Governments are currently obsessed with the idea that Google, Meta, and TikTok are "stealing" news. The narrative is as predictable as it is flawed: tech giants scrape content, profit from the hard work of journalists, and leave local newsrooms to rot in the digital gutter. To fix this, regulators want to impose a "link tax" or forced payment schemes.
They have it backward.
The proposal to tax Big Tech for the privilege of sending traffic to news sites isn't just bad economics—it’s a suicide pact for the media industry. If you think forcing a platform to pay for a hyperlink is "saving journalism," you don't understand how the internet works, and you certainly don't understand how power is actually brokered in the digital age.
The Traffic Fallacy: Who Is Sending Whom the Favor?
The core argument for these taxes rests on the "theft" of value. Regulators claim that when a platform displays a snippet or a link, they are cannibalizing the publisher’s audience.
I’ve spent fifteen years watching media executives beg for SEO juice and social virality. I’ve seen newsrooms pivot to video, pivot to "voice," and pivot to whatever flavor-of-the-month algorithm Google serves up. Why? Because the platforms provide the audience. Without the referral traffic from search and social, most local news sites would be ghost towns within forty-eight hours.
The industry is demanding to be paid for receiving a gift.
In any other sector, this would be laughable. Imagine a restaurant suing a billboard company because people saw the sign and decided to eat there. Or a shopping mall demanding a cut of a store’s profits because the mall provided the parking lot and the foot traffic. By demanding payment for links, publishers are essentially trying to charge the platforms for providing them with customers.
The Subsidy Trap for Legacy Dinosaurs
The biggest winners of these link taxes aren't the scrappy investigative startups or the local reporters covering city hall. The winners are the massive media conglomerates that have failed to innovate for two decades.
These taxes act as a protectionist subsidy for companies that refused to adapt to the internet. Instead of building better products, they are lobbying the government to extract "rent" from the companies that actually built something people want to use.
When you force a platform like Meta or TikTok to pay a flat fee or a tax to host links, you create a barrier to entry. Meta’s response in Canada and Australia was a cold, logical calculation: they simply pulled news off the platform. They realized that news accounts for a tiny fraction of user engagement—less than 3% in most cases. Meta doesn't need news. News needs Meta.
By pushing these laws, media outlets are handing Big Tech a perfect excuse to exit the news business entirely. When the platforms stop carrying the links, the traffic vanishes. When the traffic vanishes, the ad revenue dies. The "solution" ends up being the executioner.
The Algorithmic Death Spiral
Let’s look at the actual mechanics of how this plays out in the code. If a platform has to pay to host a link from "Brand A" but doesn't have to pay to host a link from a random blogger or a creator, which one do you think the algorithm will prioritize?
- Cost of Content: If every news link costs $0.05 in tax, the platform is incentivized to suppress that content.
- Replacement Strategy: Users don't go to TikTok for the New York Times. They go for entertainment. If news becomes a liability, platforms will simply fill the feed with more lifestyle content, cat videos, and influencer drama.
- Information Deserts: By making professional journalism a taxable expense, regulators are effectively subsidizing misinformation. Conspiracy theorists and "independent" agitators don't demand link taxes. Their content is free for the platform to distribute.
We are literally legislating a world where the truth is expensive to share and lies are free.
The False Promise of "Fair Compensation"
Proponents point to the Australian News Media Bargaining Code as a success. They claim it brought in millions of dollars. What they don't tell you is where that money went.
It didn't go to hiring more beat reporters in rural towns. It went into the general coffers of the largest media players—the ones with the best lobbyists. It’s a transfer of wealth from one set of billionaires to another. It does nothing to solve the underlying problem: the media’s business model is broken because it relied on a local advertising monopoly that the internet destroyed.
The "fairness" being discussed is a myth.
- Misconception: Big Tech "scrapes" and "steals" content.
- Reality: Search engines use robots.txt. If a publisher didn't want to be in the index, they could opt out with one line of code. They don't, because they crave the traffic.
- Misconception: A tax will fund local journalism.
- Reality: A tax will fund the legal and administrative departments of massive corporations while making it harder for new, digital-native outlets to compete.
The TikTok Exception
Including TikTok in this tax is particularly absurd. TikTok is not a news aggregator; it is a discovery engine. Journalists use TikTok to build their personal brands and drive interest in their stories.
By targeting TikTok, regulators are admitting that this isn't about the "value of news." It’s about a desperate cash grab. They see a company with high margins and want a piece of it. It’s not a policy; it’s a shakedown. And like most shakedowns, it eventually hurts the people it was supposed to protect. When TikTok or Meta decides that the headache of compliance outweighs the value of the news vertical, they will simply turn the faucet off.
The Hard Truth: Journalism Needs to Be a Business, Not a Charity
If a news organization cannot survive without a government-mandated handout from a competitor, it is not a viable business. That sounds harsh because it is.
The obsession with taxing Big Tech is a distraction from the real work: building subscription models that people actually want to pay for, creating niche content that can't be replicated by an AI summary, and finding ways to deliver value that doesn't depend on a third-party algorithm.
By begging for these taxes, the media industry is admitting it has lost the war for attention. It is asking the government to force its "enemies" to buy it a life jacket. But here is the problem with life jackets: they keep you from drowning, but they don't help you swim. They just keep you bobbing in the water until the sharks arrive or you die of exposure.
The "link tax" is a move of pure desperation. It signals to the market that news is a liability, not an asset. It tells investors that the only way for media to survive is through regulatory capture rather than innovation.
Stop trying to tax the platforms that saved your distribution. Start building something that the platforms can't afford to ignore.
The era of the "free ride" on Big Tech’s infrastructure is over, but the media industry is the one that’s been riding for free, not the other way around. If you want to save journalism, stop looking for a payout and start looking for a product.
Burn the subsidies. Kill the tax. Let the market decide who deserves to be read.
