11 ms·

Many people who would otherwise be appalled at laws like this seem to want to rationalize this because its specifically targeting Google and Meta. Sometimes ta

by paddw 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. 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 ago
  There'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.
    - tempestn 3y ago
      I expect you'll find that discontinuing their news linking service in Canada has very little effect on Google's profitability.
      - pyrale 3y ago
        I agree that Canada should probably have targeted their ad service rather than which link they publish.
    - throwuwu 3y ago
      One is the world’s dominant gateway to the internet, the others are a handful of websites.
    - amf12 3y ago
      > As evidenced by the average RoI at Google compared to news organisations. Not a good metric. The ROI difference is because of both entities being in different industries, and other things unrelated to the power balance. We can similarly compare the ROI of a news organization and say a restaurant and lament that there is an imbalance of power.
  - tenpies 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - pschuegr 3y ago
      Care to provide verifiable details and a timeline for "look like North Korea and China"? Because otherwise this smells like sensationalism to me. Hate is already defined in Canadian law wrt hate crimes, btw, and that predates the Trudeau-monster by decades.
      - osigurdson 3y ago
        With out a verifiable “roadmap to tyranny”, must we necessarily conclude that everything is fine?
        pschuegr 3y ago
        "Everything is fine" is a position taken by nobody afaict. But if someone is going to make brash claims they better have more than just bluster otherwise they're actively worsening discourse IMO.
        osigurdson 3y ago
        What claims can be made with current information in your opinion? Is the Trudeau regime , just another run of the mill Canadian government or possibly something more sinister (or at least more corrupt).
        pschuegr 3y ago
        I don't claim to be super-knowledgeable on this topic but IMO the current government is marginally competent and so far I'd say they seem about as corrupt as the Liberals normally are, which is to say: unacceptably. I'm not sure they're any worse than previous iterations, but history will decide. The emergency measures act stuff seems like it was mishandled to me. I find the leadership to be heavy-handed with the virtue signalling, but they're playing to the crowd in the same way that the Conservatives play to the anti-woke crowd - I despise it on both sides. They're doing a whole pile of nothing about healthcare and the housing situation, and I think it'll cost them the next election. In a world with better options I'd never vote Liberal, but since the Conservatives can't seem to come up with a coherent environmental plan to save their lives (and have abandoned what was originally their carbon tax plan because "The Liberals like it so it must be bad"), and the best leader they can come up with was encouraging people to buy crypto right before it crashed, they still seem like the better option. And I say this with a sour taste in my mouth. What's your take?
  - Majromax 3y ago
    > There's no imbalance here: newspapers produce content, search engines/social networks surface and link to it. The imbalance is that as platforms, newspapers cross-subsidize content. Interesting headlines attract readers to the newspaper, but once in hand readers are likely to continue reading the other, less unique articles. (See also why newspapers carry sports scores and comics). An investigative report is by itself a money-loser, but the overall effect on net readership is a win. Aggregators break newspapers as platforms. Google et al provide extra discoverability for a single article, certainly, but then there's no lock-in to keep readers on the (now) website, reading more and seeing other ads. Headline-and-summary view might even result in zero-click satisfaction, denying the outlet even that first impression. This might just be a change that the industry must adapt to, in the same way that television and radio news took over the news-breaking role. However, it is more than a trivial threat to the fundamental business model of a news outlet; it's not (just) superficial greed.
    - tensor 3y ago
      Personally I'd be happy to see the ad driven model die. It used to be that people bought newspapers or didn't read them. They still had some ads, granted, but far less intrusive than today's web ads with their colours and animations. I'm huge into supporting good journalism, and think we need some sort of intervention here. But I'm very very strongly opposed to this new law. If news sites want to charge for their content they should put it behind a pay gate. I pay for news, but insultingly they STILL feed me ads. There is no tier that I can pay for that will eliminate the ads. I really don't have much sympathy for them given their refusal to somehow adapt to the times and offer service that users feel valuable enough to pay for.
      - Majromax 3y ago
        > If news sites want to charge for their content they should put it behind a pay gate. This is the 'trade journalism' model. Here, good journalism still exists, but the price is more than most people would afford. People buy trade journals when the news is important, with direct financial implications that justify the cost of admission. General journalism, however, is something close to a public service. It's better in a vague, hand-wavy way to have an educated citizen body that's informed about current affairs, but few individual citizens derive much value from their own knowledge. (This is also why people tend to gravitate towards 'entertaining' news, by some definition. Come for the sports scores, stay for current events.) In this model, the benefit of news is externalized. I benefit when other people are educated. This is a classic market failure, and it suggests that a reader-pays framework will underprovide news.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  Don't want people gazing on your property? Erect a fence. Nothing prevents media sites from implementing access controls to only allow paying customers.
  - pyrale 3y ago
    That's a classic case of prisoner's dilemma though. By acting at national level, news publishers (partially) avoid that dilemma.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Don't want people stepping on your property? Shoot them down, why bother calling the police!
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    No one pays. Journalism is a public good that will not exist if the current status quo continues. It’s in societies interest to ensure that doesn’t happen but everyone wants to free ride
