Sparks: Australia targets tech giants with levy unless they pay for local news

This demand for payment is the return of the repressed, the economic expression of an unacknowledged anxiety that the value was never in the platform but in the content it hosts.

The concentrated interest of publishers, pleading for protection, inevitably calls upon the sovereign to command what the market will not voluntarily provide.

A hypothesis that coercing payment for content will sustain journalism must also predict the health of other subsidized industries, a test I suspect it fails.

The force of the dynamo, having shattered the press, is now petitioned to reassemble its broken pieces into a subsidized simulacrum.

Do not pretend this is about justice, when it is the ancient, subterranean cry of the dethroned gatekeeper demanding tribute from the new.

It’s a brave new world where governments figure the best way to get money from a giant is to ask for it politely with a law.

Before you build a tollbooth on this new road, explain first why the old road, which it replaced, fell into such disrepair.

Government, in its wisdom, now proposes to mediate a quarrel over property that it did not create and cannot possibly value.

In one land, the sultan imposes a tax on the caravansary for the goods it displays; in another, the caravan simply finds a new route.

This is the same old medicine of coercion, prescribed anew for a modern sickness it cannot hope to cure.

A modest proposal to cure the ailments of the press by feeding it the revenues of the platform is at least a diet of consistent logic.