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After watching this play out in Australia, it doesn't feel like there are many new arguments to be made. It's just sad to watch. As a Canadian, it bothers me t

After watching this play out in Australia, it doesn't feel like there are many new arguments to be made. It's just sad to watch. As a Canadian, it bothers me that our politicians are willing to jump through mental hoops to avoid considering the most obvious solutions. If news companies don't want people accessing their content through the web, shouldn't they simply take down their web sites? If they aren't willing to do that (because, say, the benefits outweigh the costs), then perhaps this isn't an issue that warrants legislation...

brunoborges 4y ago
The problem here is that people are not, at scale, hitting the news company website. Users of social media platforms see headlines, sometimes an alt text/description followed with a picture, and that is it. They start jumping to a discussion on said topic with whoever posted the news piece. People are not reading the articles in full (and therefore being presented with ads, or a subscription paywall), but they are engaging on the social media platform that in turn is making money with ads and other features thanks to the engagement produced by the shared news article. News companies are being cannibalized by social media companies who get all the engagement (and ad revenue), while people at scale are not signing up for paywalls or even visiting the news site to read the article in full. I believe this will hopefully make news companies get back to a profitable business, while making conversations on social media platforms a lot healthier.
- Teever 4y ago
  Most of the Canadian media market is owned by American interests so really we're just watching two American companies duke it out over who gets advertising money paid by companies selling American consumer shit. As a Canadian it's really hard to give a shit about any of this.
  - b112 4y ago
    Most of the Canadian media market is owned by American interests What a weird thing to say, this is wildly untrue. Foreign ownership laws tilt this dramatically.
  - peanuty1 4y ago
    What about the taxpayer-funded CBC?
- twblalock 4y ago
  Maybe the news companies should figure out how to attract more people to their sites rather than trying to charge rent on other sites? Maybe the news companies should write articles that are worth reading in full? If Facebook links to an article people might follow the link and read it. If they don't link to an article, nobody will read it. There is nothing but upside for the news companies, and people with business savvy would love to have their site linked on Facebook (that's why people pay them so much money for ads!).
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    I see lots of articles get posted which are worth reading in full, but the comments under them make it clear few if any people actually read them. I don't really see how you change that behavior. People are drawn to the path of least resistance, and that path is often just reading the headline and brief summary before making your comment and moving on to the next thing in your social media feed. The value social media companies add is creating a space where users feel like they get all their news (and other things), and can converse about it either with friends and family or like-minded strangers. I don't see how news outlets themselves can compete with that without essentially seeking to replace Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. I think it's fair to say that social media companies profiting off other people's labor should share that financial liability.
    - bdw5204 4y ago
      Facebook can just replace corporate media with alternative media outlets that provide the same news. In fact, the alternative media was doing extremely well on social media until around 2017 or so when they changed the algorithms to favor corporate media content. From the perspective of Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, they can just replace CNN and Fox News with Jacobin and Breitbart and nobody will care that much except people who work for those outlets. In fact, most people will probably be happier to have sources that care less about pretending to be "objective" and just support their party's agenda (such outlets were successfully outcompeting corporate media on the social platforms before the circa 2017 algorithm changes). In other words, the corporate media should be careful what they wish for because they might lose the fantastic gift horse they got from "big tech" 6 years ago. The value of a media outlet is in its influence over public opinion not its profitability and this greed driven proposal is a good way for corporate media to burn down their own influence.
- CivBase 4y ago
  I don't get it. People were content only reading headlines before. They couldn't be bothered to click the link and read the articles. I get why that's a problem. But now that the users aren't even being given links... the expectation is that users will go out of their way to find and read those articles? Is their strategy litterally just playing hard to get?
  - monkeywork 4y ago
