Facebook should run like your cable company, Rupert Murdoch says. How would that even work?

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Rupert Murdoch — the Fox News founder and executive chairman of News Corp, which owns the Wall Street Journal — said that Facebook should support credible news organizations by paying them for their content. Beyond publishers receiving money for their content, it isn't clear how Murdoch envisions his cable analogy playing out on the Internet. 

To take a hypothetical example, charging Facebook for, say, News Corp content could elicit one of two responses from the social media company, analysts said. Either Facebook could refuse to pay and drop Murdoch's content from its platform — hurting a news outlet that depends far more on Facebook for traffic than the other way around — or Facebook could seek to pass along those content costs. Either way, the effects would likely have a harmful effect on the Internet as an open platform, said John Bergmayer, a tech policy lawyer at the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. “The idea that you have to pay a site to link to it undermines the entire purpose of the Web, and calling linking 'carriage' is either disingenuous or ignorant,” said Bergmayer. “If you don’t want to be linked to, don’t put stuff online, or put it behind a paywall.”


Facebook should run like your cable company, Rupert Murdoch says. How would that even work?