Link tax has been debated in the EU for several years. The articles at the base of this have been rejected and are still in a process of being written. Luckily for the EU they have some protection of private rights which meant the articles were sent back rejected because of those rights. We don’t have similar protections here sadly.
This doesn’t mean that the EU won’t get a link tax but it would need to be in a space that protects the private user there, flow on effects could however impact us here and yes that could mean at some point CHOICE could be financially impacted. If not the site then the user who links could be held liable. CHOICE already has some rules in place that put the onus on the user to ensure the user has the right to post the 3rd party content, this in the case of a successful link tax could mean a user would be billed for any link beyond personal.
Should a Newsfeed RSS be billed, perhaps they should particularly if they require user payment to enjoy the service. At that point it is a commercial operation that benefits from what is currently free content. If that content became “taxed” then the RSS feeder is the one who gathers and sells the links and the end user has already paid for that access, thus the feeder should be the one who pays.