    What's not to get? The news company is in the biz of making money for themselves not for facebook. People not clicking the links and reading the articles weren't generating income for them (nor were they getting informed in any meaningful way) however they were enriching another platform (facebook). So now the users aren't being given links, which they weren't really clicking to begin with, so the news company isn't losing any significant money but at least their work (articles) aren't being used to enrich facebook. Thier strategy is that the users will eventually want news from somewhere and either they will go to the source, or they will grow dissatisfied with facebook since they don't show news anymore and facebook may pay for the content to keep their own users happy. it's a minimal risk proposition for the media companies.
    - CivBase 4y ago
      Except Facebook will still show news. Just not news articles from Canadian outlets. Unless the plan is to turn CBC readers into BBC readers, I still don't see how this is supposed to work out. Is Canadian news so superior that a significant portion users who were previously content with Facebook's news feed will become so dissatisfied with it that they'll leave?
      - chongli 4y ago
        Is Canadian news so superior that a significant portion users who were previously content with Facebook's news feed will become so dissatisfied with it that they'll leave? No. We just have a government that is captured by the media companies. We pay some of the highest fees in the world for internet and phone plans. Those providers happen to be the same media companies [1] [2] pushing for this crap legislation because they own all the newspapers and sports channels. Deep down, they would love to just block Google and Facebook for Canadians, but they know that’s not possible. So now they’re going to use their legislative cronies to ram this law through the House of Commons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Media [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Communications
- slashdev 4y ago
  > People are not reading the articles in full (and therefore being presented with ads, or a subscription paywall), but they are engaging on the social media platform I feel like you just described Hacker News.
  - suprjami 4y ago
    There are no SEO summaries here, commenters are encouraged to read full articles before commenting (and often shamed if they obviously haven't), and what's posted here is often non-journalistic "news" (blogs etc) or outright non-news.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      On the other hand it is explicitly in the rules that we aren’t supposed to ask if a commenter has read the post.
      - abeyer 4y ago
        Because the only thing less valuable than an uninformed commentator is a flame war _about_ an uninformed commentator.
- actuator 4y ago
  FWIW, social media apps used to pull data using OG tags, media publications are free to not put those tags
- justapassenger 4y ago
  You’ll get people sharing headlines from obscure blogs and then arguing about it. You cannot legislate changes to human nature.
- patmcc 4y ago
  The news sites can certainly add a robots.txt page or stop crawling from Facebook/Google in other ways. I'd even be fine with the law saying "Google/Facebook can't do automated summaries of the page content" or whatever, allow that to be opt-in/out. The bullshit part is saying Google has to pay for the privilege of linking out to the sites. Ridiculous.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    The issue with this is that news is largely fungible. If any news source adds a robots.txt that stops aggregators than other news sources will instantly rip off their content and put it on google. Since they don't actually employ any journalists but just an AI summarizer bot their expenses are low enough that they can make money off the few people who actually click the link. The problem with this strategy is that eventually all the actual news sources will run out of money and the journalists will be laid off, at which point there's no news for the scalper sites to copy.
    - varispeed 4y ago
      That's just your assumption. Don't get me wrong - it sounds plausible, but it is unlikely that such scenario would have played out. Maybe we have too many news outlets - you can even read that some employ AI already to write articles for them. They are going for quantity over quality. There are always going to be people wanting to gossip over a headline and if a news source doesn't provide much beyond that, are they actually providing anything of value? When we didn't have internet, many people would have looked at newspapers on display and discussed headlines without actually buying a newspaper. Was it a problem then?
- nvrmnd 4y ago
  I think you could easily argue that social media links to the news websites provides more value to the news website than vice-versa. If, for example, only the headline and sub-headline were quoted in the posts without the link -- which the Heritage Minister indicated would not constitute a fee -- any discussion could still take place, and certainly there would be even less benefit to the news organization. Any news website can already prevent Facebook from generating link previews through meta tags, as I understand. But very few, if any, websites do this indicating that they understand it's not in their interests. Perhaps people are not reading the articles because the _discussion_ is more valuable to them than the content of the article? Don't we all occasionally jump to the comment section on HN/reddit instead of reading the article? Seems to me that many news organizations have not yet figured out how to provide their customers with a product they are willing to "pay" for. I mean, any brief visit to a small news website without an ad-blocker or, worse, a scroll through the comment section, should make this fairly evident.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    "I think you could easily argue that social media links to the news websites provides more value to the news website than vice-versa. If, for example, only the headline and sub-headline were quoted in the posts without the link -- which the Heritage Minister indicated would not constitute a fee -- any discussion could still take place, and certainly there would be even less benefit to the news organization." I don't see an argument here that supports it, though? How are they making money off having their content cannibalized?
