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Facebook’s news blockade in Australia shows how tech giants are swallowing…

- - - - The Australian government's legislative efforts aim to support the news industry by helping to negotiate a deal whereby Facebook would pay Australian news organizations for content posted by users on its platform.
        
        But their statements show that neither has acknowledged that Facebook, for many people, has effectively become the web.
        
        In the 1980s, Berners-Lee envisioned the Web as a network of community-minded academic researchers who shared their knowledge quickly and conveniently around the world.
        
        The priority was to help users find the material they were looking for, wherever it was online.
    - - The situation in Australia is an important opportunity to examine how much power Facebook has over the ways people can search for information online.
        
        But in the short term they might need financial help from somewhere if they have become too dependent on Facebook.
        
        Or news organizations could negotiate deals directly with Facebook and avoid restrictive laws, since the proposed legislation isn't even final yet.
        
        Returning to simpler hyperlinks could help more users click on news while preserving the principles of the web.
      - Keeping users on the site
        
        When a user posts a link on Facebook, it's not just a hyperlink as Berners-Lee envisioned. It is much more advanced and displays information from the linked page, including, for news, a headline, a main image, and sometimes a summary of the news that users would see if they clicked on the link.
        
        On Facebook-owned Instagram, user options are even more restricted. People can post photos and text, but they cannot share links directly to other websites.
        
        According to the author: "In my opinion, both cases show that Facebook doesn't really want an interconnected web: it wants to keep its users on their own platforms."
    - - The company took another step toward ending the World Wide Web, the hyperlink-based system for freely connecting online sites created in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.