This bill was a pretty naked shakedown for money and it was obvious to everyone who read it. Even the intentional targeting of specific companies rather than tr

This bill was a pretty naked shakedown for money and it was obvious to everyone who read it. Even the intentional targeting of specific companies rather than trying to make a general policy raises lots of questions. If linking news is actually harmful and needs to be compensated it needs to be compensated when Apple, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter or such do it to. Everyone knows this wasn’t really because anyone believes linking is harmful to news media. If the news media wanted to they could set their robots.txt to prevent any scraping of the content but they don’t because they want the links. We even see from Google’s own blog that they were participating in the political process and were open to solutions that compensated Canadian News Media by for example creating a pool of money to distribute. But that both a link tax and uncapped liabilities were a non-starter and a potential existential threat to the business. It’s no surprise that Google and Meta delinked the news. I just hope the taxpayers don’t have to continue funding Trudeau’s idiocy until the next election. But there is no real hope of the NDP flipping on this so that hope is probably in vain.