    - AmericanChopper 4y ago
      The content isn’t being cannibalized, it’s being ignored. The customers they’re trying to extract revenue from have overwhelmingly decided that the content of the articles these outlets write is not worth reading. There isn’t an appropriate legislative solution for “customers aren’t interested in my product anymore”.
    - chipgap98 4y ago
      Then why are they making their content cannibalizable? They could make their content a walled garden, they could stop populating meta tags to make their content sharable, etc. The fact that they are choosing not to means that they like the traffic that is being generated from their content.
- kaczordon 4y ago
  This is called hyperlinking. The entire web is built on this concept.
- Marsymars 4y ago
  You're right, but this law does a terrible job of tackling that problem. It only affects links, not the headline/description/picture blurb. A plain text link would cost FB money, while a headline/description/picture with no link would cost FB nothing. And presumably FB would only block link-sharing if doing so was a net positive for them. This implementation is based off fundamentally backwards understandings of the flow of value on the web. The appropriate implementation of this would just be a straight-up corporate tax of social media companies and an accompanying subsidy of news orgs, not this weird linking nonsense.
- smsm42 4y ago
  > The problem here is that people are not, at scale, hitting the news company website Maybe that's something the news companies have to work on - such as working on making these sites more useful and attractive to the users, instead of adding more ads and paywalls and then running to the government screaming "people don't want to visit our sites, please save us".
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  So users take links to news websites, and post them on other websites, in a way that Canada thinks should be illegal? What's Facebook done wrong here?
- anoy8888 4y ago
  No. This is how they will get out of business and then cried for legislation help again to get into social media
- sroussey 4y ago
  Why stop there? The ISPs are making money on the traffic as well, maybe hit them up as well.
- donatj 4y ago
  > I believe this will hopefully make news companies get back to a profitable business It won't. Very few people who current aren't paying for news are just going to start. The incenssent news readers pay for news already. The others will move on to other less reliable content.
- varispeed 4y ago
  Why news sites should receive a special treatment? Shouldn't everyone who posts on social media get a cut of advertising revenue?
- thrown123098 4y ago
  How is this different to people from yesteryear just skimming the headlines at the local grocers then putting the paper down and buying their cigarettes? I'm old enough to remember my grand father doing that in the 90s in the same store he visited since the 50s.
- lxm 4y ago
  Would a robots.txt-equivalent solution satisfy both parties? Media orgs could ban the indexing of their pages by specific scrapers, and users on those social networks would just see a raw URL, not a preview with headline+image+blurb?
ipcress_file 4y ago
> If news companies don't want people accessing their content through the web, shouldn't they simply take down their web sites? That's clearly not the issue. The news companies obviously do want people to access their sites over the web and pay for the privilege. This argument is both incorrect and disingenuous. The problem is that search and social media companies have been permitted to appropriate and monetize other people's content in different ways. They're parasitic. I don't think that links are really the problem and I'm not surprised that the Liberals have missed the forest for the trees. They do that. The real issue is providing the significant part of the content without requiring people to go to the actual site.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  > The problem is that search and social media companies have been permitted to appropriate and monetize other people's content in different ways. They're parasitic. By this logic, Facebook, Google et.al. dropping links to these news outlets would help these companies. Furthermore, they can already opt out of being crawled through their robots.txt file. But of course, this logic is total BS which is why they don't opt of being indexed.
andrei_says_ 4y ago
News companies don’t want corporations stealing their content and presenting it on their own platforms.
- timbit42 4y ago
  Then the news media needs to modify their headlines, images and summaries to be less revealing so their content isn't stolen and so people will want to click through and read their articles. Forcing social media to pay for links users post or click is only going to end up in the news media becoming poorer because social media will demote articles that cost more and promote articles that cost less.