    - int_19h 3y ago
      If no-one pays, then society as a whole clearly disagrees that it is a public good. Or, at least, that it is a public good worth the expense.
    - revelio 3y ago
      There are plenty of news websites with paywalls, it's common amongst conservative media. It's primarily the left wing media that thinks the government should tax tech firms instead of newspapers being required to charge customers.
      - gbear605 3y ago
        …what? I’m not familiar with Canadian papers, but at least with American news sources most of the national newspapers have paywalls regardless of ideology (NYT, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal), while television news (CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC) and right-wing sources tend to be ad supported (Breitbart, New York Post), and more left-wing sources usually tend to be some form of donation funded (Jacobin, Mother Jones). If this were passed in the US, the big winners would be right-wing sources and the television news networks.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  >> While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt. I normally agree with release early, collect data and iterate. I'm not sure the law, with a bill of this impact, dependent on a bunch of politicians with obvious bias, who just went on summer vacation for 3 months, falls into this category.
- musha68k 3y ago
  Just tax big companies more liberally, in general and everywhere. No need to target so specifically, e.g. there is so much value in all the data that citizens all around the world are providing, almost for free… maintenance costs for supporting usage are low in comparison, check yearly investor reports for profits. Then we’d not only have enough financial resources to subsidize a free and healthy press but also for other worthy endeavours like better health care, open source software, science, etc. All without hampering with basic pillars of the web.
- graeme 3y ago
  >While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt. The problem is media companies have been pushing this exact blueprint for d years. decades. It is a terrible, terrible template. If countries want to tax big tech and give the money to media organizations, they should be honest about it. Laws like this distort reality. >the current balance between news organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task. This doesn't make sense. Newspapers want links to their stories. I've even seen media organization paying "internet brokers" to advertise stories. The law has the economics of the internet backwards. To receive a link is to benefit, everyone knows this except the government.
  - pyrale 3y ago
    > This doesn't make sense. Newspapers want links to their stories. Newspapers want monetization. There are three ways linking to stories equal monetization: * Newspapers get enough ad money through these link. This mostly doesn't work. * Newspapers cut their costs and deliver shitty clickbait. * Newspapers get funded by "philantropy". This ranges from newspapers independently funded by trust funds to newspapers being bought by magnates. Overall, we can see that linking is far from enough for most newspapers to publish independent, quality work. > To receive a link is to benefit, everyone knows this except the government. This appears to no longer be true. Groups benefiting from internet are mostly eyeball brokers, not content distributors.
    - sroussey 3y ago
      Newspapers lost monetization when they lost their classifieds business.
    - bandrami 3y ago
      4: Links bring in readers who then decide to support the journalism. I personally believe reader support is the only viable option going forward.
      - munk-a 3y ago
        I whole heartedly agree - I think subcription is an immense boon to services like these... that being said, if Google parses most of your article into their news tab and then only serves up an amp'ified version of your site it can be quite difficult to actually present users with an option to subscribe. I'm a Canadian and I don't like C-18, but I also think that search/aggregation companies have far too loose a leash right now and are curating an environment where they'll take home all the revenue.
- AYBABTME 3y ago
  > there is a structural imbalance between content creators and content brokers As seen in Twitch.tv vs Kick.com where streamers are dropping Twitch and migrating en-masse to Kick. Abusing the content creators can backfire. However Google is in a different situation; they have a virtual monopoly on content discovery and not existing on Google basically means not existing at all. How do you fix that? Is Google an internet-utility? Should it be regulated as such?
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    It's not a utility. Search might be, and the state is welcome to start its own search engine and run it as a utility, paying zero innovation wages as utilities do.
    - AYBABTME 3y ago
      Google the search engine is critical internet infrastructure, and innovation into it is stagnant from a user's perspective.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        It is not internet infrastructure at all. It's a consumer tool, potentially about to be replaced by AI. Another thing about utilities: water or electricity are fungible goods, easily measured. Search is rather trickier to decide what a good outcome is, and the thought of paying for politicians and administrators to debate search rank orders for eternity seems a terrible use of money. Finally, things like water supply have been around for tens of thousands of years. Thinking search hasn't done so much in the last 10 maybe be a little short term! Thinking it will be around in the long term at all, and thus worth converting may also be a little short term.
        AYBABTME 3y ago
- LegitShady 3y ago
  I disagree that its welcome. I think its just a shakedown.
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  > 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. Let's go 100%. Will journalists then pay people who they report on?
- lkhtbn 3y ago
  We need proper paid subscriptions again, but we have the chicken/egg problem that people only pay for extremely high quality sources, but there are none. CBC has received $1.2 billion annually from the federal government (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporation#Financing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporat...) and is very ... government friendly ... in matters like the trucker protests. I remember more independent press around 2000-2010, where there was true opposition in the media. I see nothing like that now.
- brokenkebaby 3y ago
