Media or mob tactics?

Mark Jennings at Newsroom writes:

The best thing the Government could do to help New Zealand media right now is to get the Prime Minister on a Zoom call with Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and ask him for $100 million.

In return for saving the New Zealand media, she agrees to let Zuckerberg off the hook that the Australian, French and other governments are planning to put him on by making Facebook pay for news content.

Eric Crampton points out:

I know that things are pretty tough in the newsrooms, but asking the government to run a shakedown operation to fund you is not all that hot.

We’ve seen this before.

The music industry demanded a tax on CDs to fund their previous business model.

The media industry are demanding a tax on Google and Facebook simply because they provided a better advertising advertising product than them.

I wonder if the horse and buggy people demanded a tax on cars?