Fri, Feb 26th 2021 7:39pm — Mike Masnick I've been somewhat amazed at the response to Facebook's decision in Australia to first block news links, in response to a dangerous new law, and then to cave in and cut deals with news organizations to pay for links. Most amazing to me is that otherwise reasonable people in Australia got very angry at me, insisting that I was misrepresenting the tax. They keep insisting it's not a tax, and that it's a "competition" response to "unfair bargaining power." Except, as I've discussed previously, there's nothing to bargain over when you should never have to pay for links. The links are free. There's no bargaining imbalance, because there's nothing to bargain over. And, it's clearly a tax if the only end result is that Google and Facebook have to fork over money because the government tells them to. That's... a tax.