If the news orgs feel they have something of value, shouldn't they welcome this move, as it will hurt Facebook?
They are asking for payment for their service. Presumably Facebook will lose more value from this than what they are being asked to pay, otherwise why pay?
They're tipping their hand here. They know that what they have is not as valuable as what they're asking for it, otherwise Facebook wouldn't be willing to give up that value.
Yes, that's been a big hole in their argument from day one. They tried to avoid this by putting in provision to not let Facebook/Google just block Australian news material or just the ones that qualify for payment, but didn't think they would go this far of not letting anybody in Australia post any news.
The other point is that the news sources could easily use robots.txt and other methods to completely cut off Facebook and Google from scraping their content. If their content was as valuable to Facebook and Google as they say it is, a few players organising a boycott and cutting them off for a bit would be a very powerful bargaining tool. Or if they just felt the content was being misused, they could just block them on principal. But they don't do either. Why not, if it's so valuable to Google and Facebook?
Publishers put up their website because they want people to go to it. They get ad impressions, subscriptions, sales for affiliate links or wine club memberships or whatever their business model is.
That said, I don't agree with the grandparent. In my view it's clearly win-win, and neither direction obviously benefits more than the other to me. "Free" seems like a fair compromise unless the news sites start blocking Facebook traffic, because the friction of agreeing on and setting up payment is costly.
They are asking for payment for their service. Presumably Facebook will lose more value from this than what they are being asked to pay, otherwise why pay?
They're tipping their hand here. They know that what they have is not as valuable as what they're asking for it, otherwise Facebook wouldn't be willing to give up that value.