Daily Archives: February 20, 2021

Some commentators reckon Facebook has called Australias bluff. They may be about to discover that Australia isnt bluffing.

The platforms own irresponsible and chaotic implementation of its Australian news ban appears to have rallied the country citizens and politicians from across the aisles and governments from around the world, to support the Australian governments resolve.

As a former chief executive of Facebook in Australia and New Zealand, Stephen Scheeler, wrote in the Nine newspapers, the company has taken an enormous gamble, betting that by taking an aggressive hard line with a middle power, such as Australia, a tough message will be sent to the rest of the world to back off on regulation.

But, as he says, there is an alternative scenario. When you pull a governments pants down in front of the world, you leave it little option but to dig in. When you vandalise 13 million citizens news feeds as a bargaining chip, you raise the stakes ... So witnessing a standoff between Australia and Facebook could be the catalyst for genuine global reform. It could be that future historians of the internet come to see this decision as the moment the world sat up and started to take serious action on making Big Tech accountable to society.

So far, that second scenario is playing out.

Its hard to think of a better way for a platform to anger a nation and destroy whats left of its own reputation than to block health and hospital sites in a pandemic, emergency service sites in a state that recently battled bushfires and the sites of innumerable welfare groups, charities and community organisations, all in a bid to avoid making payments under a new media bargaining code that aims to address the power imbalance between media companies and the big tech platforms.

Its hard to think of how to look more like an arrogant international monopoly not taking a country and its proposed laws seriously than to implement a ban with no warning and in such a ham-fisted way that a radio station could get its page back up by listing itself as a gift shop and users could still post news articles if they were posted as a link to a tweet. This is a company so sure of its capacity to bully that it was prepared to push the big destroy news in Australia button apparently without spending even a moment thinking through the consequences.

It didnt take long for comparisons to be made about how easy it had been for Facebook to shut down real, factual news and how difficult it had claimed the task of shutting down fake news and misinformation, or even shutting off the livestream of a massacre, or for questions to be asked about how a company that is supposed to be all about connecting the world could so blithely disconnect factual news from an entire nation, leaving the top-performing links to news-adjacent comedy sites and satire.

Facebooks response, that the breadth of its ban was due to the definition of news in the proposed code, makes no sense since the code is not yet law, and the company immediately began reversing some of the blocks as they were publicised by outraged users.

So far it has succeeded in strengthening the governments resolve. The prime minister says, pointedly, that threats are not a good way to deal with his government.

Google, the other media giant that faced being forced into negotiation and arbitration with news companies under the code, found a workaround.

In order to avoid setting the legal precedent of paying for news appearing in search, it has done deals of similar magnitude with Australian media companies large and small for stories to appear in its Showcase service. The government has achieved its aim of getting the platform to pay the news companies, and Google has avoided the precedent. The government retains the ability to activate the letter of the law and force payment for news appearing in search at any time in the future, as a means of ensuring the voluntary deals are not eroded over time, or denied to smaller and mid-sized publishers once the needs of the big end of town are met.

It is true that this arrangement, arrived at via the power of competition law, to even up the playing field between news companies and the powerful monopoly platforms that they cannot avoid doing business with, does not address the problem of concentration of media ownership in Australia.

But even if you hold deep concerns about that issue, as I do (it was one of the reasons we established Guardian Australia eight years ago) and even if you believe firmly that the government should act to increase media diversity, as I also do, it doesnt take too much thought to understand the danger of setting a precedent where a government uses competition law to decide which individual publishers it wants to favour and which it does not.

News Corps lobbying probably did help convince the Australian government to act on the competition regulators recommendations, and News Corp as the dominant news publisher in the country will reap substantial benefits from the code applied proportionately across the Australian publishing landscape. That is an uncomfortable reality that has caused some commentators to make the bizarre suggestion that other Australian publishers should render themselves less competitive by rejecting Googles offers, a strange idea that could only exacerbate the problem.

Writing on Medium and on the small Australian website Crikey, which was one of the very first Australian publishers to sign a Showcase deal with Google, US academic Jeff Jarvis argues Guardian Australia fell in league with the devil [News Corp] by seeking to negotiate exactly the same kind of agreement with Google as the company publishing him and most other media companies in Australia. He also claims Googles payments will not benefit journalism. He provides no evidence for this assertion, but if hes right it would be uncovered by the review to be conducted by Treasury at the end of the first year of the codes operation. Under Guardian Australias business model (we have no shareholders and operate solely to provide journalism) theres actually nothing else to spend it on.

As for Facebook, it now faces two choices. It could do deals in a similar way to Google, either voluntarily or through the formal negotiation and arbitration processes under the law, or it could stay out of Australia.

Facebook argues that journalism has a minimal upside for its business, that only about 4% of the content its users see is on their news feed. Under the logic of the code, that means it could expect to make much smaller payments than those being made by Google.

A continuing Facebook news ban does raise concerns, especially for small community news hubs, First Nations news services, or youth oriented or regional news services the kinds of sites highly dependent on Facebook. But it also highlights the dangers for them of being too reliant on a third party that is prepared to pull the plug overnight, without warning. Some of those organisations are already thinking about how they go back to basics and diversify the way they distribute their work. Should Facebook stay out, theres a strong argument for the government to help them.

Facebooks gamble is that Australia wont be able to live without it. Imagine the consequences if we prove that we can.

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Facebook is gambling Australia can't live without it. Imagine if we prove it wrong - The Guardian

Late in his life, W.C. Fields, bibulous gambler, was spotted reading, of all things, the Bible. An astonished friend asked why.

Without looking up, Fields muttered, Looking for loopholes.