  Slogans like "good journalism requires good money" don't really bring any reasonable argument to the table, let's be frank. Neither good journalism nor good money is defined for everyone, and the correlation between the two is not really established. One may say media corporations used to have an unwarranted political influence, and excessive revenues during the TV era, and now things are settling to a level which is more normal than the past which media people would like to bring back.
- LudwigNagasena 3y ago
  If there were any quality journalism to be found and to be needed by people, posting headlines wouldn’t prevent them from clicking the link.
- bawolff 3y ago
  > 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. Nobody owes anyone else a business model.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > Nobody owes anyone else a business model But there is public interest in having newspapers. (A tax on large digital ad platforms to subsidise newspapers makes much more sense.)
    - bawolff 3y ago
      Canada does have a bunch of subsidies for news already (not to mention cbc is gov funded)
- rstuart4133 3y ago
  > While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt. First attempt for Canada maybe. Australia did it a few years ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56163550 The first draft of that law was initially written by the news companies themselves, and was a hilarious exercise in overreach. (For example, the first draft insisted news companies be allowed to edit joe citizens posts to the media companies Facebook page.) The version put before parliament was watered down and vague enough that after Facebook stopped posting Australian news, a compromise was reached that oddly didn't require a change to the legislation (and the media companies got far less). But Australia wasn't the first either. The Australian media companies got their idea from the French(?): https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/21/google-agrees-to-pay-french-publishers-for-news.html I agree with some other posters here. It's not welcome. It's a shakedown from dinosaurs grasping for straws, and to accommodate them the pollies stretched the definition of copyright even further. It was obvious it wouldn't work, and clearly hasn't worked in Australia. The newspapers are still posting large losses, still shutting down newsrooms. It's inevitable they will disappear in their current form. The newspapers business wasn't selling news or doing investigations to create news. Their business is the same as Google's: selling ads. The news was always just the bait they used to get people to read their ads and they shamelessly copied it, often with only a few words changed, between mastheads. Each had their own little area they sold to, the size largely determined by how far you ship dead trees in about 6 hours. Now the BBC, CNN, The Guardian and the other remaining big ones can reach the entire world now, so we don't need thousands of little mastheads all repeating the same news items. These big news rooms do a far better job that the little ones at gathering news, and selling ads. And so, the little mastheads will die. It's bad law because in order to cover this use case, they banned creating 10 or 20 word summaries of a 200 or 300 word article, expanding copyright accordingly. That had to do that because at least in Google's case, as all Google every did was post a few words and a link to the actual content, on the newspapers site. Copyright terms have already been stretched well beyond their utilitarian justification, probably by an order of magnitude. This stretches the definition of what is covered by copyright by a similar amount. Admittedly this stretch is fairly harmless here, but if it leaks into other domains we will have a mess on our hands.
- heywhatupboys 3y ago
  > 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. then why were most news publications as bad as they are now 20 years ago? maybe they just suck. I learn more from HN that some news site ever did. When I read american aerticles about my country, they are just plain WRONG.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  > It's the simple realization that good journalism requires good money If this were about good journalism then the law wouldn’t be necessary at all. The revenue these companies are generating from the journalism content is from displaying a headline. The whole point of the law is that the actual content of these articles is so utterly worthless, that users can’t even be bothered clicking on it. A substantial portion of those users derive all of the limited value that they believe it has by reading the headline alone. There is no legislative solution to that problem. This is law is only a solution to the problem of useless businesses being selected out of the market by their consumers.
barbazoo 3y ago
> 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. Would this prevent embedding links into your posts? I thought it's about platforms displaying enough information discouraging the person to visit the news site. I get that they want people to stay on their platforms 24/7 but I also get the other side wanting a slice of the advertising cake.
- monetus 3y ago
  When they said uncapped financial liability, I took that to also mean any meta user's post or search engine result that displayed the content could expose them financially - If I were a malicious actor, I would flood meta with posts from bots, and the equivalent to google results like posting too much of the article in the website's header.
- tomComb 3y ago
  No, the issue in this case is linking.
  - nomel 3y ago
    This is false. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36528169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36528169 Having any portion of the text present is enough.
- lemmox 3y ago
  I thought so too, and thought that removing the sites from Google Search was a bit bullyish, but it looks like the bill specifically targets links in (2)(b). "Making available of news content (2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if (a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or (b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content." https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-assent https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...
  - 3y ago
grecy 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. That was exactly the sentiment in Australia when similar laws were passed there. Many, many people just said "Good, it's about time Google and Meta paid their fair share of taxes". But they completely misunderstood they are not taxes at all, it's the Australian government collecting money, by law, to give directly to Rupert Murdoch (by law)
- adjav 3y ago
  Yeah, the biggest winner under the Canadian law will be the American hedge funds who own PostMedia, the company that owns the vast majority of Canadian newspapers. But that's good apparently, since at the least the money doesn't go to those icky tech nerds.
