6 ms·

This is pretty funny, all in all. Facebook is the company that attempted to seize the internet in the developing world about a decade ago by attempting to prov

by jtode 3y ago

This is pretty funny, all in all. Facebook is the company that attempted to seize the internet in the developing world about a decade ago by attempting to provide a gratis, curated "internet" that they controlled as the entry point for people just getting online. Meanwhile, Facebook was making every attempt to do the same through its various methods; I distinctly remember when they told me I now have an @facebook email address that nobody asked for or wanted. They wanted to be the internet, essentially, the conduit for all useful information. What they had in mind was to do that capture, and then start squeezing the news themselves by choking off the supply of readers. The fact they are retreating in the face of a tax is actually a bit stunning, because I don't see how they'll ever retake this territory they are ceding, and that more or less dooms their entire strategy in a very visible way.

cowsup 3y ago
I think by paying the tax, it opens up other governments (especially individual states) to introduce similar legislation for that effortless tax revenue. In the US alone, California could charge, Texas could charge, Alabama could, each having their own percentages and qualifying methods of considering what is taxed. Easier for Meta to decline the tax and make an example by punishing the affected Canadian users, than it is to welcome the tax and end up paying millions.
Marsymars 3y ago
The problem is that a link tax is all backwards. For a physical anology, it's like if you have a new robotaxi company that drives to anywhere people want to go very cheaply/easily, and this hurts the operators of short-haul flights when people figure they'd rather sleep in a car for 3 hours rather than dealing with airports, so your response is to force the robotaxi company to pay the short-haul flight operators for every trip to the airport in a way that's unprofitable for the robotaxis. The obvious response from the robotaxi is to stop providing rides to/from the airport. The appropriate way for the government to do this is to slap a general corporate tax on Facebook, and then subsidize news agencies out of general revenue, not this convoluted/backwards link tax approach.
- jtode 3y ago
  I agree this is the wrong way of going about it, but their response is ultimately a retreat, which will cause users to look elsewhere for their news headlines, and that will pretty much be it, cause I don't see the gov pulling back on that - in the final analysis I'm pretty sure they would like to have less people on there for their news, for obvious bloody reasons.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- belorn 3y ago
  The term "link tax" is always a bit of a misnomer. It is a tax for copying small snippets, which those companies would claim fair use on. I am unsure what is the most appropriate way. Fair use laws was never designed with the idea of facebook copying news segments, search copying whole segments of websites and inline them, google making full copies of every page of every book, machine learning models, and so on. It also seem to have failed rather extremely with sites like youtube. All those cases of fair use also happens to only provide rights to large companies with hordes of lawyers. Anything smaller just get gunned down with copyright claims and strikes. I can imagine someone trying to write a bot that join every public facebook group and copy a snippet of every comment that is being made (with a helpful link if anyone want to read the full text) and publish that outside of facebook and their ads. How fast would that bot be kicked out by facebook?
  - Marsymars 3y ago
    > The term "link tax" is always a bit of a misnomer. It is a tax for copying small snippets, which those companies would claim fair use on. I don't think it is; as far as I can tell, both the spirit and letter of the law is to require payment for links only, that include no content snippets. e.g. the bill's charter reads: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_1.html https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_... "Under the Bill, a digital news intermediary could make news content available by reproducing it or by facilitating access to the news content, including by generating links to news content. Facilitating access to news content could be done through any means, including by way of an index, aggregation or ranking, all of which are methods used by online platforms to organize and distribute news content." This also comes up in the clause-by-clause review: https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/CHPC/meeting-57/evidence https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/CHPC/meetin... 1: "Facebook has said that they may consider removing the ability of news to be shared on their platform so that they cannot be scoped into this legislation. If they were to make that decision and Canadians wanted to take a quote from a newspaper article and post that quote on their Facebook page as a small snippet, would Facebook be allowed to permit that without being captured by this legislation?" 2: "[...]Regarding the example you give, in a context where Facebook has made the business decision to essentially prevent the ability of users to link to news articles but an individual is quoting from a particular news article without a link, no, I do not believe that would engage or trigger the application of the act." 1: "But as soon as a link is included, then they would be scoped into this legislation." 2: "From my perspective, the act of linking is a critical one. It boils down to the facilitation of access. Again, at the crux of this bill is a recognition that the ways that a significant number of Canadians navigate to news content is via social media services or via a search service, which involves clicking on the link. Yes." If the intention was for this law to apply to snippets rather than links, it should have been written that way, because as-is, it applies to links, and not snippets.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
> I distinctly remember when they told me I now have an @facebook email address that nobody asked for or wanted. Funny to hear a complaint about this when one is so used to hearing people complain that gmail dominates email now.
- jtode 3y ago
  But nearly everyone who has Gmail signed up for it. We were all lazy and now we are getting what we deserve for our laziness. My official email is a gmail, I'm currently shopping around for who I should plan to pay for the rest of my life to handle a new one for me. It's gonna take a while, but I do not intend to let them retain the ability to turn my life off with an algorithm.
  - phyrex 3y ago
    I’ve been a happy fastmail customer for years
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    There are plenty of reasons to make a google account other then gmail, like syncing chrome accross device or using google docs, and you get a gmail account whether you want it or not.
    - herewulf 3y ago
      Yes, but that doesn't mean you are forced to receive e-mail with it. I recently made a Google account to use Family Link so I could regulate what my kids do with their Chromebooks. I first tried the approach of making an account with a non-Google address and while this works for a lot of Google things, it didn't work for Family Link for whatever reason. So now we all have regular GMail accounts and haven't looked at the mail or used the address for a single other thing. Would be nice to not have to deal with all that but we're getting a lot of value out of the situation and the kids enjoy apps like Duolingo and Scratch Jr.
      - 3y ago

