The Global Media Internet Concentration Project examines the concentration of the communications and media in countries around the world.

The latest data for Australia have recently been released, and they show just how big Google is here.

Alphabet (Google’s parent company) had 2022 revenue in Australia of A$7.9 billion.

That revenue is only exceeded by Telstra, and is bigger than Optus and NBN Co. It’s also bigger than the revenues of News Corporation and Nine Entertainment combined.

The network media economy includes telecoms and internet infrastructure, digital and traditional publishing and internet-based companies. The 2022 revenue of this economy in Australia was $69 billion. The revenue of the top four telecommunications operators accounted for half of that.

The major internet advertising players were, unsurprisingly, Google and Meta. Together, they had revenue in excess of $10 billion.

While this sector is clearly a major part of the Australian economy, there are significant problems yet to be solved. Namely, how do we fund public-interest journalism in a sector that’s concentrated to a few major players? The report has some insights to help guide the path forward.

Highly concentrated market

Australia has traditionally had the most concentrated media sectors in the OECD. The report shows this hasn’t changed.

News Corporation, the commercial television networks and Southern Cross Media are the major players across television, newspapers and radio. Concentration in commercial radio increased significantly over the 2019–22 period.

Australia’s media concentration is among the highest in the Western world.

One new feature is the importance of classified advertising players in their own right.

For example, Seek and the Car Group are in the top 20 businesses by revenue. An examination of the News Corp revenue shows that REA (realestate.com), which is majority-owned by News Corp, provides about 25% of News Corp’s total revenue. This figure is 70% of the company’s newspaper revenue.

Nine Media owns 60% of Domain. While in 2023–24 Domain represents less than 10% of Nine’s revenue, it is a more significant (about 25%) contributor to free cash flow.

The opaque world of streaming

One of the more interesting sectors is online video services. The availability of revenue information for this sector is patchy as many of its largest operators are either global media players (Netflix, Disney+) or part of complex digital businesses (Amazon Prime, Apple TV).

It’s a sector where there is evidence of both disruption of traditional media oligopolies in broadcast TV and the entry of traditional media players into streaming. Nine Entertainment has Stan, News Corporation has Binge and Kayo, and Network 10 has Paramount+ in partnership with Paramount.

One challenge facing the federal government is whether online video services can be obligated to meet Australian content requirements, as commercial broadcasters currently are.

What about news?

An issue that flows from this report is the prospect of an alternative to the News Media Bargaining Code.

Under the code, tech companies and news organizations could negotiate to pay for content and have it included on digital platforms. Until now, it hasn’t been used by Meta because it had commercial arrangements directly with media companies, but those have since expired and won’t be renewed.

The government and media alike are still grappling with how to fund public interest journalism. There’s also appetite to adequately regulate huge tech companies to better reflect their size in the Australian market.

One option is a digital services tax. However, this would be problematic in the context of Australia’s obligations under the World Trade Organization and the free trade agreement with the United States.

Digital service taxes have also formed part of OECD discussions on “Pillar 1” of a Global Tax Agreement. France and the United Kingdom have revised their positions on such taxes and have committed to withdraw them.

How about a levy?

An alternative approach would be a public interest journalism levy in a similar form to the Telecommunications Infrastructure Levy.

Under the Telecommunications Act, service providers are either carriage service providers or content service providers. Both forms are class licensed.

Broadly, carriage service providers that operate specified infrastructure must hold a carrier license. Holders of a carrier license with revenue greater than $25 million per year must contribute to the levy.

A simple mechanism would be to introduce a new form of content license. There would then be a requirement that content service providers which operate specified infrastructure must hold a content license.

Holders of a content license with revenue greater than $25 million per year would be required to contribute to the public interest journalism levy.

The contribution to the levy could be made proportionate to the returns received through digital advertising.

On current figures, Alphabet and Meta would contribute about 70% of the levy. Handily, the scheme would have the benefit of not requiring the federal government to designate particular companies (like it does under the bargaining code).

The levy also wouldn’t be contingent on the value of news to the overall platform. If Meta decides they don’t care for platforming news, for example, the levy wouldn’t change.

