Thread · 3 tweets · 31 Aug 2022

A quick note on the "link tax" bit in case it helps. There is a nice mutualistic model in which publishers make content, search engines index it and provide links back, everyone makes money and people get something useful — this is great! It would be dumb to tax that.

But mutualistic relationships only persist in the presence of a mechanism to maintain cooperation and prevent conflict. We don't have that, and as a result the search/publisher relationship has become far more parasitic.

I'm not claiming that I have easy solutions here, I think it's probably several different governance mechanisms to create balance. But irrespective of solution preferences I think that the "it's just links" analysis obscures the facts.