I was drawn to a piece by media expert Nick Clegg, from Facebook, explaining how horrible Australia had been to his adopted platform. (Hat tip to James Cridland).
"It’s like forcing car makers to fund radio stations because people might listen to them in the car — and letting the stations set the price."
Let's set the analogy in terms which make better sense of Facebook's position. Facebook has invented a car without wheels, which is given away free to anyone who wants one. When seated in the car, passengers have access to aspects of the personal lives of most people in the world, and many now spend hours of every day in these vehicles poking around in the lives of others. In return, Facebook extracts deep personal details from each passenger, and analyses their daily habits and preferences; advertisers are entranced by these details, and have shifted major portions of their ad budgets to Facebook, who are thus skimming a margin out of nearly every product and service across the globe. Passengers in the motionless cars are not allowed to bring radios inside, but Facebook takes the output of radio stations it likes, strips them of advertising and most branding, chops them up into a Russian salad of audio, and gives that to the passengers.
I might rail against this business model if I was a radio station/newspaper owner.
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