month. this is al jazeera. the united states has now reported more than half a million deaths from covid-19, by far the highest hole in the world. lights are at half-staff. president joe biden has commemorated the victims with a moment of silence. >> people be lost for extraordinary. -- people we lost were extraordinary. they spans generations. born in america. immigrated to america. just like that, so many of them took their final breath alone.

as a nation, we can't accept such a cool fate. -- cruel fate. we have to resist becoming numb to the sorrow. anchor: bells have been tolling 500 times in washington dc in memory of those killed during the pandemic. it has been a little over a year since america recorded its first death from the disease, more than 28 million people have been infected there since then. boris johnson's laid out his plan to lift pandemic restrictions. schools are due to reopen, and to people from separate households will be allowed to be outside starting march the eighth. an ebola vcination campaign in guinea is being delayed because of bad weather. on thursday the world health organization announced it was sending more than 11,000 doses, but the flight cannot and -- could not land because of heavy fog.

italy's ambassador to the democratic republic of congo have died after a year -- a convoy he was traveling in was ambushed. his bodyguard and driver were also killed. the government is blaming it on eight rebel group for the attack. iran's supreme leaders have warned it could boost enrichment up to 60%. it allows inspectors to continue monitoring to. there will be no more step inspections. those are the headlines. goodbye. ♪

anchor: facebook on friends australia. the tech giant blocks news. who will win this battle? how willt affect the way we view and share information online? this is inside story. ♪ anchor: welcome to the program. a battle about news content appearing online is pitting australia against two of the world biggest tech firms. news organizations argue the online companies are sharing their content but not giving them a slice of the advertising profits.

web companies dispute this. facebook blocked australians from viewing and sharing news articles from local and international outlets. pages for government agencies and emergency services we also taken down. they have since been restored. facebook says a proposed lot misunderstands its relationship with publishers. traffic to australian new sites dropped by 30%. the government is standing firm and says facebook appears willing to find a compromise. >> we want to work through this issue. i welcome the fact that they are engaging with the government as they should, and those actions were completely indefensible. we are no strangers to taking the lead on this, so i am pleased to have the strong international support that has come forward. but i am also pleased that facebook has decided it would friend us again and get those discussions going. anchor: google hedren to pull

out of australia if the law is passed. it has announced deals to future news content, reported to be worth $24 million a year. other countries are debating how to make big tech firms pay for journalism. in france, google lost an appeal to avoid paying news publishers for the content. they agreed on a copyright framework last month. facebook announce lt year that it would pay u.s. news organizations including the wall street journal and washington post to future headlines. in spain, google shut down its news website after a 2014 lower already to pay publishers. canada is bowing to be the next country to follow australia's lead, the government sent it will put forth similar ledges -- legislation this year. let's bring our guests now. julie a global director of research.

in washington, d.c., and advocacy director. in the netherlands, an assistant professor in private law. . and comanager. facebook still arguing this out, and the outcome will have global implications. scott morrison said that facebook's action was indefensible. but was it? isn't facebook right when they say they help news organizations get new subscribers and help drive revenue? >> yes, facebook is right when it says that. certainly, the discoverability of news on facebook is really important to a range of his organizations, not least of all, small news organizations that do not have the same ability to pay for distribution.

we have actually seen a reaction by community broadcasting and first nations media in australia to this decision, because it is really negatively impacting their ability to be seen on the platform and reach their audiences. we have seen an impact throughout the region as australia is a really important new source for other countries in the region that have much smaller news industries. we are seeing a pretty big ripple effect. anchor: what are your thoughts about this? do you think facebook's action was indefensible? >> i think it was reckless, indefensible, and highly demonstrative of a failed pr campaign, despite the fact that public relations in the spaces probably facebook's greatest forte, historically, in terms of trying to forge relationships with journalism. i am australian as you can hear. i was a politica reporter with

the abc for many years become reporting and academic. i am not monitoring this globally, with a real concerns about the implications for freedom of expression and access to information on two fronts. what i call platform capture is in full display here. this is the process whereby news organizations and a whole range of other public interest information groups have been sucked into facebook under the encouragement of facebook's operating systems, and also, sometimes with enticement. some of the funding that is funneled into journalism is used to train journalts specifically how to use the tools. this capture also extends to news organizations becoming young codependent -- beyond codependent on a platform facebook, as courtney points out , has become a really fundamental facet of the weight independent journalism has

operated. to cut off access of information was extremely high-risk as a strategy. this happened in australia the week that vaccinations were supposed to be rolled out. as you mentioned, health websites, domestic violence call centers, facebook pages were blockaded. and so in fact with a deep stke of irony, let's facebook's own corporate page. that was some massive shooting in the foot. really, you encouraged an ecosystem, facebook did, where people are depending on your network for information. you use free speech as a defense against regulation and gets respond as -- to regulate arguably in the defensive.