devsda 3y ago
I don't see how we can call this nationalistic politics. I'm sure if a (hypothetical) Canadian big-tech impacted news organizations similarly, they would also have been a target of this law. Many of the biggest tech have origins in US and any country trying to make a law regulating businesses and technology within its borders is bound to impact American companies one way or the other. We can take the easy route and call it just nationalism or we can try to understand the intention/reasons behind the law. We may not agree with their laws but it is their right.
- cornholio 3y ago
  Nobody denies its their right, but that doesn't mean it's not a very stupid action, motivated by dumb nationalism. You can't handwave circumstances away, as if the legislators don't know it is a cashgrab against foreign corporations and genuinely believe Google and Facebook are Canadian companies.
  - gremlinunderway 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - jurassic 3y ago
      I don't think it adds anything to the discussion to personify and sexualize these companies.
  - tomComb 3y ago
    It’s not dumb nationalism, it’s typical lobbying, sold as nationalism.
    - largepeepee 3y ago
      What's new? We have been using that same excuse to block out Japanese and Chinese goods in various eras. Just feels weird the Canadians are copying our playbook
tyingq 3y ago
It's a little more nuanced than "many people...rationalize...because it's specifically targeting Google". It wasn't that long ago that Google was forcing AMP onto the same publishers by making it a requirement to appear in the news carousel. That forced a lot of unwanted intrusion into content that wasn't Google's to mess with. Including a forced banner in the most valuable space, hijacking right/left swipes to navigate to competitor publisher sites, etc. They have a strong demonstrated history of doing the wrong thing in this space. Though, I agree, this law and the outcome aren't the solution.
- kittiepryde 3y ago
  AMP made the internet on my phone work. Most sites seem to dedicate 50% or more of the screen space to advertisements and load very slowly -- AMP sites were just crazy more performant -- I'm not saying AMP was the right move to make, but, it was trying to solve a real problem (similar to this bill also likely being the wrong move)
  - tyingq 3y ago
    It did have some benefits for consumers (and some drawbacks also). That doesn't really change what they did to publishers with it though.
  - basisword 3y ago
    AMP worked like shit for me. Any time I had weird behavioural issues with a site, I’d look to the address bar and spot AMP. Using an extensions to prevent AMP stealing my clicks has made my phones browser work much better.
    - jefftk 3y ago
      Guess: you were running iOS and your parent was running Android
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
Barrin92 3y ago
I've always considered linking perfectly fine, but what to me is shady when platforms start to summarize or preview content of the link to the point where that functions as a substitute for the site. There needs to be a distinction between reference to content and the content itself. When platforms start to profit from other people's work without their consent that shouldn't fly. Google search's primary purpose is to make links discoverable and I don't think anyone ever took offense to that. But in recent years companies have started to deliberately blur that line by showing more content upfront, essentially to turn themselves into a middleman and choke content producers. It's perfectly legitimate to not allow this.
- benedictevans 3y ago
  Snippets are explicitly declared in the metadata of a web page. Those previews only appear because the publisher explicitly asked for them to be used.
  - bpye 3y ago
    Well for Google specifically isn’t your ranking severely impacted if you don’t include them? In that case it’s hardly a choice.
    - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
      How tightly does Google check if the preview matches the real content?
basisword 3y ago
Governments are there to serve their citizens, not the interests of foreign multinational companies. If this is good for Canadian businesses and the citizens running them and working for them then good for them.
- p0pcult 3y ago
  [dead]
- throwaway104782 3y ago
  How is Google and Meta removing links to news businesses that really on eyeballs to generate revenue a good thing for those Canadian businesses?
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  If robbing is good for Canadian businesses and the citizens running them and working for them then good for them.
- cwalv 3y ago
  What about the citizens not running those businesses? This may not exactly be a "great firewall", but it seems like your argument could be applied equally to that, and it's hard for me to believe it's really a "good" for citizens in general
tomlin 3y ago
On the other hand, less people arguing over news articles may be what the world needs.
WheelsAtLarge 3y ago
We have seen that in other markets this type of law has hurt not helped publishers. This is Canada but it can easily be any country. We need a fix, big tech has monopolized ad revenue and is choking out the publishers. The quality of newspaper stories has deteriorated over the years and local news has suffered to the point of almost being nonexistent. Also, we now have very few companies that dominate the news. Look at how big the New York times has gotten. It's now the national newspaper in the US. All the other newspapers are nipping at it's ankles. It's a direct result of the fact that other newspapers can't compete without a steady flow of ad revenue. Big tech has sucked all the money which makes it hard for any newspaper to survive, specially regional ones. We need a fix.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- s__s 3y ago
  These News orgs haven’t adapted. They’re sitting around publishing long winded, biased stories on their shitty Wordpress implementation with sketchy ads wondering why they’re failing. I’d happily pay good money for high quality news / journalism presented appropriately for the medium. That means a lot of concise real time information, coupled with long form discussion and debate. All packaged up in a modern, high quality web app, with auxiliary mobile applications.
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    Are you paying for Reuters, New York Times, WaPo, et al right now?
    - s__s 3y ago
      No I’m Canadian, and those are American. I subscribe to Apple News for access to some Canadian sources, including my local newspaper. Though I don’t think it’s very good.
osigurdson 3y ago
Fully agree. The unfortunate part is Canadians don’t seem to care.

