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Bill C-18: Google to remove news links in Canada over online news law
- TimPC 3y agoThis bill was a pretty naked shakedown for money and it was obvious to everyone who read it. Even the intentional targeting of specific companies rather than trying to make a general policy raises lots of questions. If linking news is actually harmful and needs to be compensated it needs to be compensated when Apple, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter or such do it to. Everyone knows this wasn’t really because anyone believes linking is harmful to news media. If the news media wanted to they could set their robots.txt to prevent any scraping of the content but they don’t because they want the links. We even see from Google’s own blog that they were participating in the political process and were open to solutions that compensated Canadian News Media by for example creating a pool of money to distribute. But that both a link tax and uncapped liabilities were a non-starter and a potential existential threat to the business. It’s no surprise that Google and Meta delinked the news. I just hope the taxpayers don’t have to continue funding Trudeau’s idiocy until the next election. But there is no real hope of the NDP flipping on this so that hope is probably in vain.
- matbilodeau 3y agoSuggested workaround https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/ Most news outlets have rss feeds https://www.thestar.com/about/rssfeeds.html https://www.thestar.com/about/rssfeeds.html https://www.cbc.ca/rss/ https://www.cbc.ca/rss/
- kevincox 3y agoThe problem is that all of these feeds are huge and not relevant to my interest. For example I live in Toronto but the first 5 items in the CBC Toronto are not interesting to me. For example I see "It's like smoke on your wedding day — How the wedding industry is working around wildfires ". I couldn't give two hoots about people working around some smoke on their wedding. The General News category doesn't do much better. The category of each individual item doesn't help filtering, most of them are just labeled News/Canada/Toronto. I love RSS but I don't find these news company feeds compelling. They just pump out too much junk to fill the void of real news. However I would definitely click through links to their site when searching for news about specific events. But they have shot themselves in the foot. Now I am just going to be directed to US sources instead.
- jimnotgym 3y agoJust need the US and EU to follow suit now and the giants can get back to paying for what they use!
- alphanullmeric 3y agoWhat are they using?
- thorncorona 3y agoProbably cocaine. By the looks of it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- scarface_74 3y agoAnd in Australia it was pushed by Rupert Murdoch. But fair is fair. If publishers want to force social media to pay for news content. Social Media has every right to refuse to pay and refuse to redistribute.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago> Social Media has every right to refuse to pay and refuse to redistribute. Unfortunately Brazil is trying to take that right away, too. Hopefully they fail at doing so.
- jupp0r 3y agoWhat leverage do they have? Companies can always pull out of the country entirely.
- tradewinds 3y agoWell, the leverage is that some profit is better than no profit, in theory.
- bratao 3y agoBrazil is currently considering a similar law that would require social networks to compensate content creators for each republication [1]. However, unlike the situation in Canada, the Brazilian lawmakers have taken into account this scenario. The law mandates that social networks cannot cease publishing the content and must negotiate compensation in "fair terms." Personally, I find this approach to be quite perplexing. [1] Source: https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/politica/2023/04/5089930-pl-das-fake-news-deputados-querem-obrigar-remuneracao-de-criadores-de-conteudo.html https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/politica/2023/04/50899...
- amusingimpala75 3y agoSo if I understand correctly, those companies are now going to be forced into paying for products that they cannot just stop using?
- JoshTriplett 3y agoOr fighting a legal battle (which they will hopefully fight and win), or leaving the jurisdiction and then saying "good luck with that, let's find out how much of your companies' revenue we were driving".
- intrasight 3y agoIf they just showed the title and the link - like they used to - they it would drive revenue. But because they show a synopsis of the news, people very often don't click the link.
- amadeuspagel 3y agoThis doesn't happen automatically, it's something websites have to set up: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/cards/overview/abouts-cards https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/c...
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- TekMol 3y agoNews outlets usually provide RSS feeds. Don't they allow to show the contents of those feeds on websites? And isn't showing the content of the RSS feed "fair use" anyhow? When I look at the content of the Toronto Star for example: https://www.thestar.com/content/thestar/feed.RSSManagerServlet.articles.topstories.rss https://www.thestar.com/content/thestar/feed.RSSManagerServl... My gut feeling is that showing those short snippets with a link to the articles should be fair use. Am I wrong?
- throw0101c 3y ago> And isn't showing the content of the RSS feed "fair use" anyhow? Fair use and copyright are 'artificial' legal constructs, so if they were defined in an 'arbitrary' way to begin with, they can be redefined to add or remove provisions. These online publishing laws could tweak those provisions. Also: when an RSS/Atom feed is published, it is still copyrighted, and the terms and conditions would/could perhaps be defined what "fair use" is by copyright holder (maybe?).
- TekMol 3y agoSure, laws are human constructs. But what is the situation in Canada now? Did they really put a law into place which says "When you link to a page with a short excerpt to show what the link is about, this is now a copyright violation"? Wouldn't that also make search engines illegal?