anchor: do you wonder why facebook are so pleased -- peeved at this law? they have acknowledge themselves that news only represents a small share. why do they worry about this? why don't they just pay up and be done with it? >> i think it is just to agree with what the other guests were mentioning, just a very bad pr campaign. generally speaking, i believe the australian ill is a very nominal piece of legislation. it really redoes the balance between smaller news organizations and smaller players, and is very large tech companies, which are really not dominating the way information is being accessed by billions of users. what i find particularly interesting is that, as you were mentioning earlier, news is only a part of the type of speech they would find on these platform, especially social

media platforms. and what was really striking, just to identify these streams of content that come together in the melting pot which is a users newsfeed. we see platforms are now bringing together social commerce, political speech, social speech, news, and all of this is done without any kind of labels. i personally, very much admired the initiative of the australian legislator to try and put some labels on, ok, these are news. we are going to treat them like this. anchor: isn't it right to say that facebook is more useful to news organization them the other way around? >> i agree with that, partially.

what kind of revenue does a social media platform eight from news organizations? i would also like to ask yourself. what exactly is a news organization? what we see on social media, this does not necessarily apply to google because it is a different site -- type of platform. but on social media platforms, we have a lot of content creation. in this content creation could very well fall under this idea of becoming a news organization, orap is producing news. i think it is very important to really reflect on what exactly do we mean by news? even in the bill itself, the definition, i think this is one of them are critical points i have seen around, that the definition of news is quite over encompassing. i think this also led to the very unfortunate overhaul of news content from all feeds from

australian facebook users. anchor: things have changed completely. they need cash, badly. advertising has dried up. how serious is that situation in australia as far as publishers are concerned? >> very serious. some of the outlets that have closed during the pandemic, is a butchers are facing the further collapse of advertising revenue. it has left cities, swath of towns without independent outlets, apart from the national broadcast which is also being guarded by the same government who is trying to funnel funds through these mechanisms. australia has very poor levels of media diversity. it is often referred to as a

murdocracy. it is fair to argue that these laws and leglation will privilege the murdoch press which is in alignment politically with the australian conservative government. i am saying all this to give you ample context for understanding, that despite this, it is still fundamentally important that the government propose ways to try and ensure that appropriate investment is made in journalism. it is all very well to say journalism benefits more from facebook than facebook does from journalism. but facebook and other tech giants have really upended the information ecosystem, with really devastating effects for democracy and parts of the world, as well as news organizations. there has to be a reset. it is not just about economics in the sense of what is the value of x compared to wide. there is a moral and ethical responsibility to support public interest journalism, which has

collapsed partly as a result of google and facebook sucking up 80% of digital advertising in australia. anchor: i am going to come to courtney in a second. the problem with this law as you have a knowledge -- acknowledged . news corporation, fairfax, they stand to benefit from this. but while the smaller sectors will go to the wall, what they? >> not necessarily. google is promising agreements to some of the smaller publishers. this points to two things. one is to acknowledge, which have not really come up this debate properly yet, the real problem of disinformation in an environment where doors organizations are pulled out.

the second is to suggest that there needs to be some kind of mechanism, some kind of independent authority. something with a funding capacity which can make decisions at arms length about where to invest this money collected. i think that is the piece that we are missing, i hope that is where we had. anchor: this issue of disinformation is a big issue, a big problem. is the australian government dealing with that? >> i think we are going to have to see. i want to push back on this idea that the only way we should evaluate whether facebook brings value to news is through an economic analysis. the fact is, if you look at facebook statements and reactions to disinformation, the rise of fake news, harassment, all of these issues, is to try

and entice journalists and news organizations to use their platform, train them. they are spending millions of dollars, a tiny drop in the revenue bucket, to support the journalistic initiatives that they feel like they want to support, because it improves the information environment on their platform. i have had dozens of discussions with company representatives at a million different forms. i am talking about a healthy environment. independent, real news. there is a greater value for the platform then is simply captured and looking at traffic numbers or how much revenue one brings to the other. i think that this point about disinformation is ridiculous. in the midst of what the u.n. is calling a dis-infodemic around the pandemic, to democratic governance, that you would have

a major, dominant platform for sharing information, both news and rumor, decide to kick off australian news. to not allow that to circulate. that seems to fly in the face of what they are trying to find as a solution. we have to recognize that the status quo is not the right way for things to be. i think legislators experimenting with ways to rebalance power in the media ecosystem is really important. but i would also urge them to get down into the fundamental business models that have made it nearly impossible for mainstream media and much less independent or community media to compete with these platforms. they have an overwhelming monopoly on the digital advertising market, which is how our digital economy functions. regulators need to look more broadly at the type of economy,