That brings us to the self-destructive gambler and curious specimen, Craig Carton. Understand that compulsive gamblers have severe self-delusion in common. After weekly settling their debts with bookies, they sit at a red light in their overly financed cars, relieved and self-satisfied, telling themselves, Now Im even.

Cartons Saturday morning show on life-destroying gambling, heard over gambling revenue-reliant and invested WFAN, is surprisingly good and highly worthwhile, though Carton, the rest of the week, endeavors to prove he isnt worth any intelligent listeners short while.

For starters, on Saturdays hes a good listener. This past Saturday he allowed a recovering addict, Drew, to tell his story with Carton interrupting only to ask good questions.

On Saturdays he works clean, no sense that hes eager to reestablish his pre-prison popularity among creeps by being the stations crude, name-calling, scatological, defamatory Master Creep.

Despite (or because) working clean on Saturdays he has been entertaining, an interesting raconteur with a serious message he doesnt wield as a cudgel.

Drew, a Gamblers Anonymous member who juggled credit card debt the worst kind short of blackmail until he could no longer answer his wife with anything stronger than conspicuous lies as to what happened to their lives.

To that Carton added a Ralph and Alice Kramden farce: the time he thought hed verbally settled a debt with an A.C. casino collections agent he had the cash and, they agreed, he would come down to make good in two days. They agreed. He even challenged his wife to listen in on a second confirmation call so she could share that truth.

But then the agent told them that, no, Carton still officially had unpaid markers. Busted. And she was done believing him that it was someone elses error or fault. Its said that unlike alcoholism, you cant smell compulsive gambling. But wives can.

Carton was just another pampered high roller who lost his casinos love and VIP status to become a no-more-comps pariah because he defaulted on his credit.

Joined by Dan Trolaro of the N.J. Council on Compulsive Gambling, Cartons Saturday shows have two consistent missions:

To let people know, especially at a time when sucker sports gambling and no longer the love of sports is being shoved down their senses, that no one falls alone. Hardly.

And the only gambling system that has proven effective is to seek and sustain help. For all the bad-odds parlays WFAN pitches, Saturdays Carton show is the only one that doesnt promise to make it rain anything better than the plagues, Misery and Regret.

Saturday mornings at 9:30, Carton throws a changeup. Conditioned to success by going low, he travels a high road. His enabling, helicopter service to Atlantic City has been canceled. His federal serial number and those mug shots arent worth a spin at a penny slot machine.

Recidivism among problem gamblers is high. Arnie Wexler, a living saint for his 45 years of successfully counseling rock-bottomed gamblers, tells us that many who give heartfelt personal testimony at G.A. meetings are still plunging.

Thus time should tell if Cartons has gone straight or whether his Saturday show is an exercise in leafing for loopholes. He doesnt like me and I dont like him. But Im rooting for him.

Without the TV stars of golf Rory, Tiger, Phil to make event coverage into Access Hollywood, those who used to tune to watch golf among those in the lead or closest to it, were left to cool their Footjoys.

Thats why Sundays final round of the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, sans Ams, on CBS was good on the golf senses. No names to endlessly gush over, no transparent messing around with the leader board to place the bigger names ahead of lesser names despite identical scores.

In fact, Sunday CBS was forced to cover nine players down the stretch. Aside from Jordan Spieth, CBS was stuck with the likes of winner Daniel Berger, Nate Lashley and Maverick McNealy.

The upside: genuine coverage.

I often wonder if ESPNs top executives ever take even five minutes to reflect on how bona fide sports fans feel about what the network has so purposefully become.

Put it this way: Within 24 hours of the reported latest arrest of career person of interest Adam Pacman Jones, this time accused of having kicked a bouncer unconscious (which he denies), more than a dozen emails arrived suggesting the Jones would fit perfectly with those ESPN regularly rewards with on-air employment.

Pacmans traveling team in Vegas for the 2007 NBA All-Star Game left two strip club bouncers shot, one paralyzed, according to the police. Despite an $11 million civil court judgment against him, Jones has insisted on his innocence.

This weeks arrest is different from Jones previous collars in that he no longer has pandering Roger Goodell to quietly and lightly punish him before allowing him to return to NFL teams for whom he again can cost dearly for remorselessly brutal, illegal play. Those teams deserved what he provided.

But Id suggest that a real-deal NFL steward years ago would have gone on record stating that he plans to do all he can to keep Jones out of the league so Jones could no longer feed the leagues disrepute.

In an exchange with reader Steve DeCillis about the 3-point shot having turned NBA games into heave n hope sideshows, we reached this junction: Would Wilt Chamberlain today even be relevant or just another stand-around guy? DeCillis: Would Wilt shoot 3s under-handed?

The pride of UConn stomps on: As seen but not heard never! on SNY, Wednesday, Geno The Impaler Auriemmas women needlessly humiliated St. Johns, 77-32. Two UConn starters played 34 or more minutes. UConn subs? One played four minutes, another for two.

Nothing like raucous laughter over the antics of drunks who arent funny. I agree with the daughter of the designer of the NFLs Super Bowl champs Vince Lombardi Trophy: The yacht-tossing of the trophy as entrusted to an apparently inebriated Tom Brady was disrespectful and childish.

College basketball continues to destroy itself from the inside out. Sunday on ESPN2, the last 12 seconds of overtime in Loyola-Chicago at Drake included three timeouts plus five other clock stops. Twelve seconds, eight stops!

Unaccomplished 6-foot-9 Duke freshman Jalen Johnson is bolting for the NBA after less that one season. When will all the hollow, habitual praise for Mike Krzyzewski as extra special be replaced by reality? Duke is the latest Kentucky.

Due to revisionist social justice pressures, Roger Goodells alma mater, Washington & Jefferson, this week will be renamed &.

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Craig Carton's other WFAN show is surprisingly good - New York Post