brunoborges 4y ago

The problem here is that people are not, at scale, hitting the news company website. Users of social media platforms see headlines, sometimes an alt text/description followed with a picture, and that is it. They start jumping to a discussion on said topic with whoever posted the news piece. People are not reading the articles in full (and therefore being presented with ads, or a subscription paywall), but they are engaging on the social media platform that in turn is making money with ads and other features thanks to the engagement produced by the shared news article. News companies are being cannibalized by social media companies who get all the engagement (and ad revenue), while people at scale are not signing up for paywalls or even visiting the news site to read the article in full. I believe this will hopefully make news companies get back to a profitable business, while making conversations on social media platforms a lot healthier.

Teever 4y ago
Most of the Canadian media market is owned by American interests so really we're just watching two American companies duke it out over who gets advertising money paid by companies selling American consumer shit. As a Canadian it's really hard to give a shit about any of this.
- b112 4y ago
  Most of the Canadian media market is owned by American interests What a weird thing to say, this is wildly untrue. Foreign ownership laws tilt this dramatically.
- peanuty1 4y ago
  What about the taxpayer-funded CBC?
twblalock 4y ago
Maybe the news companies should figure out how to attract more people to their sites rather than trying to charge rent on other sites? Maybe the news companies should write articles that are worth reading in full? If Facebook links to an article people might follow the link and read it. If they don't link to an article, nobody will read it. There is nothing but upside for the news companies, and people with business savvy would love to have their site linked on Facebook (that's why people pay them so much money for ads!).
- babypuncher 4y ago
  I see lots of articles get posted which are worth reading in full, but the comments under them make it clear few if any people actually read them. I don't really see how you change that behavior. People are drawn to the path of least resistance, and that path is often just reading the headline and brief summary before making your comment and moving on to the next thing in your social media feed. The value social media companies add is creating a space where users feel like they get all their news (and other things), and can converse about it either with friends and family or like-minded strangers. I don't see how news outlets themselves can compete with that without essentially seeking to replace Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. I think it's fair to say that social media companies profiting off other people's labor should share that financial liability.
  - bdw5204 4y ago
    Facebook can just replace corporate media with alternative media outlets that provide the same news. In fact, the alternative media was doing extremely well on social media until around 2017 or so when they changed the algorithms to favor corporate media content. From the perspective of Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, they can just replace CNN and Fox News with Jacobin and Breitbart and nobody will care that much except people who work for those outlets. In fact, most people will probably be happier to have sources that care less about pretending to be "objective" and just support their party's agenda (such outlets were successfully outcompeting corporate media on the social platforms before the circa 2017 algorithm changes). In other words, the corporate media should be careful what they wish for because they might lose the fantastic gift horse they got from "big tech" 6 years ago. The value of a media outlet is in its influence over public opinion not its profitability and this greed driven proposal is a good way for corporate media to burn down their own influence.
CivBase 4y ago
I don't get it. People were content only reading headlines before. They couldn't be bothered to click the link and read the articles. I get why that's a problem. But now that the users aren't even being given links... the expectation is that users will go out of their way to find and read those articles? Is their strategy litterally just playing hard to get?
- monkeywork 4y ago
  What's not to get? The news company is in the biz of making money for themselves not for facebook. People not clicking the links and reading the articles weren't generating income for them (nor were they getting informed in any meaningful way) however they were enriching another platform (facebook). So now the users aren't being given links, which they weren't really clicking to begin with, so the news company isn't losing any significant money but at least their work (articles) aren't being used to enrich facebook. Thier strategy is that the users will eventually want news from somewhere and either they will go to the source, or they will grow dissatisfied with facebook since they don't show news anymore and facebook may pay for the content to keep their own users happy. it's a minimal risk proposition for the media companies.