- d0gsg0w00f 3y ago> Wouldn't that also make search engines illegal? Seems like yes. From the article: "The tech giant plans to remove news links from its search engine, Google News and Google Discover for only Canadian publishers and readers."
- robryan 3y agoSeems like this will be much worse for the media companies. It isn't like most people who clicked on news while casually scrolling their feed are suddenly going to start going to all these news sites direct.
- whywhywhydude 3y agoGoing a step further, I think google should stop crawling websites that are paywalled. When I search for something, I want to see results that I can click on. Not some snippets from NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg and others which are heavily paywalled.
- carlosjobim 3y agoWhen I search for something I want the best results for the query, and sometimes those are behind a paywall.
- JoshTriplett 3y agoCheckbox, unchecked by default: [ ] I want to see results from sites I'd have to pay to access
- kccqzy 3y agoThe obvious problem to this armchair expert "solution" is that Google doesn't know what I am already paying. I pay NYT for a subscription, but Google doesn't know that. For obvious privacy reasons users don't want to tell Google what sites they already have subscriptions with. And I don't even log in to Google to do a search so there's no place to store that information even if I actively wanted to provide that to Google.
- JoshTriplett 3y agoI wasn't presenting it as a perfect solution. I was observing that many people don't want to see paywalled results, some may want to see all of them because they may choose to pay, some may want to see them because they plan to use a paywall bypass, and some as you pointed out may want to see the subset they already pay for but not others. As a first pass, a binary approach seems better than nothing, and is simpler to provide than a more complex user-subscription-specific solution.
- pipo234 3y ago
- lordleft 3y agoSurely news publications benefit more from Google/Facebook providing links to their content? It's a mutually beneficial relationship. I'm a bit puzzled as to why this was pushed, I'd love some context for this.
- JimtheCoder 3y agoJust Canadian politicians being Canadian politicians...that's really all the context you need.
- musha68k 3y agoLook at the constant internet censorship pressures in the UK. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree unfortunately.
- glonq 3y ago> Surely news publications benefit more from Google/Facebook providing links to their content? To paraphrase a great Canadian -- Yes they probably do. And don't call me Shirley.
- duringmath 3y agoLiberal politicians will pass any law seen as harmful to US tech companies consequences be damned. It's like California but on a national level, still not quite as insane thankfully.
- jug6ernaut 3y agoWhich state are these big US tech companies based in again? I may have missed it.
- whitewingjek 3y agoThe eff had an interesting article[1] about this issue (and others) as well as some alternative ways solve the issue, not that I agree with all of them. Ultimately, this is the wrong approach. The internet should be "open," and people or companies should be free to link to whatever they want without penalty. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech
- nceqs3 3y agoWhile I agree with them, it's important to note that the EFF is very pro-big tech and is largely funded by them.
- halJordan 3y agoPeople are so often surprised when the money in an industry funds an industry group. It's especially egregious in the defense industry when people turn it into conspiracy theories saying like "this think tank is a puppet because they got money from the people with money."
- jewelry 3y agoexactly. like how else they'll get the money? do you the random people donate?
- SllX 3y agoObviously a bake sale and all the members of the think tank have to work gig economy jobs in-between research, writing and speeches just to keep the lights on in a dinky little conference room of the sub-sub-sub basement of the Pentagon they rent out. Perks of the job mainly consist of being able to sporadically say “Gentlemen. You can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!” and having critics in the mainstream media that hate your guts and will—uncompensated!—drop your name on a frequent basis and imply you are much much much more important and influential than you actually are.
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- neverrroot 3y agoHow long till they will beg to be re-linked?
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 3y agoNot only will they beg, they'll offer money to be linked... like all advertisers.
- msla 3y agoBeg, nothing. They'll mandate Google link to them and pay the tax.
- graeme 3y agoYou generally can't force someone to do business with another company. You can tax a company and give that company to another organization. But you can't force google to run google news in a given jurisdiction.
- chroma 3y agoThat may be mostly true in the US, but many other parts of the world are more authoritarian. For example, Australia passed a law forcing Google to negotiate with news publishers regarding payment.[1] When France passed a law requiring that Google pay news sites for linking to them, Google tried to stop linking to those sites. In response, France sued Google for half a billion dollars for antitrust violations. 1. https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/25/after-facebooks-news-flex-australia-passes-bargaining-code-for-platforms-and-publishers/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/25/after-facebooks-news-flex-...
- graeme 3y agoFacebook and Google pulled out of news after that law was passed. They only returned when Australian publishers agreed to negotiate outside the law. For France, the devil is in the details. Google has agreements to fund news in many countries. This is generally a bribe it pays publishers not to pursue laws like this. Whereas the Canadian law seeks fairly unlimited payments. So the question in the French case is how much Google could actually be forced to pay. It sounds like they can still accept an unreasonable deal. https://www.politico.eu/article/french-competition-authority-greenlights-google-pledges-over-paying-news-publishers/ https://www.politico.eu/article/french-competition-authority...
- ortusdux 3y agoThey went to great lengths to no mention Meta. Bill C-18 changes the rules for linking by requiring two companies, including Google, to pay Canadian news publishers simply for linking to their sites.