by paddw 3y ago

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 ago
There'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.
  - tempestn 3y ago
    I expect you'll find that discontinuing their news linking service in Canada has very little effect on Google's profitability.
    - pyrale 3y ago
      I agree that Canada should probably have targeted their ad service rather than which link they publish.
  - throwuwu 3y ago
    One is the world’s dominant gateway to the internet, the others are a handful of websites.
  - amf12 3y ago
    > As evidenced by the average RoI at Google compared to news organisations. Not a good metric. The ROI difference is because of both entities being in different industries, and other things unrelated to the power balance. We can similarly compare the ROI of a news organization and say a restaurant and lament that there is an imbalance of power.
- tenpies 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - pschuegr 3y ago
    Care to provide verifiable details and a timeline for "look like North Korea and China"? Because otherwise this smells like sensationalism to me. Hate is already defined in Canadian law wrt hate crimes, btw, and that predates the Trudeau-monster by decades.
    - osigurdson 3y ago
      With out a verifiable “roadmap to tyranny”, must we necessarily conclude that everything is fine?
      - pschuegr 3y ago
        "Everything is fine" is a position taken by nobody afaict. But if someone is going to make brash claims they better have more than just bluster otherwise they're actively worsening discourse IMO.
        osigurdson 3y ago
        What claims can be made with current information in your opinion? Is the Trudeau regime , just another run of the mill Canadian government or possibly something more sinister (or at least more corrupt).
        pschuegr 3y ago
        I don't claim to be super-knowledgeable on this topic but IMO the current government is marginally competent and so far I'd say they seem about as corrupt as the Liberals normally are, which is to say: unacceptably. I'm not sure they're any worse than previous iterations, but history will decide. The emergency measures act stuff seems like it was mishandled to me. I find the leadership to be heavy-handed with the virtue signalling, but they're playing to the crowd in the same way that the Conservatives play to the anti-woke crowd - I despise it on both sides. They're doing a whole pile of nothing about healthcare and the housing situation, and I think it'll cost them the next election. In a world with better options I'd never vote Liberal, but since the Conservatives can't seem to come up with a coherent environmental plan to save their lives (and have abandoned what was originally their carbon tax plan because "The Liberals like it so it must be bad"), and the best leader they can come up with was encouraging people to buy crypto right before it crashed, they still seem like the better option. And I say this with a sour taste in my mouth. What's your take?
- Majromax 3y ago
  > There's no imbalance here: newspapers produce content, search engines/social networks surface and link to it. The imbalance is that as platforms, newspapers cross-subsidize content. Interesting headlines attract readers to the newspaper, but once in hand readers are likely to continue reading the other, less unique articles. (See also why newspapers carry sports scores and comics). An investigative report is by itself a money-loser, but the overall effect on net readership is a win. Aggregators break newspapers as platforms. Google et al provide extra discoverability for a single article, certainly, but then there's no lock-in to keep readers on the (now) website, reading more and seeing other ads. Headline-and-summary view might even result in zero-click satisfaction, denying the outlet even that first impression. This might just be a change that the industry must adapt to, in the same way that television and radio news took over the news-breaking role. However, it is more than a trivial threat to the fundamental business model of a news outlet; it's not (just) superficial greed.
  - tensor 3y ago
    Personally I'd be happy to see the ad driven model die. It used to be that people bought newspapers or didn't read them. They still had some ads, granted, but far less intrusive than today's web ads with their colours and animations. I'm huge into supporting good journalism, and think we need some sort of intervention here. But I'm very very strongly opposed to this new law. If news sites want to charge for their content they should put it behind a pay gate. I pay for news, but insultingly they STILL feed me ads. There is no tier that I can pay for that will eliminate the ads. I really don't have much sympathy for them given their refusal to somehow adapt to the times and offer service that users feel valuable enough to pay for.
    - Majromax 3y ago
      > If news sites want to charge for their content they should put it behind a pay gate. This is the 'trade journalism' model. Here, good journalism still exists, but the price is more than most people would afford. People buy trade journals when the news is important, with direct financial implications that justify the cost of admission. General journalism, however, is something close to a public service. It's better in a vague, hand-wavy way to have an educated citizen body that's informed about current affairs, but few individual citizens derive much value from their own knowledge. (This is also why people tend to gravitate towards 'entertaining' news, by some definition. Come for the sports scores, stay for current events.) In this model, the benefit of news is externalized. I benefit when other people are educated. This is a classic market failure, and it suggests that a reader-pays framework will underprovide news.
kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
Don't want people gazing on your property? Erect a fence. Nothing prevents media sites from implementing access controls to only allow paying customers.
- pyrale 3y ago
  That's a classic case of prisoner's dilemma though. By acting at national level, news publishers (partially) avoid that dilemma.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Don't want people stepping on your property? Shoot them down, why bother calling the police!
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  No one pays. Journalism is a public good that will not exist if the current status quo continues. It’s in societies interest to ensure that doesn’t happen but everyone wants to free ride
  - int_19h 3y ago
    If no-one pays, then society as a whole clearly disagrees that it is a public good. Or, at least, that it is a public good worth the expense.
  - revelio 3y ago
    There are plenty of news websites with paywalls, it's common amongst conservative media. It's primarily the left wing media that thinks the government should tax tech firms instead of newspapers being required to charge customers.
    - gbear605 3y ago
      …what? I’m not familiar with Canadian papers, but at least with American news sources most of the national newspapers have paywalls regardless of ideology (NYT, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal), while television news (CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC) and right-wing sources tend to be ad supported (Breitbart, New York Post), and more left-wing sources usually tend to be some form of donation funded (Jacobin, Mother Jones). If this were passed in the US, the big winners would be right-wing sources and the television news networks.
deleted 3y ago
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skeeter2020 3y ago
>> While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt. I normally agree with release early, collect data and iterate. I'm not sure the law, with a bill of this impact, dependent on a bunch of politicians with obvious bias, who just went on summer vacation for 3 months, falls into this category.
musha68k 3y ago
Just tax big companies more liberally, in general and everywhere. No need to target so specifically, e.g. there is so much value in all the data that citizens all around the world are providing, almost for free… maintenance costs for supporting usage are low in comparison, check yearly investor reports for profits. Then we’d not only have enough financial resources to subsidize a free and healthy press but also for other worthy endeavours like better health care, open source software, science, etc. All without hampering with basic pillars of the web.
graeme 3y ago
>While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt. The problem is media companies have been pushing this exact blueprint for d years. decades. It is a terrible, terrible template. If countries want to tax big tech and give the money to media organizations, they should be honest about it. Laws like this distort reality. >the current balance between news organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task. This doesn't make sense. Newspapers want links to their stories. I've even seen media organization paying "internet brokers" to advertise stories. The law has the economics of the internet backwards. To receive a link is to benefit, everyone knows this except the government.
