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> 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 j

by 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.

by pyrale 3y ago

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.