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> The Canadian government told Google and Meta that if a link to a newspaper story ever appears in search, or if a journalist ever posts a link to a story on Fa

> The Canadian government told Google and Meta that if a link to a newspaper story ever appears in search, or if a journalist ever posts a link to a story on Facebook, then they have to pay the newspaper for sending business to the newspaper. This is first-class bullshit. Google and Meta made their money by co-opting third party content, concentrating audiences into their own portal, and selling advertising against it - often through algorithmic dark patterns. This is a disreputable business model that’s as old as iframes, but somehow its acceptable for these gigacompanies to do it. To characterise this as “they have to pay the newspaper for sending business to the newspaper” is just buying into the kind of self-interested “no” that the article purports to discuss. They systematically took these audiences away from the content providers, and then started to charge a premium to the providers for placement in the algorithms. Meta has been the most egregious of these but Google has been moving in this direction for years. These companies have more than enough money to pay for their content, but that would break their protection racket business model.

vkou 3y ago
> They systematically took these audiences away and then charge a price to get the audiences to return. How exactly does the existence of search take audiences away? Or do you mean the 15-word clickbait headline blurb takes audiences away? If your news story isn't worth reading after reading the headline, it's probably not worth reading.
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  Google thinks its worth including in the index.
  - falcor84 3y ago
    What kind of argument is that? Google's mission was literally to "organize the world's information" - of course they would include newspapers in the index, irrespective of any opinion about the articles.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > How exactly does the existence of search take audiences away? Oh, that one's easy. Because the old media companies used to curate which stories people see, and now the search engines do it, but do it in a way that also shows competing sources. So then legacy media outlets lose a lot of traffic -- and political influence -- to random blogs and social media. Somewhat ominously, Google has mostly stopped showing the latter in search results. If you like conspiracy theories, this happened not long after those companies filed a lot of lawsuits and pushed for legislation against them, and once they did the number of lawsuits and proposed legislation declined.
smoldesu 3y ago
> They systematically took these audiences away from the content providers Let's not get carried away here. These newspaper businesses choose to upload their content to the open web. By making and distributing public links, they are accepting the fact that others will do the same. They didn't take anything that wasn't on the table.
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  Posting your content on the open web doesn't give permission for somebody to lift the content from your site and display it next to their own ads. (I don't know why I'm defending news here, they could have fixed it themselves years ago. )
  - slyall 3y ago
    Come on, when you say "lift your content" you mean show a headline, a picture and maybe the top line of the story with a huge link back to the original website? 90% of the time that data is published as "Open graph" format by the website so it looks nice. The website is going out of it's way to make links to it on facebook look pretty.
tomComb 3y ago
The law is essentially a tax on links. His characterization of it is accurate and is the same as any in depth analysis I’ve seen. If you want a really good, independent analysis read Michael Geist, who is a law professor at Ottawa. Sounds like you are letting your hatred of meta and Google warp your analysis of this bill (which is what the government is counting on).
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  Or, my understanding of the absolutely critical importance of media in a democracy is making me angry because we are killing it in favour of a couple of huge corporations who couldn’t give a shit about government, and often work actively to undermine it.
natdempk 3y ago
Or: newspapers opted into the Google + Facebook ecosystem because it was beneficial for them to do so, customers choose to use Google and Facebook because they provide tangible user benefits, and competition is just a click away yet most newspapers fail to deliver a competitive value prop to visit/subscribe directly compared to the traffic they get from Google/Facebook. The reality is that the newspapers derive great value from Google/Facebook traffic (lets them get more ad money + subscribers) whereas the value of the newspapers to Google/Facebook is marginal as they are just more content in a feed/aggregator. There's no racket going on here just incentives/products/reality all around. If anything the Canadian government's asks are the real racket/shakedown. I recommend reading this article from Stratechery if you want a more thorough breakdown of the incentives from when Australia tried to do something similar: https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargaining-code-breaking-down-the-code-australias-fake-news/ https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargainin...
- riku_iki 3y ago
  > and competition is just a click away yet most newspapers fail to deliver a competitive value prop there are many points where big tech abuses their monopolistic advantage making competition not fair.
  - natdempk 3y ago
    I don't disagree there are some instances of this in other areas, but in the case of links to news websites I don't think there's a meaningful argument against customers choosing which URL to visit as it relates to competition.
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      fb+google have monopoly on links discovery, customers can't open news URL unless visit google or fb and watch all their ads and give them data.
      - DocTomoe 3y ago
kaoD 3y ago
Then how come the media backtracked this exact law in my country (which actually came into effect) as soon as they saw their audience plummet?
summerlight 3y ago
> They systematically took these audiences away from the content providers It sounds like those audiences have an equivalent chance of organically discovering those news without centralized search engines or news feed systems? Then what's the value of those systems? If they don't provide any values, then why don't those audiences just go to the new website instead of clicking a link from Google/Facebook/whatever.
Affric 3y ago
And only made possible by the fact that levels of neutrality were enforced lower in the stack. These tech giants would not have been possible if the telecoms companies had the power to leverage their platforms for advertising. That's not to say the social media model wasn't revolutionary. It was like the emergence of the Gnathostomata. But it seems crazy that people's online identities are tied directly to the companies trying to manipulate them.