- pyrale 3y ago
  > This doesn't make sense. Newspapers want links to their stories. Newspapers want monetization. There are three ways linking to stories equal monetization: * Newspapers get enough ad money through these link. This mostly doesn't work. * Newspapers cut their costs and deliver shitty clickbait. * Newspapers get funded by "philantropy". This ranges from newspapers independently funded by trust funds to newspapers being bought by magnates. Overall, we can see that linking is far from enough for most newspapers to publish independent, quality work. > To receive a link is to benefit, everyone knows this except the government. This appears to no longer be true. Groups benefiting from internet are mostly eyeball brokers, not content distributors.
  - sroussey 3y ago
    Newspapers lost monetization when they lost their classifieds business.
  - bandrami 3y ago
    4: Links bring in readers who then decide to support the journalism. I personally believe reader support is the only viable option going forward.
    - munk-a 3y ago
      I whole heartedly agree - I think subcription is an immense boon to services like these... that being said, if Google parses most of your article into their news tab and then only serves up an amp'ified version of your site it can be quite difficult to actually present users with an option to subscribe. I'm a Canadian and I don't like C-18, but I also think that search/aggregation companies have far too loose a leash right now and are curating an environment where they'll take home all the revenue.
AYBABTME 3y ago
> there is a structural imbalance between content creators and content brokers As seen in Twitch.tv vs Kick.com where streamers are dropping Twitch and migrating en-masse to Kick. Abusing the content creators can backfire. However Google is in a different situation; they have a virtual monopoly on content discovery and not existing on Google basically means not existing at all. How do you fix that? Is Google an internet-utility? Should it be regulated as such?
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  It's not a utility. Search might be, and the state is welcome to start its own search engine and run it as a utility, paying zero innovation wages as utilities do.
  - AYBABTME 3y ago
    Google the search engine is critical internet infrastructure, and innovation into it is stagnant from a user's perspective.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      It is not internet infrastructure at all. It's a consumer tool, potentially about to be replaced by AI. Another thing about utilities: water or electricity are fungible goods, easily measured. Search is rather trickier to decide what a good outcome is, and the thought of paying for politicians and administrators to debate search rank orders for eternity seems a terrible use of money. Finally, things like water supply have been around for tens of thousands of years. Thinking search hasn't done so much in the last 10 maybe be a little short term! Thinking it will be around in the long term at all, and thus worth converting may also be a little short term.
      - AYBABTME 3y ago
LegitShady 3y ago
I disagree that its welcome. I think its just a shakedown.
cscurmudgeon 3y ago
> 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. Let's go 100%. Will journalists then pay people who they report on?
lkhtbn 3y ago
We need proper paid subscriptions again, but we have the chicken/egg problem that people only pay for extremely high quality sources, but there are none. CBC has received $1.2 billion annually from the federal government (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporation#Financing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporat...) and is very ... government friendly ... in matters like the trucker protests. I remember more independent press around 2000-2010, where there was true opposition in the media. I see nothing like that now.
brokenkebaby 3y ago
Slogans like "good journalism requires good money" don't really bring any reasonable argument to the table, let's be frank. Neither good journalism nor good money is defined for everyone, and the correlation between the two is not really established. One may say media corporations used to have an unwarranted political influence, and excessive revenues during the TV era, and now things are settling to a level which is more normal than the past which media people would like to bring back.
LudwigNagasena 3y ago
If there were any quality journalism to be found and to be needed by people, posting headlines wouldn’t prevent them from clicking the link.
bawolff 3y ago
> 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. Nobody owes anyone else a business model.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Nobody owes anyone else a business model But there is public interest in having newspapers. (A tax on large digital ad platforms to subsidise newspapers makes much more sense.)
  - bawolff 3y ago
    Canada does have a bunch of subsidies for news already (not to mention cbc is gov funded)
rstuart4133 3y ago
> While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt. First attempt for Canada maybe. Australia did it a few years ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56163550 The first draft of that law was initially written by the news companies themselves, and was a hilarious exercise in overreach. (For example, the first draft insisted news companies be allowed to edit joe citizens posts to the media companies Facebook page.) The version put before parliament was watered down and vague enough that after Facebook stopped posting Australian news, a compromise was reached that oddly didn't require a change to the legislation (and the media companies got far less). But Australia wasn't the first either. The Australian media companies got their idea from the French(?): https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/21/google-agrees-to-pay-french-publishers-for-news.html I agree with some other posters here. It's not welcome. It's a shakedown from dinosaurs grasping for straws, and to accommodate them the pollies stretched the definition of copyright even further. It was obvious it wouldn't work, and clearly hasn't worked in Australia. The newspapers are still posting large losses, still shutting down newsrooms. It's inevitable they will disappear in their current form. The newspapers business wasn't selling news or doing investigations to create news. Their business is the same as Google's: selling ads. The news was always just the bait they used to get people to read their ads and they shamelessly copied it, often with only a few words changed, between mastheads. Each had their own little area they sold to, the size largely determined by how far you ship dead trees in about 6 hours. Now the BBC, CNN, The Guardian and the other remaining big ones can reach the entire world now, so we don't need thousands of little mastheads all repeating the same news items. These big news rooms do a far better job that the little ones at gathering news, and selling ads. And so, the little mastheads will die. It's bad law because in order to cover this use case, they banned creating 10 or 20 word summaries of a 200 or 300 word article, expanding copyright accordingly. That had to do that because at least in Google's case, as all Google every did was post a few words and a link to the actual content, on the newspapers site. Copyright terms have already been stretched well beyond their utilitarian justification, probably by an order of magnitude. This stretches the definition of what is covered by copyright by a similar amount. Admittedly this stretch is fairly harmless here, but if it leaks into other domains we will have a mess on our hands.
heywhatupboys 3y ago
> 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. then why were most news publications as bad as they are now 20 years ago? maybe they just suck. I learn more from HN that some news site ever did. When I read american aerticles about my country, they are just plain WRONG.
AmericanChopper 3y ago
> It's the simple realization that good journalism requires good money If this were about good journalism then the law wouldn’t be necessary at all. The revenue these companies are generating from the journalism content is from displaying a headline. The whole point of the law is that the actual content of these articles is so utterly worthless, that users can’t even be bothered clicking on it. A substantial portion of those users derive all of the limited value that they believe it has by reading the headline alone. There is no legislative solution to that problem. This is law is only a solution to the problem of useless businesses being selected out of the market by their consumers.

