better an idea, or any less stupid, or anything like that." People who don't know how something works really shouldn't be legislating on it! (Not that we can actually avoid that, given the sheer number of things there are to know about... but they should at least try.) But I always figure trying to understand a problem may help some towards trying to avoid it recurring in future.
That, and I think it's good practice to try and see things from other perspectives, however dumb. Most people aren't evil in their own eyes, so sometimes trying to look through those eyes can be useful. In some cases, one perspective is clearly wrong (being built on false assumptions, for example, such as the one I hypothesise above), while in other cases it may be a fundamental matter of conflicting values. But it's very difficult to solve a problem (even/especially one involving human beings) without first attempting to understand it.
But hey, I'm just another pseudonymous blurb on the Internet. What do I know? :)
I haven't really followed this anywhere other than the pages of Techdirt, so there may well be plenty of available information that I don't actually know. (AKA "Disclaimer: I know nothing.") But it strikes me that this likely makes a lot more sense from a certain perspective - one probably difficult to imagine for most commenters here.
Chances are, the people writing and passing - and demanding - this law probably didn't come to computers, let alone the internet, as early as we did. I'd lay good odds that many of them never had a 56k modem. So, they probably don't remember the days when your best bet for actually reaching the site you wanted was to type in its address. They probably don't remember when the address bar actually was an address bar and not a search bar, and if you typed in "blue cheese" then it threw an error at you rather than sending you to Google "blue+cheese" search results (by default - mine sends me to DuckDuckGo, but that's really not the point).
My bet would be that to many of these people, Google and Facebook literally are the Internet. Sure, they may know that somewhere there are some servers, and ISPs, and if you're really lucky they may know (sort of) what an IP address is and that something called DNS exists. But when you don't know anything much about computers, when you type into your "address bar" and get back a screen that says "Google", and when you go to every "page" via something that says "Facebook" and never sign out - when those little "like" buttons are ubiquitous and everywhere so that everything is clearly plugged in and part of it - is it really any wonder that you actually would think that Google and Facebook together are in fact the entire Internet, its infrastructure and its operations? That "www.xyznewssite.com" is a strange personal hive-off of part of the larger Google/Facebook entity that they see as the Internet, rather than an honest-to-goodness separate and distinct entity? So that not appearing on Google/Facebook is, to them, what we would understand as cutting off your DNS resolution? After all, under this schema, under which they were quite likely introduced to the Internet, typing in the address bar gives you only Google - so, if you type in "XYZ News Site" and XYZ News Site doesn't appear, it clearly isn't on the internet. Which means Google/Facebook has taken XYZ News off the Internet!!!
When I was very much younger, because AOL (remember those guys?!) had its own internal browser, its own news, its own forums that you got to by clicking menu options rather than typing a web address, and so on, I was pretty sure that what you got on AOL probably was a subset of the Internet that I could also access through Internet Explorer, but I wasn't sure how one would actually go about doing that.
(I was young, okay?)
So now the problem becomes, from this messed-up perspective, not "newspapers shouldn't get free traffic", but "if newspapers have to be on the internet to be relevant in modern society, the internet shouldn't be making money from their having to be on the internet in a way that the papers themselves can't, since the internet holds a monopoly over the internet". That the same company apparently owns all those papers and is super influential certainly doesn't help either, of course.
None of this makes it any better an idea, or any less stupid, or anything like that. But perhaps it might go some way to explaining why it's happened? I suspect this level of tech illiteracy is likely to be a large part of the root problem at work here... and in many, many other similar cases.
Some self-published authors have gone completely free in the sale on at Smashwords right now. (Others have just gone with a reduction.) So a lot of little authors have signed up to do just that! I'd love to see more of the big companies actually doing something more like this, like you suggest. But I have little hope it will actually happen...
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Re:
Oh no, not at all! As I said, "None of this makes it any better an idea, or any less stupid, or anything like that." People who don't know how something works really shouldn't be legislating on it! (Not that we can actually avoid that, given the sheer number of things there are to know about... but they should at least try.) But I always figure trying to understand a problem may help some towards trying to avoid it recurring in future.
That, and I think it's good practice to try and see things from other perspectives, however dumb. Most people aren't evil in their own eyes, so sometimes trying to look through those eyes can be useful. In some cases, one perspective is clearly wrong (being built on false assumptions, for example, such as the one I hypothesise above), while in other cases it may be a fundamental matter of conflicting values. But it's very difficult to solve a problem (even/especially one involving human beings) without first attempting to understand it.
But hey, I'm just another pseudonymous blurb on the Internet. What do I know? :)
Another Possible Viewpoint
I haven't really followed this anywhere other than the pages of Techdirt, so there may well be plenty of available information that I don't actually know. (AKA "Disclaimer: I know nothing.") But it strikes me that this likely makes a lot more sense from a certain perspective - one probably difficult to imagine for most commenters here.
Chances are, the people writing and passing - and demanding - this law probably didn't come to computers, let alone the internet, as early as we did. I'd lay good odds that many of them never had a 56k modem. So, they probably don't remember the days when your best bet for actually reaching the site you wanted was to type in its address. They probably don't remember when the address bar actually was an address bar and not a search bar, and if you typed in "blue cheese" then it threw an error at you rather than sending you to Google "blue+cheese" search results (by default - mine sends me to DuckDuckGo, but that's really not the point).
My bet would be that to many of these people, Google and Facebook literally are the Internet. Sure, they may know that somewhere there are some servers, and ISPs, and if you're really lucky they may know (sort of) what an IP address is and that something called DNS exists. But when you don't know anything much about computers, when you type into your "address bar" and get back a screen that says "Google", and when you go to every "page" via something that says "Facebook" and never sign out - when those little "like" buttons are ubiquitous and everywhere so that everything is clearly plugged in and part of it - is it really any wonder that you actually would think that Google and Facebook together are in fact the entire Internet, its infrastructure and its operations? That "www.xyznewssite.com" is a strange personal hive-off of part of the larger Google/Facebook entity that they see as the Internet, rather than an honest-to-goodness separate and distinct entity? So that not appearing on Google/Facebook is, to them, what we would understand as cutting off your DNS resolution? After all, under this schema, under which they were quite likely introduced to the Internet, typing in the address bar gives you only Google - so, if you type in "XYZ News Site" and XYZ News Site doesn't appear, it clearly isn't on the internet. Which means Google/Facebook has taken XYZ News off the Internet!!!
When I was very much younger, because AOL (remember those guys?!) had its own internal browser, its own news, its own forums that you got to by clicking menu options rather than typing a web address, and so on, I was pretty sure that what you got on AOL probably was a subset of the Internet that I could also access through Internet Explorer, but I wasn't sure how one would actually go about doing that.
(I was young, okay?)
So now the problem becomes, from this messed-up perspective, not "newspapers shouldn't get free traffic", but "if newspapers have to be on the internet to be relevant in modern society, the internet shouldn't be making money from their having to be on the internet in a way that the papers themselves can't, since the internet holds a monopoly over the internet". That the same company apparently owns all those papers and is super influential certainly doesn't help either, of course.
None of this makes it any better an idea, or any less stupid, or anything like that. But perhaps it might go some way to explaining why it's happened? I suspect this level of tech illiteracy is likely to be a large part of the root problem at work here... and in many, many other similar cases.
(untitled comment)
Some self-published authors have gone completely free in the sale on at Smashwords right now. (Others have just gone with a reduction.) So a lot of little authors have signed up to do just that! I'd love to see more of the big companies actually doing something more like this, like you suggest. But I have little hope it will actually happen...
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Filaste.
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