  - CivBase 4y ago
    Except Facebook will still show news. Just not news articles from Canadian outlets. Unless the plan is to turn CBC readers into BBC readers, I still don't see how this is supposed to work out. Is Canadian news so superior that a significant portion users who were previously content with Facebook's news feed will become so dissatisfied with it that they'll leave?
    - chongli 4y ago
      Is Canadian news so superior that a significant portion users who were previously content with Facebook's news feed will become so dissatisfied with it that they'll leave? No. We just have a government that is captured by the media companies. We pay some of the highest fees in the world for internet and phone plans. Those providers happen to be the same media companies [1] [2] pushing for this crap legislation because they own all the newspapers and sports channels. Deep down, they would love to just block Google and Facebook for Canadians, but they know that’s not possible. So now they’re going to use their legislative cronies to ram this law through the House of Commons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Media [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Communications
slashdev 4y ago
> People are not reading the articles in full (and therefore being presented with ads, or a subscription paywall), but they are engaging on the social media platform I feel like you just described Hacker News.
- suprjami 4y ago
  There are no SEO summaries here, commenters are encouraged to read full articles before commenting (and often shamed if they obviously haven't), and what's posted here is often non-journalistic "news" (blogs etc) or outright non-news.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    On the other hand it is explicitly in the rules that we aren’t supposed to ask if a commenter has read the post.
    - abeyer 4y ago
      Because the only thing less valuable than an uninformed commentator is a flame war _about_ an uninformed commentator.
actuator 4y ago
FWIW, social media apps used to pull data using OG tags, media publications are free to not put those tags
justapassenger 4y ago
You’ll get people sharing headlines from obscure blogs and then arguing about it. You cannot legislate changes to human nature.
patmcc 4y ago
The news sites can certainly add a robots.txt page or stop crawling from Facebook/Google in other ways. I'd even be fine with the law saying "Google/Facebook can't do automated summaries of the page content" or whatever, allow that to be opt-in/out. The bullshit part is saying Google has to pay for the privilege of linking out to the sites. Ridiculous.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  The issue with this is that news is largely fungible. If any news source adds a robots.txt that stops aggregators than other news sources will instantly rip off their content and put it on google. Since they don't actually employ any journalists but just an AI summarizer bot their expenses are low enough that they can make money off the few people who actually click the link. The problem with this strategy is that eventually all the actual news sources will run out of money and the journalists will be laid off, at which point there's no news for the scalper sites to copy.
  - varispeed 4y ago
    That's just your assumption. Don't get me wrong - it sounds plausible, but it is unlikely that such scenario would have played out. Maybe we have too many news outlets - you can even read that some employ AI already to write articles for them. They are going for quantity over quality. There are always going to be people wanting to gossip over a headline and if a news source doesn't provide much beyond that, are they actually providing anything of value? When we didn't have internet, many people would have looked at newspapers on display and discussed headlines without actually buying a newspaper. Was it a problem then?
nvrmnd 4y ago
I think you could easily argue that social media links to the news websites provides more value to the news website than vice-versa. If, for example, only the headline and sub-headline were quoted in the posts without the link -- which the Heritage Minister indicated would not constitute a fee -- any discussion could still take place, and certainly there would be even less benefit to the news organization. Any news website can already prevent Facebook from generating link previews through meta tags, as I understand. But very few, if any, websites do this indicating that they understand it's not in their interests. Perhaps people are not reading the articles because the _discussion_ is more valuable to them than the content of the article? Don't we all occasionally jump to the comment section on HN/reddit instead of reading the article? Seems to me that many news organizations have not yet figured out how to provide their customers with a product they are willing to "pay" for. I mean, any brief visit to a small news website without an ad-blocker or, worse, a scroll through the comment section, should make this fairly evident.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  "I think you could easily argue that social media links to the news websites provides more value to the news website than vice-versa. If, for example, only the headline and sub-headline were quoted in the posts without the link -- which the Heritage Minister indicated would not constitute a fee -- any discussion could still take place, and certainly there would be even less benefit to the news organization." I don't see an argument here that supports it, though? How are they making money off having their content cannibalized?