barbazoo 3y ago

> 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. Would this prevent embedding links into your posts? I thought it's about platforms displaying enough information discouraging the person to visit the news site. I get that they want people to stay on their platforms 24/7 but I also get the other side wanting a slice of the advertising cake.

monetus 3y ago
When they said uncapped financial liability, I took that to also mean any meta user's post or search engine result that displayed the content could expose them financially - If I were a malicious actor, I would flood meta with posts from bots, and the equivalent to google results like posting too much of the article in the website's header.
tomComb 3y ago
No, the issue in this case is linking.
- nomel 3y ago
  This is false. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36528169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36528169 Having any portion of the text present is enough.
lemmox 3y ago
I thought so too, and thought that removing the sites from Google Search was a bit bullyish, but it looks like the bill specifically targets links in (2)(b). "Making available of news content (2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if (a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or (b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content." https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-assent https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...
- 3y ago

grecy 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. That was exactly the sentiment in Australia when similar laws were passed there. Many, many people just said "Good, it's about time Google and Meta paid their fair share of taxes". But they completely misunderstood they are not taxes at all, it's the Australian government collecting money, by law, to give directly to Rupert Murdoch (by law)

adjav 3y ago
Yeah, the biggest winner under the Canadian law will be the American hedge funds who own PostMedia, the company that owns the vast majority of Canadian newspapers. But that's good apparently, since at the least the money doesn't go to those icky tech nerds.

devsda 3y ago

I don't see how we can call this nationalistic politics. I'm sure if a (hypothetical) Canadian big-tech impacted news organizations similarly, they would also have been a target of this law. Many of the biggest tech have origins in US and any country trying to make a law regulating businesses and technology within its borders is bound to impact American companies one way or the other. We can take the easy route and call it just nationalism or we can try to understand the intention/reasons behind the law. We may not agree with their laws but it is their right.

