Google has been busy making major deals with news organisations. Facebook has chosen the opposite track. The problem Facebook has is government in Australia is wildly popular because of the pandemic. They can do what they want right now it won't lose them any votes. Ministers are already telling Facebook to leave the country completely!
I would not call the federal government “wildly popular”. Most people are (rightly, IMO) laying our pandemic success at the feet of state politicians and realising that the federal level had been ineffective at best.
Australia does have competitive federalism, and so many of the localised decisions have been from the states, but the major decisions for seeding - closing borders, acquiring vaccines, etc, along with fiscal backstopping - are federal.
The federal government (under ScoMo) has never polled so well as it has during covid, and for good reason.
(NB: I am no blind Coalition supporter, but they have made decisions which are very popular, and no amount of directing attention to the states would absolve them from blame if we had a situation more like Europe or the US.)
The United States has land borders with two countries: Canada and Mexico. However these are NOT considered to be major sources of Covid infection in the U.S.--instead it has been China and Europe. The U.S. could have set up controls eliminating people movement by air as easily as Australia did--but it failed to do so.
This is an artefact of bad testing in non-developed countries.
You should assume it's ten or twenty times worse than the figures show, AT LEAST, in any countries that aren't fully transparent and rich enough to test widely.
Facebook and Google have not taken opposite tracks; Google hasn't made deals to pay for linking, a major problem with the legislation. Google's deals are around news content, but FB lacks comparable products to negotiate deals around, leaving them with only a refusal to pay for linking.
Yup, and given that we have largely managed the pandemic extremely well as a society with a competent government that has a publicly funded health care system, I think it's unlikely that Facebook preventing us from reading the news via Facebook is much of a concern.
We were a large consumer of news before Facebook. We will be a large consumer of news after Facebook.
