The rule is because of American monopolies and oligopolies. To have your news seen at all, you need to use major social media platforms or google. These platforms benefit from the news links, and the news has to fight to compete on those platforms, earning less and less revenue every year because the news is less engaging than flamebait. So the news gradually becomes flamebait to try to garner enough engagement to compete, otherwise the news stops existing, and next thing you know, investigative journalism is almost extinct.
This isn’t an ideal solution, it’s basically a subsidy that big tech is supposed to pay for, but there is a massive, massive! power imbalance where the platforms are the only winners, so it’s also not the worst rule ever. I don’t know. The overwhelming power imbalance of oligopoly platforms is a thing, I’m not sure what to do about it. The issue is bigger than just news, and this law only partially addresses one aspect of the situation
The issue of real journalism having to compete with sensationalist tabloids and clickbait is nothing new though. There was a time before all the blind rage turned against big tech when we actually found it problematic how much political influence media moguls like Murdoch, Berlusconi or Springer had accumulated.
Google and Facebook have syphoned off a lot of advertising income from these big publishers and they are leveraging their political clout to make politicians pass laws that have nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with serving the special interests of a few powerful publishers.
Yes the fact that too much money stays with Google and Facebook rather than funding serious journalism is a problem. But these laws are not supposed to fix that and they are not fixing it. It's just corruption.
This isn’t an ideal solution, it’s basically a subsidy that big tech is supposed to pay for, but there is a massive, massive! power imbalance where the platforms are the only winners, so it’s also not the worst rule ever. I don’t know. The overwhelming power imbalance of oligopoly platforms is a thing, I’m not sure what to do about it. The issue is bigger than just news, and this law only partially addresses one aspect of the situation