cornholio 3y ago
Nobody denies its their right, but that doesn't mean it's not a very stupid action, motivated by dumb nationalism. You can't handwave circumstances away, as if the legislators don't know it is a cashgrab against foreign corporations and genuinely believe Google and Facebook are Canadian companies.
- gremlinunderway 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - jurassic 3y ago
    I don't think it adds anything to the discussion to personify and sexualize these companies.
- tomComb 3y ago
  It’s not dumb nationalism, it’s typical lobbying, sold as nationalism.
  - largepeepee 3y ago
    What's new? We have been using that same excuse to block out Japanese and Chinese goods in various eras. Just feels weird the Canadians are copying our playbook

tyingq 3y ago

It's a little more nuanced than "many people...rationalize...because it's specifically targeting Google". It wasn't that long ago that Google was forcing AMP onto the same publishers by making it a requirement to appear in the news carousel. That forced a lot of unwanted intrusion into content that wasn't Google's to mess with. Including a forced banner in the most valuable space, hijacking right/left swipes to navigate to competitor publisher sites, etc. They have a strong demonstrated history of doing the wrong thing in this space. Though, I agree, this law and the outcome aren't the solution.

kittiepryde 3y ago
AMP made the internet on my phone work. Most sites seem to dedicate 50% or more of the screen space to advertisements and load very slowly -- AMP sites were just crazy more performant -- I'm not saying AMP was the right move to make, but, it was trying to solve a real problem (similar to this bill also likely being the wrong move)
- tyingq 3y ago
  It did have some benefits for consumers (and some drawbacks also). That doesn't really change what they did to publishers with it though.
- basisword 3y ago
  AMP worked like shit for me. Any time I had weird behavioural issues with a site, I’d look to the address bar and spot AMP. Using an extensions to prevent AMP stealing my clicks has made my phones browser work much better.
  - jefftk 3y ago
    Guess: you were running iOS and your parent was running Android
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

Barrin92 3y ago

I've always considered linking perfectly fine, but what to me is shady when platforms start to summarize or preview content of the link to the point where that functions as a substitute for the site. There needs to be a distinction between reference to content and the content itself. When platforms start to profit from other people's work without their consent that shouldn't fly. Google search's primary purpose is to make links discoverable and I don't think anyone ever took offense to that. But in recent years companies have started to deliberately blur that line by showing more content upfront, essentially to turn themselves into a middleman and choke content producers. It's perfectly legitimate to not allow this.

benedictevans 3y ago
Snippets are explicitly declared in the metadata of a web page. Those previews only appear because the publisher explicitly asked for them to be used.
- bpye 3y ago
  Well for Google specifically isn’t your ranking severely impacted if you don’t include them? In that case it’s hardly a choice.
  - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
    How tightly does Google check if the preview matches the real content?

basisword 3y ago

Governments are there to serve their citizens, not the interests of foreign multinational companies. If this is good for Canadian businesses and the citizens running them and working for them then good for them.

p0pcult 3y ago
[dead]
throwaway104782 3y ago
How is Google and Meta removing links to news businesses that really on eyeballs to generate revenue a good thing for those Canadian businesses?
cscurmudgeon 3y ago
If robbing is good for Canadian businesses and the citizens running them and working for them then good for them.
cwalv 3y ago
What about the citizens not running those businesses? This may not exactly be a "great firewall", but it seems like your argument could be applied equally to that, and it's hard for me to believe it's really a "good" for citizens in general

tomlin 3y ago

On the other hand, less people arguing over news articles may be what the world needs.

WheelsAtLarge 3y ago

We have seen that in other markets this type of law has hurt not helped publishers. This is Canada but it can easily be any country. We need a fix, big tech has monopolized ad revenue and is choking out the publishers. The quality of newspaper stories has deteriorated over the years and local news has suffered to the point of almost being nonexistent. Also, we now have very few companies that dominate the news. Look at how big the New York times has gotten. It's now the national newspaper in the US. All the other newspapers are nipping at it's ankles. It's a direct result of the fact that other newspapers can't compete without a steady flow of ad revenue. Big tech has sucked all the money which makes it hard for any newspaper to survive, specially regional ones. We need a fix.

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s__s 3y ago
These News orgs haven’t adapted. They’re sitting around publishing long winded, biased stories on their shitty Wordpress implementation with sketchy ads wondering why they’re failing. I’d happily pay good money for high quality news / journalism presented appropriately for the medium. That means a lot of concise real time information, coupled with long form discussion and debate. All packaged up in a modern, high quality web app, with auxiliary mobile applications.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  Are you paying for Reuters, New York Times, WaPo, et al right now?
  - s__s 3y ago
    No I’m Canadian, and those are American. I subscribe to Apple News for access to some Canadian sources, including my local newspaper. Though I don’t think it’s very good.

osigurdson 3y ago

Fully agree. The unfortunate part is Canadians don’t seem to care.