- quitit 3y agoAlthough I disagree with this kind of law: Was it just linking? Or was it providing a useful summary that essentially renders no need to click the provided link? + the link Otherwise I can see why Google and Meta got the law, while Reddit, Apple news and others don't.
- adjav 3y agoReddit and Apple News will have the law applied to them as well, since the law doesn't include a list of sites affected, just the criteria under which affected sites fall.
- quitit 3y agoSo when google said 2 companies it was also as disingenuous as when they said "only linking"
- tomComb 3y agoIt’s just linking
- JoshTriplett 3y agoI doubt that's just "don't mention a competitor" (though that was likely a factor too). Saying "two" is an important point to emphasize: if this was a national law written to target just two companies, saying so makes the sentiment clear. And on top of that, I have the impression that Meta/Facebook has much lower public approval than Google.
- bdw5204 3y agoThe solution to this problem is for Google, Facebook and other web sites that link to news to limit links to web sites that agree that the free traffic they're receiving from extremely popular web sites is sufficient compensation for linking to them. In other words, block links to any web site that feels entitled to be paid for being linked to. There are plenty of web sites that will be happy to take the free traffic and it isn't like it matters to Facebook's bottom line if their mostly elderly users are arguing over some article from Fox News (which supports the journalism cartel bill in the US) or some article from Breitbart (which opposes the journalism cartel bill). I imagine it won't take long for Murdoch to change his mind and stop trying to shake down tech companies for the privilege of sending his media outlets free traffic.
- jsnell 3y agoThey cannot do that. The law forbids discriminating against any Canadian news business. If they link to news sites that don't demand payment but won't link to ones that want to be paid, it'd be viewed as retaliation. The only options are to accept the rigged negotiation process and pay all news business vastly inflated rates, or to link to none of them.
- andromeduck 3y agoIsn't price discrimination the whole point of having a private sector?
- Zetice 3y agoMaybe, or maybe the law will be scoped narrowly via the bench.
- akira2501 3y ago> to limit links to web sites that agree that the free traffic they're receiving from extremely popular web sites is sufficient compensation for linking to them. The problem with this is there's no direct relationship between the two. So Google and Facebook can arbitrarily decide to "punish" a paper by demoting or flat out filtering their content. These platforms aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. They put this content on their platform because it made their platform more popular and provided value for them, and now that they've monopolized user attention, they're directly weaponizing it. > There are plenty of web sites that will be happy to take the free traffic So.. it's a race to the bottom. News sources are no longer selected based upon quality or user demand, but on their willingness to be used by billion dollar tech giants. I'm sure the quality of the reporting will be identical.
- anderspitman 3y agoThe web may never be better than it was about 5 years ago, and that makes me very sad
- randcraw 3y agoMake that 25 years ago, before the FAANGs came out.
- shadowgovt 3y agoN'ah, I remember that era. Search engines were basically worthless. Google was the first one to get the formula right. Before Google, search engines were basically just doing keyword matching and so you'd have the issue that every search for a programming topic landed you on expertsexchange. Google was the first to start leveraging click-away signal, and they were able to successfully down-sample keyword-farmers like that one and their ilk.
- chongli 3y agoSearch engines were bad in the 90's, but the web was much smaller and community-driven. Most of the websites people visited were created by individuals and people linked to each other to form web rings.
- shadowgovt 3y agoI remember. It was the worst. Crawling a ring all day to find useful content was incredibly inconvenient.
- tenebrisalietum 3y agoExpertsexchange was one of the main reasons I began contributing to Stack Overflow in 2010-ish.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoI'm not going back to using Alta Vista, no thanks.
- paddw 3y agoMany people who would otherwise be appalled at laws like this seem to want to rationalize this because its specifically targeting Google and Meta. Sometimes taking the simple view is correct: It's a bad thing to prevent sites from linking to one another. It's a bad thing to interfere with the ability to access information on the Internet for reasons of nationalist politics.
- dirtyid 3y ago> bad thing to interfere with the ability to access information on the Internet for reasons of nationalist politics Or after 20 years, non Americans recognize information control should be more nationalized instead of under perview of US companies.
- pyrale 3y ago> Many people who would otherwise be appalled at laws like this seem to want to rationalize this because its specifically targeting Google and Meta. It's not just a matter of the targeted companies being Google and Meta, even though these two especially deserve it. It's the simple realization that good journalism requires good money, and that the current balance between news organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task. It is also true of other type of content creators, by the way: there is a structural imbalance between content creators and content brokers. This is even more true with Google's zero-click efforts. While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt.
- duringmath 3y agoThere's no imbalance here: newspapers produce content, search engines/social networks surface and link to it. What's happening here is that publishers and their owners somehow figured these pesky internet wiz kids owe them more money.
- pyrale 3y ago> There's no imbalance here: newspapers produce content, search engines/social networks surface and link to it. As evidenced by the average RoI at Google compared to news organisations.