by jtode 3y ago

cowsup 3y ago

I think by paying the tax, it opens up other governments (especially individual states) to introduce similar legislation for that effortless tax revenue. In the US alone, California could charge, Texas could charge, Alabama could, each having their own percentages and qualifying methods of considering what is taxed. Easier for Meta to decline the tax and make an example by punishing the affected Canadian users, than it is to welcome the tax and end up paying millions.

Marsymars 3y ago

The problem is that a link tax is all backwards. For a physical anology, it's like if you have a new robotaxi company that drives to anywhere people want to go very cheaply/easily, and this hurts the operators of short-haul flights when people figure they'd rather sleep in a car for 3 hours rather than dealing with airports, so your response is to force the robotaxi company to pay the short-haul flight operators for every trip to the airport in a way that's unprofitable for the robotaxis. The obvious response from the robotaxi is to stop providing rides to/from the airport. The appropriate way for the government to do this is to slap a general corporate tax on Facebook, and then subsidize news agencies out of general revenue, not this convoluted/backwards link tax approach.

jtode 3y ago
I agree this is the wrong way of going about it, but their response is ultimately a retreat, which will cause users to look elsewhere for their news headlines, and that will pretty much be it, cause I don't see the gov pulling back on that - in the final analysis I'm pretty sure they would like to have less people on there for their news, for obvious bloody reasons.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
belorn 3y ago
The term "link tax" is always a bit of a misnomer. It is a tax for copying small snippets, which those companies would claim fair use on. I am unsure what is the most appropriate way. Fair use laws was never designed with the idea of facebook copying news segments, search copying whole segments of websites and inline them, google making full copies of every page of every book, machine learning models, and so on. It also seem to have failed rather extremely with sites like youtube. All those cases of fair use also happens to only provide rights to large companies with hordes of lawyers. Anything smaller just get gunned down with copyright claims and strikes. I can imagine someone trying to write a bot that join every public facebook group and copy a snippet of every comment that is being made (with a helpful link if anyone want to read the full text) and publish that outside of facebook and their ads. How fast would that bot be kicked out by facebook?
- Marsymars 3y ago
  > The term "link tax" is always a bit of a misnomer. It is a tax for copying small snippets, which those companies would claim fair use on. I don't think it is; as far as I can tell, both the spirit and letter of the law is to require payment for links only, that include no content snippets. e.g. the bill's charter reads: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_1.html https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_... "Under the Bill, a digital news intermediary could make news content available by reproducing it or by facilitating access to the news content, including by generating links to news content. Facilitating access to news content could be done through any means, including by way of an index, aggregation or ranking, all of which are methods used by online platforms to organize and distribute news content." This also comes up in the clause-by-clause review: https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/CHPC/meeting-57/evidence https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/CHPC/meetin... 1: "Facebook has said that they may consider removing the ability of news to be shared on their platform so that they cannot be scoped into this legislation. If they were to make that decision and Canadians wanted to take a quote from a newspaper article and post that quote on their Facebook page as a small snippet, would Facebook be allowed to permit that without being captured by this legislation?" 2: "[...]Regarding the example you give, in a context where Facebook has made the business decision to essentially prevent the ability of users to link to news articles but an individual is quoting from a particular news article without a link, no, I do not believe that would engage or trigger the application of the act." 1: "But as soon as a link is included, then they would be scoped into this legislation." 2: "From my perspective, the act of linking is a critical one. It boils down to the facilitation of access. Again, at the crux of this bill is a recognition that the ways that a significant number of Canadians navigate to news content is via social media services or via a search service, which involves clicking on the link. Yes." If the intention was for this law to apply to snippets rather than links, it should have been written that way, because as-is, it applies to links, and not snippets.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

> I distinctly remember when they told me I now have an @facebook email address that nobody asked for or wanted. Funny to hear a complaint about this when one is so used to hearing people complain that gmail dominates email now.

jtode 3y ago
But nearly everyone who has Gmail signed up for it. We were all lazy and now we are getting what we deserve for our laziness. My official email is a gmail, I'm currently shopping around for who I should plan to pay for the rest of my life to handle a new one for me. It's gonna take a while, but I do not intend to let them retain the ability to turn my life off with an algorithm.
- phyrex 3y ago
  I’ve been a happy fastmail customer for years
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  There are plenty of reasons to make a google account other then gmail, like syncing chrome accross device or using google docs, and you get a gmail account whether you want it or not.
  - herewulf 3y ago
    Yes, but that doesn't mean you are forced to receive e-mail with it. I recently made a Google account to use Family Link so I could regulate what my kids do with their Chromebooks. I first tried the approach of making an account with a non-Google address and while this works for a lot of Google things, it didn't work for Family Link for whatever reason. So now we all have regular GMail accounts and haven't looked at the mail or used the address for a single other thing. Would be nice to not have to deal with all that but we're getting a lot of value out of the situation and the kids enjoy apps like Duolingo and Scratch Jr.
    - 3y ago