  - AmericanChopper 4y ago
    The content isn’t being cannibalized, it’s being ignored. The customers they’re trying to extract revenue from have overwhelmingly decided that the content of the articles these outlets write is not worth reading. There isn’t an appropriate legislative solution for “customers aren’t interested in my product anymore”.
  - chipgap98 4y ago
    Then why are they making their content cannibalizable? They could make their content a walled garden, they could stop populating meta tags to make their content sharable, etc. The fact that they are choosing not to means that they like the traffic that is being generated from their content.
kaczordon 4y ago
This is called hyperlinking. The entire web is built on this concept.
Marsymars 4y ago
You're right, but this law does a terrible job of tackling that problem. It only affects links, not the headline/description/picture blurb. A plain text link would cost FB money, while a headline/description/picture with no link would cost FB nothing. And presumably FB would only block link-sharing if doing so was a net positive for them. This implementation is based off fundamentally backwards understandings of the flow of value on the web. The appropriate implementation of this would just be a straight-up corporate tax of social media companies and an accompanying subsidy of news orgs, not this weird linking nonsense.
smsm42 4y ago
> The problem here is that people are not, at scale, hitting the news company website Maybe that's something the news companies have to work on - such as working on making these sites more useful and attractive to the users, instead of adding more ads and paywalls and then running to the government screaming "people don't want to visit our sites, please save us".
madeofpalk 4y ago
So users take links to news websites, and post them on other websites, in a way that Canada thinks should be illegal? What's Facebook done wrong here?
anoy8888 4y ago
No. This is how they will get out of business and then cried for legislation help again to get into social media
sroussey 4y ago
Why stop there? The ISPs are making money on the traffic as well, maybe hit them up as well.
donatj 4y ago
> I believe this will hopefully make news companies get back to a profitable business It won't. Very few people who current aren't paying for news are just going to start. The incenssent news readers pay for news already. The others will move on to other less reliable content.
varispeed 4y ago
Why news sites should receive a special treatment? Shouldn't everyone who posts on social media get a cut of advertising revenue?
thrown123098 4y ago
How is this different to people from yesteryear just skimming the headlines at the local grocers then putting the paper down and buying their cigarettes? I'm old enough to remember my grand father doing that in the 90s in the same store he visited since the 50s.
lxm 4y ago
Would a robots.txt-equivalent solution satisfy both parties? Media orgs could ban the indexing of their pages by specific scrapers, and users on those social networks would just see a raw URL, not a preview with headline+image+blurb?

ipcress_file 4y ago

> If news companies don't want people accessing their content through the web, shouldn't they simply take down their web sites? That's clearly not the issue. The news companies obviously do want people to access their sites over the web and pay for the privilege. This argument is both incorrect and disingenuous. The problem is that search and social media companies have been permitted to appropriate and monetize other people's content in different ways. They're parasitic. I don't think that links are really the problem and I'm not surprised that the Liberals have missed the forest for the trees. They do that. The real issue is providing the significant part of the content without requiring people to go to the actual site.

Manuel_D 4y ago
> The problem is that search and social media companies have been permitted to appropriate and monetize other people's content in different ways. They're parasitic. By this logic, Facebook, Google et.al. dropping links to these news outlets would help these companies. Furthermore, they can already opt out of being crawled through their robots.txt file. But of course, this logic is total BS which is why they don't opt of being indexed.

andrei_says_ 4y ago

News companies don’t want corporations stealing their content and presenting it on their own platforms.

timbit42 4y ago
Then the news media needs to modify their headlines, images and summaries to be less revealing so their content isn't stolen and so people will want to click through and read their articles. Forcing social media to pay for links users post or click is only going to end up in the news media becoming poorer because social media will demote articles that cost more and promote articles that cost less.