- asfarley 3y agoDeeply shameful, as a Canadian. I did not ask for this.
- palijer 3y agoYeah, it doesn't look like they asked every single individual Canadian what they wanted. But here are the details for what was driving this. https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/fair-revenue-sharing/stakeholder-engagement.html https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/fair-re...
- LegitShady 3y agoYou have it backwards. Thats the way they justify what they already had planned. That didn’t drive this, that’s the post-decision excuse. “We consulted with stakeholders and press decided they really wanted that money”
- ix-ix 3y agoMeh, as a Canadian, this might not be perfect, but I am happy whenever the government attempts to revitalize Canadian heritage and remove American influences.
- LegitShady 3y agoAs a canadian, this is a disaster of legislation, and I don't celebrate attempts at anything that are so bad for the internet. The precedent this sort of legislation sets will break the internet and also make companies leave canada in fear of having legislation targeted at them. And for no gain at all. No Canadian heritage will be saved, and this doesn't remove american influences because google and meta were going to be charged for linking to canadian news, not american news. Still 100% ok to link to american news. This legislation does the opposite of what you're claiming.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoIs there really anything new in this post from the news that came out last week?
- AlanYx 3y agoLast week it was Facebook. Today it's Google too. And the impact is arguably more significant given that Google is delisting Canadian news from their core search engine (not just from news.google.com), which has 92% market share in Canada.
- swader999 3y agoAs a Canadian, I don't really care about this. The informed citizen model is already broken by censorship, cancel culture, corporate influence, paywalls, monopolies and a soon to be flood of AI content. Burn it all down imo and let something else take its place. I only use google news now to see what agenda/narrative is being pushed at the moment or maybe to check the weather.
- gwright 3y ago> Burn it all down imo and let something else take its place. Probably hyperbole, but catastrophic failure of our economy/institutions/society isn't something I would choose to experience. This nihilistic attitude is dangerous, IMHO. In the extreme, it is a self-fulfilling approach with severe consequences. Seems like we should be able to do better than that as a society.
- swader999 3y agoIt really has nothing to do with my attitude. Reality is the majority of the electorate doesn't know/believe/care that this is an issue.
- ingen0s 3y agoIs Apple News affected by this?
- monsieurgaufre 3y agoDisclaimer: Am Canadian. The way i see it, it's a clear case of "we tried nothing and we're out of ideas" on BOTH sides. The canadian medias are boring and are mostly opinions and a few Reuters/AFP articles. On the other hand, GOOG and Meta are not even acknowledging that they're trying to bully nations around while providing a slowly worse service as time goes by and profiteering from work they acquire for free. I do understand that people weren't forced to use this service in the past and can (with some level of difficulties) remove their content. It's not as clear an issue some would like it to be. I know that I will remove myself of both these services in the future as they are hostile (and really, i should move to my own domain for lots of reasons).
- jupp0r 3y agoI don't see the problem. News outlets can now negotiate individually with Google if they still want the free traffic. Google will be paying $0 to them. Other outlets who don't want the free traffic from Google can choose to not receive it, as they can right now via robots.txt.
- monsieurgaufre 3y agoTraffic is generated by the content which is not free (most of the time) to produce. Google without content is what except an empty library? I'm not sure why people here are defending GOOG so much.
- throwawaycad11 3y agoCanadian here as well. Your assumption that traffic is generated by content (alone) is incorrect. Google is certainly profiting, but the news publisher will struggle to find readers without Google. It's a symbiotic relationship, but Google is doing the REAL work. If you don't believe that, build your own website and try to get people to read your content. Believe me, content doesn't matter as much as reach. If you want to support Canadian news outlets, then go to their websites directly. Let's see them stand on their own without Google, and see who provides the most value. This law will kill Canadian news outlets. No one pays for their content when there's a global ecosystem of stuff to subscribe to. That's capitalism. Good riddance.
- pessimizer 3y agoBetween legacy news organizations complaining about links and the censorship of news coming from blacklisted areas of the world, what will social media and news aggregators be left with? Also, I have to believe that some of these outlets will go under without social media traffic. You can get Canadian wire service content from any US website that decides to publish it.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agorelated: the official post from Google https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36523516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36523516
- agnosticmantis 3y agoI’m guessing if/when this takes effect, the publishers will have to buy ads on Google and FB to attract readers that would previously find the content in the said platforms? Seems like a win for the two companies.
- agnosticmantis 3y agoAlso it seems like a business opportunity to start a newspaper outside Canada that does journalism for Canada. Then you’d appear in search results for free, while your Canadian counterparts would have to pay for ads to show up on the first page.
- rafaelturk 3y agoUndeniable truth remains: This is such a bad regulation
- tomlin 3y agoUndeniable?
