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3:50 PM ET, February 18, 2021

Mediagazer

 Top News: 
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Banning Australian news makes sense for Facebook and may prompt people to visit news sites directly; Google's payoffs, though, will invite global shakedowns  —  Yesterday, I wrote that Australia's News Media Bargaining Code threatened to splinter the internet.
RELATED:
Damien Cave / New York Times:
Australia's concentrated media industry, dominated by News Corp, is aligned with the prime minister and has sought compensation from tech companies for years  —  Pathbreaking legislation showed that even a small nation can get the tech giant to bend.  But the United States seems unlikely to follow.
Benedict Evans:
Australia's proposal for media compensation, which covers raw link sharing, is presented as a competition case when it's actually a tech tax and media subsidy  —  Newspaper revenue really started to collapse well over a decade ago, and we've been discussing what to do about it for almost as long.
Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
Facebook's refusal to pay a misguided media tax, pushed by Rupert Murdoch, is a defense of the open web and criticizing it for rejecting a link tax is bizarre  —  None of this should have been a surprise.  Back in September we wrote about Facebook publicly saying that if Australia went forward …
Reuters and Associated Press:
Facebook says it generated ~5.1B free referrals to Australian publishers worth ~AU$407M last year, as Australia's Media Bargaining law passes the House  —  - Facebook will no longer allow people in Australia to read or share news  — The move is a response to the country's proposed Media Bargaining law
Campbell Brown / Facebook:
Facebook News Partnerships VP: Australia's planned law “fails to recognize ... the fundamental nature of the relationship between our platform and publishers”
Nicholas McElroy / ABC:
Australian authorities in public health, weather, and other areas say Facebook has removed posts from their feeds following Facebook's news ban
News Corp:
News Corp announces a multi-year, global partnership with Google to provide content from its news sites “in return for significant payments by Google”
William Easton / About Facebook:
Ahead of proposed media law, Facebook says it's banning Australians from sharing/viewing news and all users from sharing from and viewing Australian news Pages
Nicholas Quah / Vulture:
Hannah Murphy / Financial Times:
Court filing says a Facebook manager warned that the company reported revenues it “should have never made” by overstating how many users advertisers could reach  —  Lawsuit cites product executive's qualms over figures provided to advertisers  —  A Facebook employee warned …
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Recent deals like the iHeart Media's purchase of Triton Digital suggest that ad tech, not exclusive content, will be the key to long-term success in podcasting  —  iHeart Media acquires Triton Digital for $230 million  —  iHeartMedia, the company behind podcasts like Stuff You Should Know and hundreds …
Sean Burch / The Wrap:
Triller CEO says the company never inflated user numbers after a report said the app had half the 50M users it claimed  —  Triller on Wednesday denied it had severely inflated its monthly active user count in press releases, one day after Billboard reported the short-form video app …
 
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 More News: 
Manori Ravindran / Variety:
BBC Studios' streaming channel BBC Select launches today in the US on Amazon Prime and Apple TV for $4.99/month, with non-fiction culture and politics shows
Todd Spangler / Variety:
UFC signs partnership with TikTok, under which it will produce live content including interviews and training segments for the platform
Discussion: Engadget
Reuters:
Belarusian court sentences two journalists who filmed protests to two years in prison; they were accused of orchestrating the protests by filming them
Marc Tracy / New York Times:
Profile of Stewart Bainum, who set up a nonprofit to buy The Baltimore Sun; filing shows price of $65M for The Sun and other papers under nonbinding term sheet
 Earlier Picks: 
ProPublica:
ProPublica says Richard Tofel, its founding general manager and president since 2013, will retire from the company when a successor is found
Brian Flood / Fox News:
Rush Limbaugh has died at the age of 70 after a battle with lung cancer
 

 
From Techmeme:

Raffaele Huang / Wall Street Journal:
Apple removes WhatsApp, Threads, Signal, and Telegram from its App Store in China, after orders from the country's regulators citing national security concerns

Ryan Morrison / Tom's Guide:
Microsoft researchers introduce VASA-1, an AI model that can create a realistic talking face video from a portrait photo and an audio file, in research preview

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
Sources: EU may accept Apple's proposal to open its NFC payments tech to rivals, and may close its antitrust probe in May, letting Apple avoid hefty fines

 
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