The rate of the levy would depend on the level of funding required. However, using the revenues in the report, it would be lower than 2% of content service revenue. This would make for a funding pool about the same size as is currently available to news organizations under the bargaining code.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the early days of the internet, famously, no one knew if you were a dog. The internet was a place where you could be anyone.

More importantly, it was also a place where you could find anything: that rare book, or the perfect pair of neon-pink tights, or a community for your unusual health condition. The underlying model of the internet was that it was decentralized, and everyone had the right to have a voice—even dogs.

Marketers realized they could use the internet to make money, but no one had figured out how yet. The original search engine included an index of all the pages on the web: you could literally browse the whole web if you were so inclined.

For those of us who were there, it was like the coolest club going, only everyone there was an oddball, nerd or another kind of outcast. Like all the best clubs, though, the internet didn’t stay exclusive. Marketers did work out how to use it to sell things (mostly pornography in the early days), and the internet became a fact of life rather than a niche interest.

From consolidation to ‘enshittification’

In the early 2000s, we saw another phenomenon: consolidation.

Facebook, through its links to the US college experience, became the place to connect with friends. Amazon, through its distribution network, became the place to buy … well, everything. Google was the source of information, and used this position to become the default source of information in browsers and mobile phones.

Initially, this consolidation happened because these tools were great for the people who used them. Then the tools became less great for end users, and instead became great for the people who sold things on them (advertisers, mostly).

However, people kept using the tools because the cost of switching was high, or there was no viable alternative.

Finally, these products have become great for people who own them, and not great for anyone else. The competition has also been squeezed out. The most fitting term for this process is “enshittification,” coined by author and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow. It is rife across digital products as diverse as ridesharing, streaming services and search engines.

So now, instead of connecting with friends, finding unique products or having the information of the world at your fingertips, the internet is a shopping mall advertising the same poor-quality products everywhere.

The alternative world exists

So, what was the alternative? It’s been there all along. In fact, lots of the internet still runs on it.

It’s called the free and open source software movement.

In the dawn of the tech era—1950s and 60s—most of the people involved in tech and programming were hobbyists and tinkerers, who shared code to help each other build stuff, grow and learn.

This became a social movement centered around the ethics of distributing software, and it had four underlying principles:

1. Software should be free to use for any purpose.
2. Software, and the code that underlies it, should be available for study and modification.
3. You should be free to share software with others.
4. You should be free to share software you have modified.

For many people in the movement, it was unethical to make software proprietary, or work with companies that did: this became the free software movement.

The open-source software movement is an alternative that’s more amenable to proprietary software, but still believes people should have access to the code.

This approach has much in common with the modern “right-to-repair movement”—it’s fine for a company to sell you a product, but you should be able to take it apart and fix it if it isn’t working.

Open-source software is baked into the internet. Over 95% of the top million web servers—the computers that send web content to your laptop or browser—run Linux, an open-source operating system (instead of Windows or iOS).

Netscape, an early web browser, was released open source, and the Firefox browser is still open source today.

A right to repair the internet

So how different would the internet look if the open source movement had been even more dominant?

It is instructive to look at what happens when for-profit tech giants release code and documentation, either deliberately (like Twitter) or accidentally (like Google).

In both cases, analysis of the code or documents discovered quirks that benefit either the companies or their founders, which company representatives said or implied weren’t happening.

In these cases, the openness has meant people could understand what was happening in a way that wasn’t possible before.

Understanding is one thing. Even better would be if people could use what has been released to get their own data, so the cost of switching to an alternative service—be that a social media network, search engine or shopping provider—is lower.

Imagine if you could write a post and choose which social media platform it went to, or have a single app to keep up with all your friends. Open-source code and such behavior being allowed would almost certainly mean this was a reality.

And that reality is still possible. The recent antitrust judgment against Google has shown tech giants that the consolidation required to enshittify user and seller experience—and enrich tech company owners—is on notice.

Without consolidation, tech companies have to compete for users by providing better services, and that’s good for everyone.

The right-to-repair movement is taking off, too. Perhaps one day, we will have the right to understand—and repair—the technology we use on the internet. That would be a future worth fighting for.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For many Australians, the family home is their largest financial asset. With an increasing variety of ways to tap into home equity, the temptation to access this wealth is ever growing.

