I think you’re ignoring that there is a path to getting to users/customers for many types of products like news, which are the tightly controlled platforms of giant tech companies (Google, Meta, etc), and there isn’t viability for products like news unless they play ball with these big tech companies. It’s not that they haven’t monetized effectively, but rather that there are gatekeepers in the way with no real competition, who can steal your margin by showing part of your news story. All of this is really a classic problem of anti-trust, and what a monopoly is today is different from the past but we haven’t acknowledged this properly in my view.
If that's true (and I agree that it is), then charging for links is going to make it even worse and effectively cement that reality for all time. How is a startup who can't afford to pay employees, let alone publishers, supposed to come by and provide some alternative?
Possibly perhaps, the big publishers (with deep pockets and lobbyists) really like this approach because despite entrenching big tech, it erects formidable barriers to entry for new upstart competitors to them? Regulatory capture is a tried and true tactic for industries that reach a certain size.
IMHO society is a lot better off trying to prevent summarization efforts (that eliminate the need for the user to visit the page) than they are trying to charge for links. The latter is something that benefits everyone regardless of size. I'm not necessarily in favor of doing that either (would need to think it through a lot more, because it would essentially legislate a worse user experience, which is not something to be done without serious deliberation), but it seems like a much more relevant fight to have and one that isn't so self-serving.
The proposed California law is written so that it basically only applies to Google and other social media giants. You need to have 50M+ monthly users, or be owned by someone with either a market cap of $550B+ or 1B+ monthly users.
So, at least in theory, some nimble startup could come in and have a lasting advantage against the big existing platforms until they got big enough that they could handle dealing with the regulations.
I do have mixed feelings about the recent laws written like this. It feels like if it's important that we pay news publishers, that should apply to everyone.