ta8645 3y ago
If you are correct, then those newspaper businesses will now enjoy an economic upturn, since Google and Meta no longer allow links to them on their platforms. But I think we'll see it hurt the Canadian businesses instead. At the very least, it will hit the small independent companies very hard, since it was the primary method readers found them in the first place. This may have the unfortunate side effect of reducing the number of players who can meaningfully contribute to public discourse in Canada.
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  > If you are correct, then those newspaper businesses will now enjoy an economic upturn, since Google and Meta no longer allow links to them on their platforms. How does that follow? My position is that Google and meta have monopolised the audience. If links to news are no longer published then obviously the traffic is going to go down. > But I think we'll see it hurt the Canadian businesses instead. Obviously - that’s exactly why they’re doing it.
  - relativ575 3y ago
    > My position is that Google and meta have monopolised the audience. Meta have said that people don't come to them for news - [0]. Do you have numbers to counter? What prevents Canada's government to create a news portal, then promote it everywhere, including on Google and Meta, telling people to go to that website for news? People who are looking for news will surely be visiting that site now, since they spend less time on FB. Call it news.ca. Of course big businesses will benefit. The smaller ones will inevitably suffer. > Obviously - that’s exactly why they’re doing it. Seems to be the government's intention too. They've been very well aware of it. [0] - https://about.fb.com/news/2023/06/changes-to-news-availability-on-our-platforms-in-canada/ https://about.fb.com/news/2023/06/changes-to-news-availabili...
    - ulrashida 3y ago
      > Meta have said that people don't come to them for news - [0]. Do you have numbers to counter? I think the question is does Meta have any numbers to this effect? Their quote is literally: "In contrast, we know the people using our platforms don’t come to us for news." Meta seems to want it both ways as they state elsewhere: "Though news article links make up less than 3% of what Canadians see in Feed, we estimate that we sent Canada News Page Index-registered publishers more than 1.9 billion clicks in the last 12 months ending in April 2022." So it's both a tiny part for Meta, but also a big part of the Canadian news ecosystem.
benedictevans 3y ago
Thea's a lot of rhetoric, so let's get really specific about how these laws are supposed to work. You do a search. You get ten blue links. One of them is to a newspaper website. Google has to pay that website - but not any of the other 9 websites. You see a cool web page. You post a link on Facebook for your friends and say 'hey, read this!" If it's a link to a newspaper, but not to any other kind of website, Facebook has to pay them. Google and Facebook not 'co-opting their content.' You need to be really clear about this - we are talking about links. In Meta's case it might be a link posted by the newspaper itself. Let's extend the principle here: someone posted a link to my website on Hackernews - so Hackernews has to pay me. Really? They post it on Reddit and Reddit has ads, so I get a percentage of the ad revenue. Really??
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  All of this is arguably true, but conveniently forgets Google News and FB’s algorithmic feed, among other products. There is so very much wrong with the way search works - its opacity, the enormous reach of Google advertising, the way Facebook manipulates sentiment to sell advertising. This law may be clumsy, but lazy rhetoric is still bullshit.
  - benedictevans 3y ago
    Google News is tiny and irrelevant - that's not what the law is about. Again - do you really think that if you do a web search, and one of the results goes to a newspaper, then the newspaper should get paid? And none of the other links?
    - doctor_eval 3y ago
      > Google News is tiny and irrelevant - that's not what the law is about. According to SimilarWeb, Google News ranks #114 globally (all websites), and #7 in the News category. https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.google.com/#overview https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.google.com/#overview It is much larger than WAPO, and not far behind NYT. Which makes it significantly larger than any news provider anywhere else in the world. So maybe I'm weird but that hardly seems "tiny and irrelevant". > do you really think that if you do a web search, and one of the results goes to a newspaper, then the newspaper should get paid? And none of the other links? From the context, I doubt that you're arguing that everyone should get paid, so I'm not sure what your point is, because I don't see why they shouldn't. If you do a web search and one of the results goes to a newspaper, and you click the result, then the newspaper can monetise that. I don't have a problem with that. If you do a web search and it presents enough information that the user can answer their question without clicking, well, that's an interesting problem. The answer would not exist if not for the provider, yet the search engine makes money and the provider of the result does not. This is particularly true when the search engine pops up a news box as a result. So if a search result provides useful information to a user, and the search engine makes money from providing that answer despite it being sourced from elsewhere - why shouldn't the source of that information be compensated? As I said above, this law may be clumsy - it might not even be possible - but my objection is to the lazy rhetoric surrounding the issue, which is still bullshit.
elpool2 3y ago
The part you quoted and called bullshit is factually correct though. CAN has told Meta and Google that if they show links to news sites (which do drive business to those sites) then they have to pay those news sites. It’s not a characterization, it’s what has actually happened. How can you deny that?
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  The part that’s bullshit is this: > they have to pay the newspaper for sending business to the newspaper That’s an opinion. Another way to explain the situation is: they are being forced to pay for content that they’ve monetised at the newspaper’s expense. There are several other ways to view this situation, but Ben Evans has decided to push this version, which makes it sound like big tech is being somehow generous by sending traffic in the first place. In fact, Google and Meta in particular have been pushing news producers against the wall for years.
  - elpool2 3y ago
    They have to pay for showing links, and those links do send traffic to news sites. That is indisputable. You’re phrasing is just incorrect, honestly. Linking to a website is not at all taking the site’s “content”. And monetizing search results doesn’t do anything “at the newspaper’s expense”, what expense has a news site incurred by someone sharing a link to their site?