Homeowners increase the debt owed on their home when they borrow against their equity. Standard mortgage home loans now provide facilities for relatively cheap or free withdrawals of equity from the home.

This turns the home into an ATM, which borrowers can access when they choose.

Our new study asks what motivates Australians to tap into their home equity, and how does this behavior change with age?

Surprisingly, despite having much lower housing equity levels, younger homeowners borrow often, and borrow more, than their Boomer parents.

How common is equity borrowing?

Using 15 years of data from the government-funded Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, we tracked the mortgage debt and repayments of homeowners aged 35 and over.

The chart above shows younger owners are far more likely to engage in equity borrowing.

In 2006, nearly 39% of the youngest homeowners, aged 35–44, borrowed against their home equity. By 2021, this number had dropped to 29%. Despite the decline, it’s still 24 percentage points more common than those aged 65 and over. The older group has remained steady at about 5% over the years.

How much do equity borrowers withdraw from their home?

Among those who use their home like an ATM, younger borrowers now withdraw larger amounts than older borrowers.

In 2006–07, equity borrowers aged 35–44 and 45–54 withdrew on average $43,000 and $57,000, respectively (expressed in real values set at 2022 price levels). By 2021, the amount withdrawn by these two age groups had climbed to $70,000 and $100,000.

On the other hand, the amount withdrawn by borrowers aged 55 or older fell from more than $50,000 to less than $40,000.

What motivates equity borrowing?

Young homeowners’ equity borrowing behaviors are sensitive to changes in house prices and debt values, and their financial risk preferences. Among those aged 35–44, a $10,000 increase in the primary home value raises the likelihood of equity borrowing by 10 percentage points.

Every $10,000 in debt against the primary home reduces the likelihood by 2.8% percentage points. Those willing to take substantial financial risk are eight percentage points more likely to borrow against their home than those who are risk-averse.

Those aged 65+ are not inclined to borrow, and exhibit little change in equity borrowing behavior with variations in asset, debt, income or financial risk preferences.

Why borrowing practices differ between age groups

As well as being more likely than older homeowners to borrow against equity, the younger group also withdraws higher amounts than their Boomer parents.

This is despite younger borrowers already carrying much higher debt against their primary home. Among those in our study who engaged in equity borrowing in 2021, the median debt before borrowing was $401,000 for 35–44 year-olds compared to $0 for those aged 65+.

As real house prices have risen over decades, the current generation of young homeowners has had to invest more money into purchasing their first home than previous generations.

It’s therefore not surprising the primary home is now widely viewed as a financial resource to be tapped into to meet spending needs.

On the other hand, most Baby Boomers bought their first home at more affordable prices than their children, and at lower levels of debt. Now they don’t appear to be spending their kids’ inheritance by drawing down housing wealth.

In fact, older parents may shy away from equity borrowing to bequeath wealth to children. Some also dislike passing debt on to their children.

Older people may also avoid equity borrowing due to concerns about aged care costs. Some may be hampered by poor financial literacy.

More debt ahead without policy changes

Present trends suggest young homeowners will remain indebted for longer periods, and more and more will retire with mortgage debt.

For indebted retirees, there are real prospects of drawing down of superannuation to pay off mortgages in retirement.

This may impose extra burdens on the age pension system. Another unwelcome consequence, which may add to health costs, is the prospect of debt-related psychological distress among those who can’t pay off their mortgage in old age.

If the current trends continue, the great wealth transfer that has already begun looks set to further entrench inequality between those who have access to the bank of mum and dad and those who do not.

Encouraging older people to use their housing equity to fund their needs in old age may lighten fiscal burdens on younger generations. But policy reforms will be needed to relieve concerns about the risks of equity borrowing in old age.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

TikTok headed to court on Sept. 16, 2024, in a bid to overturn a law that would force the video app to divorce from its China-based parent company or be banned in the U.S.

During the appearance before a panel of judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, layers for TikTok said imposing such a prohibition would have “staggering” consequences for free speech.

The court hearing is the latest development in a lengthy saga over the fate of an app that is widely popular, especially among young Americans, but that many politicians in Washington fear poses or is a security risk.

Whatever the outcome of the oral arguments presented by lawyers from the U.S. government on one side and TikTok and parent company ByteDance on the other, it’s unlikely to be the end of the story. Many analysts expect the case will head to the Supreme Court.