- opportune 3y agoI was curious how link taxes panned out in other places they were tried and found this: https://www.techdirt.com/2021/06/21/as-predicted-smaller-media-outlets-are-getting-screwed-australias-link-tax/ https://www.techdirt.com/2021/06/21/as-predicted-smaller-med... I honestly figured it would not even help the big sites - users would have to start deliberately going to those sites directly without first arriving there through an aggregator/search. Apparently that’s incorrect for major news organizations though still true for smaller ones (which I guess have not enough brand awareness for users to directly go to the site). I guess as it long as link taxes appear beneficial for major news organizations that can afford to lobby for them, we can sadly expect this to happen in more and more countries. IANAL but I understand that most Anglosphere countries outside the US have very different interpretations/not as strong guarantees of freedom of expression as in the US and some other Western countries. In countries with stronger protections I can’t imagine a link tax having legs. Given that a link itself is not IP/content (I think), what would be the legal basis for displaying it on a website requiring compensation to the linked site? Though I suppose there is some precedent for requiring link removal from eg Google through DMCA, it seems different because in that case it’s driving traffic to “stolen” content.
- rafaelturk 3y agoStartup idea: Canadian news, but based on US based website.
- pyrale 3y agoIt would be a pretty decent idea, if there wasn't a significant risk to get nuked by regulation in a couple years.
- human 3y agoAs a Canadian, I feel like this is terrible news. From a web publisher point of view, I do agree that Google is going to far sometimes by embeding the content directly in the SERP. They take it so far that most of the time you don’t even need to click on the article to get the summary.
- phailhaus 3y agoSo these news orgs are getting free advertising, and they want to be paid on top?
- isykt 3y agoFacebook and Google cache their content and display it on their own websites, negating the reason for clicking through to the website where the ad dollars would be generated for the content creators.
- cpncrunch 3y agoThat isn't the case for google news. There is just the article title, and a link to the publisher's website. If you mean on google search: caching can easily be disabled by using noarchive.
- Tyr42 3y agoThe law also include "indexing" and "ranking" under the definition of "makes available". So even crawling the sites requires an agreement now.
- s__s 3y agoThe data they cache and display is explicitly provided by the publishers for the sole purpose of being used that way. They are free to stop providing that data, or even opt out of indexing all together.
- tradewinds 3y agoIt's not really advertising when the user is specifically searching for news content. That's like saying the halibut fisherman is getting free advertising when you go to a restaurant and ask to see the menu.
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- phailhaus 3y ago
- bluenose69 3y agoI actually forgot about google-news. It used to be my landing page, long ago. Now my landing page is an actual (online) newspaper. I like the fact that it is well-organized, with curated content by professional reporters. I pay a little for this, but find it to be good value. I won't miss google news. And I never saw any real value in facebook. So, my response to this, as a Canadian, is "who cares, eh?"
- tick_tock_tick 3y agoI mean I'd assume you care. Either they are going to jack the price way up for you or the quality will plummet. They don't have a plan to just go without all the revenue they get from Google.
- sberens 3y agoCan someone ELI5 the argument for the bill? My impression is it's something like "news websites provide content that creates engagement which drives ad revenue, and the news websites want a piece of that revenue." Is my understanding correct? Also, I can see how it applies for Facebook, how does it apply to Google?
- bragr 3y agoThat's basically the issue. And Google because Google News.
- tradewinds 3y agoNot to argue in favour of the bill, but I think the idea is Google's whole business model relies on others for content, so a slice of that revenue should go to the content creators (even though the content creators gain from Google, and can generate their own ad revenues). The Liberal party is also trying to protect Canadian content (again, not to defend or advocate for this policy), and I'm sure this is part of it, even though it may ironically backfire and end up hurting Canadian news outlets.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cpncrunch 3y agoWhere are the adverts on google news? I haven't seen a single advert there in 10 years, and I just looked very carefully in case I somehow missed them, but no, there are none.
- tradewinds 3y agoEven within the search results, there will be ads. If you search "what happened in Canada today", Google will link some news and there will likely be a sponsored link or some form of income-generating item for Google. Then there's the data you're generating as you use Google to navigate to the content you want, which can also be sold. Google connects you to content, every dollar they make is dependent on a non-Google creator, with the exception of maybe some Maps/Earth use-cases.
- glonq 3y agoNow that I'm weaning myself off of reddit, my favorite "toilet reading" is news.google.com But since I'm in Canada, I suppose I'll go back to RSS or maybe AP news.
- m-p-3 3y agoRSS is IMO the best way to follow multiple websites, not only news.
- morkalork 3y agoMedia in Canada is in pretty dire straits right now. It looks like one of the last left-ish leaning papers (Toronto Star) is about to be gobbled up by post media. A huge swath of broadcast news media is owned by just one company, Bell which predictably leads to stories like "Top Bell Media executive urged CTV to avoid ‘negative spin’ on coverage of parent company". Plus the current batch of conservative leaders (PP, Danielle Smith, Ford..) all have an axe to grind with what they portray as leftist and woke media. Particularly the CBC, they'd love to see that dismantled. Then there's all the wonderful personalities involved like Conrad Black.
- peanuty1 3y agoImportant to note that the CBC is state-funded and even the previous leader of the ultra left-wing party, Tom Mulcair, has recently accused the CBC of having a heavy left-wing bias.
