Steve Saretsky

It's a pretty decent quid pro quo.

And the government was like, well, no, we still want to require this.

And they were, of course, being egged on by the media lobby to do so.

Meta, which owns Instagram, as well as Facebook, of course, said from the very beginning that news was not a particularly valuable form of content on their platform.

And if you think about social media, it's pretty obvious why.

That platform is all about getting people on the platform, keeping them there as long as possible so they can learn as much about them and serve up as many ads as possible.

Viewed in that light, news, where you click away from the site, is actually pretty terrible content.

So they said, well, we don't mind including links to news, but if you're going to force us to pay for linking to news, including, let's be clear, it is our users that are posting these links.

It's not us.

We're not indexing this.

We're not deciding what's there.

It's users that make these decisions.

Well, we're just going to stop linking altogether and legislation that.

is premised on making those that link to news pay for the privilege of linking to the news, of making it available.

They say, well, OK, fine.

We fall outside of legislation because we're not linking to it anymore.

That's that's in a nutshell why you still don't see news links, because the government sort of says we think you're bluffing.

They go ahead and pass the legislation.

Meta, through both Facebook and Instagram, cut off the news links, and we've remained in that space for now two and a half, nearly three years.

The other company that was targeted by all of this was Google.