Being taken for a ride

Your neighbour Nick wants to borrow your rideon lawnmower. Again.

It’s a pretty good mower. You take care of it, make sure it’s stored properly in the garage all winter, even get the blade sharpened in spring. You keep it well tuned, gassed up, and you smile a bit when it starts up, every time, on the very first try.

But then your new neighbour knocks on the door. He asks if he can borrow it: “We don’t have a mower yet, and I wouldn’t want to bring the look of the neighbourhood down.”

So you lend it to him. And lend it again. It doesn’t look like he’s ever getting a mower.

It always comes back empty, and that’s costing you money. Sometimes, you can’t even seem to reach your neighbour when your own yard’s looking ratty. He’s getting more use from your mower than you do.

Then, one day, you see your mower heading down the street in a trailer behind your neighbour’s pickup. On the side of the pickup, a magnetic sign: “Nick’s Expert Lawn Service.” Nick the neighbour looks out the side window at you, waves, gives the horn a little toot.

As soon as you stop seeing the pickup (and your mower), you start to see red.

Later, you get ready to confront him about it. Before you can, he shows up at your door: “Listen, about the mower…” you start. But he interrupts. “Hey, neighbour, things are going great. I made $400 already this week — but maybe you should give the old beast a bit of a going-over tonight. It’s making a funny noise. I can stop by to get it in the morning.”

Now, imagine your neighbour is Facebook or Google.

For years, those companies have been reaping the lion’s share of revenues on journalism advertising — which is remarkable for companies that don’t actually employ any journalists or cover anything.

What they do is deliver news and content made by others on their platforms, use their own advertising and keep the money. (Kind of like selling apples at the market that you steal from other peoples’ trees.)

For the tech giants, it’s been a cash cow. Australia is now putting mandatory rules in place to ensure that tech companies share the money they make from ads on the media’s work — and stop techniques that throttle or redirect business for their own benefit. France is also launching new rules to force tech companies to pay for what they “borrow.”

Canada’s federal government is pondering similar rules, but they can’t just keep pondering — Big Tech is milking the cows dry, and not bothering with troublesome details like feeding them or mucking out the barns.

Pay for what you use. It’s only fair.

Right, Nick?