- morkalork 3y agoRight, who could forget PP asking Elon Musk to get the CBC flagged as state media in the same class as Xinhua and Russia Today.
- evandale 3y agoGreat job missing Tom Muclair who was the one mentioned in the comment.
- belval 3y agoI don't know about heavy but CBC is definitely left-leaning. I feel like that should be curbed with some watchdog for media impartiality (not sure how it could be implemented?) instead of doing away with it entirely. The reality is (at least in Quebec), we don't have much to replace it. This is also a new development in journalism at CBC, older journalists tend to value reporting over opinion pieces, whereas younger journalists feel like it's their "duty" to push their opinion onto the readership which is an extremely toxic ideology.
- 3y ago
- Permit 3y agoMy understanding is that Australia created a similar law and both FB/Google came to the bargaining table. Does anyone know what’s different this time? Is the law different? Is Canada a less valuable market?
- peanuty1 3y agoPresumably Meta has learned that media linking is not worth negotiating with hostile governments.
- ahahahahah 3y agoIf you were meta and wanted to go to that bargaining table, would you want to have a good understanding of the value that these links are providing you and your users? Would you maybe try to get that understanding by running a small test in the wild where you disabled these links for some users?
- jonny_eh 3y agoHow can you negotiate once the law was on the books? I assume that negotiations were attempting before the law was passed.
- jeffbee 3y agoThat's not exactly what happened. Facebook stopped serving Australian news stories and the Australian news industry immediately surrendered to Meta's terms.
- gameman144 3y agoMy read on this is that news organizations are upset that Google/Facebook are taking profits by providing cached content that makes people not want to actually click their links. If this is the primary concern, though, then wouldn't it make more sense to draft a law regulating content caching, rather than the pay-per-click approach? It seems like a law that said "Sites that serve any content which wasn't part of a 'you can cache me' section need to pay for that content" would address the concerns of both parties here. This would solve the alleged issue that news organizations are bringing up, while also making it totally clear what the consequences are. If you don't want Google to be able to use your content within search results that's totally fine, but you can't then also be mad that they don't surface your content in search results. Seems like letting news site determine what content Google can cache for its results, and then letting Google determine ranking based only on that data would be a completely reasonable compromise. As it stands now, though, Google is directly incentivized to just never surface these websites, which hurts everyone involved.
- xvector 3y agoIt is trivial, absolutely, absurdly trivial, for any site to opt out of Google caching.
- bastawhiz 3y ago> It seems like a law that said "Sites that serve any content which wasn't part of a 'you can cache me' section need to pay for that content" would address the concerns of both parties here. Because you can't have your cake and eat it too. If Google can't cache the whole article, they can't provide search for the article. That's why publishers are serving the full, unpaywalled article to Google: how do you index an article you can't cache? The publishers—today—can simply serve the paywalled versions to Google. The publishers want Google to keep a copy of their data to offer search services to Google's customers, but then want Google to pay for the privilege.
- josefx 3y ago> If Google can't cache the whole article, they can't provide search for the article. Google can index the articles independently of serving their entirety to visitors. Might as well claim that wikipedia can't have articles covering movies without acting as the worlds largest piracy site. > but then want Google to pay for the privilege. On the other hand Google wants all the articles for free, but doesn't have any motivation to share the users or ad impressions they attract.
- empressplay 3y agoLike weather reporting, journalism (in the 'what happened' sense, not all of this 'analysis' crap) should be funded by the public. The independence of the journalism department must be enshrined in law, but further I imagine a system where anyone can apply to become a journalist assuming they meet minimum requirements. You submit your accounts, and if they pass quality checks (including rejecting editorial content and passing basic fact checking) they get published and you get paid. Multiple accounts of the same event may (and should) be posted, and so then the reader can build a picture from those varied sources. This is citizen journalism, funded by the government and lightly edited, its purity spelled out to the literal letter by law. It's the only way out.
- motohagiography 3y agoA side effect of this implies that if the internet platforms drop all Canadian media as a result of this law, it demonetizes all Canadian media, and then the only Canadian media that survives is what is directly subsidized by the government at its discretion. I see why this "works" now. The effect is censorship and silencing of disfavoured outlets with the pretense of deniability. This country is a lost cause.
- tenebrisalietum 3y agoPossible non-sequitur: ... "if the internet platforms drop all Canadian media as a result of this law, it demonetizes all Canadian media, and then the only Canadian media that survives is what is directly subsidized by the government at its discretion." Does Canadian media have no other revenue stream other than the Internet?
- motohagiography 3y agoYes, let them eat radio spots.
- chongli 3y agoThey still own cable and satellite TV. They make a lot of their money from live sports, one of the only reasons to still subscribe to cable.
- photochemsyn 3y agoNot a problem. Go to ChatGPT and ask it to tell you the top ten Canadian media outlets. You can also ask for the top ten left-leaning, right-leaning, and tech/sci/engineering outlets. Then go to Wikipedia to get the urls for each. Bookmark all the sites and write a little Python scraper to get all the headlines each day. Then, say goodbye to Alphabet and Meta.
