Today’s links How to save the news from Big Tech: Four prescriptions from EFF. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading How to save the news from Big Tech (permalink) It’s no longer controversial to claim that Big Tech is a parasite on the news business. But there’s still a raging controversy over the nature of the parasitism, and, much more importantly, what to do about it. https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/18/stealing-money-not-content/#beyond-link-taxes This week on EFF’s Deeplinks blog, I kick off a new series on the abusive relationship between Big Tech and the news, analyzing four different dirty practices and proposing policy answers to all four: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech The context here is that various governments around the world have taken notice of the tech/news problem, and are chasing a counterproductive “solution” – the “link tax,” where tech firms are required to pay for the links and short snippets their users or news search-tools make to news-stories. In some cases, the “tax” is indirect: tech is required to negotiate a payment to make up for other misdeeds (like ripping publishers off with ad fraud). You can argue that this isn’t a link tax, it’s just pressure to bargain, but because these rules typically ban platforms from simply blocking publishers’ content if they can’t reach an agreement, they become link taxes: “You must carry links, and you must pay the sites you link to” isn’t meaningfully different from “You must…Pluralistic: How to save the news from Big Tech (18 May 2023)