the data fixation,. . monetization of data targeting individuals. all of this upon which the modern economy is based, in which the information environment is existing. sure, people can go in and type a url into their browser. but that is not how we work anymore. we are in an information ecosystem. anchor: this issue of disinformation. to a sense it is nothing new. murdoch's has been doing it. >> just to build on some of the things that were said earlier. misinformation and disinformation are some very important drawbacks of the situation that journalism faces nowadays. i would also like to say to a

certain extent, i completely agree, i think julie mentioned this earlier. there needs to be more public funding that needs to be pumped into journalism, because at the end of the day, all this money -- we are talking about advertising, it is to come from somewhere. anchor: that public money could come from charging the platforms. >> it could come from charging platforms. or another model is just revisit the failed business model of actually asking citizens to pay for the news as they might have done and other iterations of media. now the idea that a user, a consumer has a free contract with facebook, has just created his narrative that there is a free access to information. in spite of the fact that a lot of industries need more funding. this has been the status quo.

going back to disinformation, what we see right now on social media, the idea of having a ban on news. i think courtney was missing this earlier. having this in the middle of the pandemic, you can see how social media influencers are really the only opinions and voices that remain on such a platform. they have been vehicles of misinformation. dislikes back to the idea that we need to really consider exactly what the definition of news is because there are so many, new, small companies that right now offer content, which traditionally would not qualify as news, which does not have the same editorial format as journalism, but which is spread very widely on social media platforms. that is a problem. anchor: in this era. >> was just going to say, i think it is important to note in discussing the disinformation factor here, that we can take

from this that facebook is acting exceptionally quickly. during the pandemic, during the alleged genocide in places like myanmar, during the transformation of the philippines into a teetering democracy,, all of which has been tied up with facebook spiral power, they were so slow to act. even in the course of publishing a major report for the u.n. last year about freedom of expression challenges connected to disinformation, which i co-authored, we were struggling to get facebook to explain why they were taking more time to do x and y, and they were arguments back and forth and trying to clarify information that took months. yet, overnight they would blockade independent journalism on their own platform, in a country in the middle of the pandemic. i can't underline that enough.

that fundamentally needs to be part of the conversation. there is a need for regulation and, accountability and transparency that at the moment this company in particular facebook, just does not want to engage in. anchor: what model in your view would provide that regulation and that transparency? >> i actually wanted to build on this. i think the australian bill has a very good model and disrespect, because what it does, and this is exactly why facebook is acting up so dramatically, because what this bill does, it creates a framework for platforms to negotiate. the bill says, the status to create this framework for negotiation. if you don't agree on negotiating with news corporation's, then there is

even arbitration that is mandated under this bill. platforms are thinking right now, while, our freedom of contract is severely endangered because the state is telling us how to conduct our negotiations. what exactly will happen if we don't agree to pay? i think this is the source part -- sore spot. anchor: in this era where big tech can effectively control news consumption, and platforms control the access of the audience. what is the best model for rectifying this? >> i think we need to go back to core principles of independent media, media freedom, which includes pluralism. not just pluralism and the

choice of alice, -- choice of outlets, but what the funding levels are. in terms of how the news is gathered. you need a lot of different core principles, because if you don't have different choices, you end up having a monopoly or one way to get information. for example, in the philippines and myanmar. many people think that facebook is the internet. in many countries you have subsidized access to facebook. that is the only way that people are getting their news. we need to look at encouraging pluralism. we also need to have regulators think about how they can actually mandate transparency. part of what we are going to need to know after this law is implement it, is what is the impact on news organizations and on facebook traffic?

if we had better data from the platforms, we could make better regulatory decisions. i think we need to get a lot more sophisticated in terms of how we do this, and make sure when the slide is implemented, there are firewalls between the government and decisions about what is included as news media. having independent arbiters and decision-makers. otherwise you don't want the government choosing winners and losers. anchor: i just wanted to leave we have about 50 seconds. how will the news landscape look into decades time? >> radically different. if we cannot figure out how to support critical, independent journalism that holds power to account, but we have learned over the past decade of allowing the wild west ecosystem to evolve, is that access to reliable information will be extreme and difficult.

and, our ability to rely on information that is accurate and factual will be extremely problematic. it is really urgent that we put human rights in the form of press freedom and access to information at the core of what we are doing. be mindful that we do not cede authority to dictatorial regimes . international protocols to ensure that we can maintain this kind of information environment, or at least return to it. anchor: it's going to be a radically different environment. that is all we have time for. thank you to all of our guests. thank you for watching. you can see this program again any time by visiting our website, al jazeera.com. for further discussion go to our facebook page.

you can also join the conversation on twitter. @ajinsidestory. for me and the entire team, goodbye for now.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ eric campbell: flying insects, by definition, get around. along forests, over fields, and if they're lucky, through insecticides, but for decades people have had