- timbit42 3y agoWhy not just use RSS/Atom?
- cosmojg 3y agoForget about Google and Meta, they'll be fine, but those poor local news sites are screwed.
- jeffbee 3y agoMost Canadian media is owned by asset-stripping American private equity firms, just like American newspapers. They just want to get paid, and have figured out a particular way that Canadian, Australian, German, and Californian legislators can be duped into it.
- objektif 3y agoYeah Google never ever does this. They do not want money they just work for kisses and they are not evil at all.
- tensor 3y agoEvery company tries to earn money, that's not a problem. The problem is when a company tries to legislate themselves to be owed money, or eliminate competition via various means, that it becomes a problem. Companies should earn my by building good competitive products.
- gwright 3y agoOne reason to advocate for a government with minimal power is to avoid the temptation to legislate preferential treatment. If the government has been granted more expansive powers, it is inevitable, and arguably rational, for those affected to try to steer regulations in a way that benefits them.
- gostsamo 3y agoThere is no vacuum in power. If it is not the government enforcing one mechanism, it will be another player leveraging another. The fantasy that if it wasn't for the government, everything would be sunshine and roses should be brought behind the barn and finished for good.
- gwright 3y agoHow do you define ‘power’. The unique aspect of government controls is that we grant the government a monopoly on force (imprisonment, seizure of property, etc). That is not the case with private actors and that is a significant and consequential difference in ‘power’.
- stainablesteel 3y agoit seems like the canadian government wants to use its news as propaganda in small local regions without the rest of the world being able to figure it out via searching for it. this might also be a leeway for charging the same cost to social media sites. might this be an insidious form of censorship? given the canadian government's strong ties to its government-funded media, this sounds like it could be concerning.
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- johnnyApplePRNG 3y agoThis is only going to kill Canadian news outlets more than they're already dead. If you're not on Google, you don't exist to 99% of the world. I expect their readership to fall at least 50% overnight.
- cratermoon 3y agoLoss of news in Canada via Google won't really happen. Google and the news outlets will negotiate new agreements in line with the law. Same with Facebook. It's in all parties interest to find an acceptable compromise. Unless Google or Facebook decide to get out of one side of online ad business entirely.
- mgraczyk 3y agoI was at Facebook working on ranking when a similar thing happened with Australia. Showing news is a net negative for Facebook and probably not very positive for Google. Facebook's short and long term metrics were better without news. Facebook and Google are basically doing charity when they link to local news sites. These laws make absolutely no sense when you think about that.
- cubefox 3y agoWell, the users of Facebook/Google would like to link to those sites, and Facebook/Google would like to keep those users...
- mgraczyk 3y agoYes the users want that content, but generally not as much as they want other content that Facebook could show instead
- esperent 3y agoI think this is one of those things where you might think that, and the numbers might show it, and yet if you remove it human nature will surprise you. People expect to be able to find and share everything, including the long tail of their interests. If they suddenly can't, they'll look for alternatives. In the case of Google, there are a lot of alternatives and while Google just keeps getting worse, the alternatives are better then ever. Even if a person only searches for news items a few times a month, if they suddenly can't do that, they'll just go find an alternative search engine.
- kwar13 3y agoCanada is a tight oligopoly and they don't like when you can read anything other than they want you too.
- wintogreen74 3y ago>> Walker said he wrote a letter to Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez early Thursday morning to inform him and his team of the decision. The fact that this is being lead by the Minister of Heritage should tell you how little this has to do with actual business and technology justifications.
- post-it 3y agoThe Department of Canadian Heritage is responsible for media and broadcasting. The CRTC, Canada's broadcasting regulator, is also part of the department.
- j45 3y agoThis will likely have a worse effect than intended of fewer people having access to Canadian ends and instead American news or worse the meme news networks that have out educated press conferences over the pandemic.
- moneywoes 3y agoDidn’t they try this in Australia and it failed?
- jxdxbx 3y agoThe argument is always that these companies are using and benefiting from news for free. Now, they aren't. It's weird to create a new kind of property right and then complain that companies are choosing to simply stop doing the thing that triggers the new right.
