It's been only 6 days since the news that Facebook page owners will now be held responsible for Facebook's data protection breaches, and already the EU strikes again:
Link Tax
Imagine you’re sharing a link with a preview (like the one below) and next you’ll receive a bill for that: “Link Tax”. Yap, that’s what the EU is proposing.
Bots and web crawlers will spy and invoice us or delete our content before it’s being seen. This the height of censorship and the end of freedom of speech.
This is what a link tax will mean:
The link tax is a proposal to apply a new copyright to the snippets of text that automatically accompany news links. It will mean licensing fees and unaffordable contracts for sites that share news.
Imagine your favourite websites are stripped of links, or forced out of business because they can’t afford the hyperlink fees. The web as we know it will be taken away.
The Link Tax will also stifle innovation and ensure the dominance of entrenched players, to the detriment of smaller publishers and smaller news sites. Only major websites will be able to pay these fees and only major news sites will get linked to.
But there is a bright side
There always is one. Even if it's invisible in the dark. (
I believe that every single one of these strikes is also a nail in the coffin of the old centralized paradigm. It's a last attempt to stay in power. It's the final roar of the beast.
Because every single one of these moves will cause more resistance and more creativity from the new decentralized paradigm. (I'm seriously getting more and more excited about the upcoming launch of ONO. The timing couldn't be more perfect!)
The more our wings get cut, the more our desire for bigger wings will grow.
It always gets worse before it gets better.