But why is TikTok controversial? Are the claims of it being a national security risk valid? And what will the case mean for free speech? The Conversation’s contributors have been on hand to answer these and other questions.

1. An agent of the Chinese state?

Politicians who want to ban TikTok, or at least sever its links to China, fear that the app provides a way for the Chinese Communist Party to influence Americans or use their data for malicious purposes. But how much influence does the Chinese government have at TikTok? That question is addressed by Shaomin Li, a scholar of China’s political economy and business at Old Dominion University.

Li explains that the relationship between TikTok, ByteDance and the Chinese Communist Party is nuanced—it isn’t simply a matter of officials in Beijing telling ByteDance to jump and the parent company dictating how high its subsidiary will leap. Rather, as with all companies in China, employees are under certain obligations when it comes to advancing national interests. In China, private enterprises, such as ByteDance, operate as joint ventures with the state.

“Regardless of whether ByteDance has formal ties with the party, there will be the tacit understanding that the management is working for two bosses: the investors of the company and, more importantly, their political overseers that represent the party,” Li writes. “But most importantly, when the interests of the two bosses conflict, the party trumps.”

2. Exploiting user data

The risks TikTok poses to U.S. users are similar to the risks posed by many popular apps, principally that the app collects data about you. That data, which includes contact information and website tracking, plus all data you post and messages you send through the app, is available to use or misuse by ByteDance and any other entity that has or gains access to it.

Iowa State University cybersecurity researcher Doug Jacobson writes that U.S. officials and lawmakers are concerned that the Chinese government could exploit TikTok user data to spy on U.S. citizens. Government hackers could use the TikTok data to trick users into revealing more personal information.

But if the goal is to counter Chinese hackers, banning TikTok might prove too little, too late. “By some estimates, the Chinese government has already collected personal information on at least 80% of the U.S. population via various means,” Jacobson writes. “The Chinese government—along with anyone else with money—also has access to the large market for personal data.”

3. The security risks of a ban

Banning TikTok could also make U.S. users more vulnerable to hackers of all stripes. Rochester Institute of Technology computer security expert Robert Olson writes that many of the more than 100 million U.S. TikTok users could try to get around a ban on the app, with negative consequences for their digital safety.

If TikTok ends up banned from Apple’s and Google’s app stores, users could try to access the app elsewhere via sideloading. This practice of getting around Apple and Google app stores leaves users vulnerable to malware posing as the TikTok app. TikTok users might also be motivated to circumvent Apple and Google security controls in order to keep the app installed, a move that would make users’ phones more vulnerable.

“I find it unlikely that a TikTok ban would be technologically enforceable,” Olson writes. “This … legislation—aimed at improving cybersecurity—could motivate users to engage in riskier digital behavior.”

4. First Amendment concerns

In its legal challenge to the U.S. government, ByteDance claims the government is violating its First Amendment rights. Technology law scholars Anupam Chander of Georgetown University and Gautam Hans of Cornell University write that ByteDance has grounds for its claim, and that the implications go beyond this case.

TikTok is a publisher, an online publisher of users’ videos. Forcing ByteDance to divest TikTok is a form of prior restraint—the government preventing speech before it occurs.

“By forcing the sale of TikTok to an entity without ties to the Chinese Communist Party, Congress’ intent with the law is to change the nature of the platform,” they write. “That kind of government action implicates the core concerns that the First Amendment was designed to protect against: government interference in the speech of private parties.”

5. What about the others?

Security and legal issues aside, the forced sale to a U.S.-based company or ban of TikTok in the United States is a questionable approach to solving the problems the law aims to address: potential Chinese government influence in the U.S., harm to teens, and data privacy violations, writes Arizona State media scholar Sarah Florini.

The Chinese government—and other U.S. adversaries—has long used social media apps owned by U.S. companies to attempt to influence American public opinion. TikTok is hardly alone in posing harm to teens, as the Facebook whistleblower case amply demonstrated. And vast amounts of Americans’ personal data are already available to any buyer on the open and black markets.

“Concerns about TikTok are not unfounded, but they are also not unique. Each threat posed by TikTok has also been posed by U.S.-based social media for over a decade,” Florini writes.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.