- kmeisthax 3y agoThey didn't want to create a new property right, they wanted money to move out of Google's pockets and into news agencies' pockets. Link rights were just a means to do so. The state chose to use this tool because commercial benefit is very legible[0] to states and copyright is a familiar hammer[1]. It was thought that big tech was gaining $X from having news on their site and that they could make $X * 0.3 of that move into the pockets of news companies. When you see that kind of situation, you invent a new kind of property right to make the people benefiting from the resource have to pay into something. Problem with this model is that it's too simplistic. Big tech doesn't sell news. They sell ads. In fact, the main reason why news companies are ailing today is because big tech siphons off much of the ad revenue that they would have sold directly before the Internet. Google or Facebook can take the 5% that news companies might ask for and just... deduct it from their ad revenue somehow. They control the analytics behind this and news companies are in no position to credibly question them. The only way to stop this madness is to ban economic centralization - i.e. enforce antitrust law by breaking up all these companies and forcing them to be sold to different competing owners. Governments, of course, don't want to do that. This is not because they've suddenly become right-libertarians or ancaps. This is because large monopolies are both legible and corrigible[2]. Google, Facebook, or Reddit is far more likely to pay a 5% link tax than, say, hundreds of individual Fediverse instance operators. This is, of course, a regulatory curse - the bigger you make the organization, the more likely that organization can exert power back upon your government. This is not solely the function of generalized abstract "corruption." Economic power is itself a form of political power and letting companies grow too big is like Congress delegating legislative power to the President. [0] Legible meaning that the organization can understand it at an institutional level. [1] As in, if all you have is copyright, everything looks like a nail. [2] Corrigible meaning that the organization is capable of maintaining regulatory controls over the target organization.
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- post-it 3y agoI think this will turn out great. As a news outlet, there are two ways it could go: - Your revenue goes up, because people are now visiting your website and giving you ad hits instead of just seeing a blurb on Facebook. - Your revenue goes down, because nobody cares about news unless it's dropped in their feed, and the few page views you were getting are now gone. Not to worry, you can strike a deal with Facebook and Google for them to reinstate your links for $0. The secret third option is that your revenue goes down, you go to Facebook and Google to ask them to show your links again, and they ask you to pay them for the privilege of having your links shown. Diclaimer: I have not yet read the bill. Edit: After reading the bill, it looks like if Google links to any news at all in Canada, it has to participate in the bargaining and arbitration process, so their only winning move is not to play. Looks like Option B won't work unless all of the news outlets decide on it together.
- jsnell 3y ago> Not to worry, you can strike a deal with Facebook and Google for them to reinstate your links for $0. That option does not exist in practice. The companies cannot strike a deal with just one publication and not others. After having made one deal, even at $0, the other publications will just be able to name their price, because the law sets up forced arbitration with parameters that basically tell the arbitrators to give the publication what they want.
- laserDinosaur 3y ago"because of the Liberal government's Online News Act" That's an odd sentence. Shouldn't it just say "From the government"? Seems weirdly leading to point that it out as "because of the liberal government". I dunno, I don't read much news.
- realprimoh 3y agoThe name of the party in power right now in Canada is called the Liberal Party. That's why Liberal is capitalized.
- throw0101a 3y agoThe Liberal Party of Canada is currently the party that has the most seats, and whose leader is the Prime Minister, and whose members are various cabinet ministers. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_of_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_of_Canada So the (capital-l) Liberals are currently running the government. So Liberal government. There is also the capital-c Conservatives: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Party_of_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Party_of_Canada
- rifty 3y agoI guess news outlets are realizing late that what they sold to the masses is largely the headline feed which is something the internet can re-aggregate for free. On the internet they can’t rely on gatekeeping the distribution to be their moat so they need regulation. If it wasn’t Canadian outlet favouring, a generalized form of this bill would be like saying, aggregate feeds shouldn’t aggregate their competitor aggregate feeds for free. I guess this could potentially make the ecosystem less organized around a few big sharing platforms, but I don’t feel like this helps a lot of the smaller outlets. It feels like it maybe just works for the big ones who already have a lot of mind share and can worry less about being linked to in a feed.
- bawolff 3y agoRip canadian news sites. This seems like an incredible self-own. News aggregators drive traffic and relavence. If anything news sites were getting the better end of the bargin Luckily the beaverton is unaffected: https://www.thebeaverton.com/2023/06/editorial-with-news-blocked-on-facebook-we-the-beaverton-are-now-the-sole-arbiters-of-truth/ https://www.thebeaverton.com/2023/06/editorial-with-news-blo...
- sandworm101 3y agoAm I the only one who won't notice this change? I have never used google news. When I want to read news I go to the news sources. I'll read BBC or whatever other news outlet I choose. I do not want or need google to decide what I should or should not read. But maybe I am just old. Maybe people want a little robot picking and choosing content for them. Maybe websites are as dead as printed paper.
- activiation 3y agoGoogle need to pay for its copyright infringements ... Not exactly sure if that's what this is about though
- beboplifa 3y agocanada has always had the media monopolies control the politics, now they are just getting the dividends from that control
- Zufriedenheit 3y agoIf i read this correctly they will also be delisted from google search, which is almost equivalent to being erased from the internet nowadays. The newspaper business model seems to be broken but i don't think this is the way to fix it.
- rekabis 3y agoJust like how it was tried (and quickly repealed) in Australia, news orgs in Canada will see their traffic plummet massively and significantly, and then scream bloody murder to have this law rolled back. Google and Facebook (along with other social media sites) are the primary method by which news orgs have their individual articles percolate through the population. This law cuts that exposure off at the knees, and by proxy, any revenue gained from having readers pulled into these articles. Most people don’t go directly to a news org website to read news. I don’t. No-one I know does. We just see interesting articles as they pop up in our social media.