vkou 3y ago

> They systematically took these audiences away and then charge a price to get the audiences to return. How exactly does the existence of search take audiences away? Or do you mean the 15-word clickbait headline blurb takes audiences away? If your news story isn't worth reading after reading the headline, it's probably not worth reading.

jay_kyburz 3y ago
Google thinks its worth including in the index.
- falcor84 3y ago
  What kind of argument is that? Google's mission was literally to "organize the world's information" - of course they would include newspapers in the index, irrespective of any opinion about the articles.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> How exactly does the existence of search take audiences away? Oh, that one's easy. Because the old media companies used to curate which stories people see, and now the search engines do it, but do it in a way that also shows competing sources. So then legacy media outlets lose a lot of traffic -- and political influence -- to random blogs and social media. Somewhat ominously, Google has mostly stopped showing the latter in search results. If you like conspiracy theories, this happened not long after those companies filed a lot of lawsuits and pushed for legislation against them, and once they did the number of lawsuits and proposed legislation declined.

smoldesu 3y ago

> They systematically took these audiences away from the content providers Let's not get carried away here. These newspaper businesses choose to upload their content to the open web. By making and distributing public links, they are accepting the fact that others will do the same. They didn't take anything that wasn't on the table.

jay_kyburz 3y ago
Posting your content on the open web doesn't give permission for somebody to lift the content from your site and display it next to their own ads. (I don't know why I'm defending news here, they could have fixed it themselves years ago. )
- slyall 3y ago
  Come on, when you say "lift your content" you mean show a headline, a picture and maybe the top line of the story with a huge link back to the original website? 90% of the time that data is published as "Open graph" format by the website so it looks nice. The website is going out of it's way to make links to it on facebook look pretty.

tomComb 3y ago

The law is essentially a tax on links. His characterization of it is accurate and is the same as any in depth analysis I’ve seen. If you want a really good, independent analysis read Michael Geist, who is a law professor at Ottawa. Sounds like you are letting your hatred of meta and Google warp your analysis of this bill (which is what the government is counting on).

doctor_eval 3y ago
Or, my understanding of the absolutely critical importance of media in a democracy is making me angry because we are killing it in favour of a couple of huge corporations who couldn’t give a shit about government, and often work actively to undermine it.

natdempk 3y ago

Or: newspapers opted into the Google + Facebook ecosystem because it was beneficial for them to do so, customers choose to use Google and Facebook because they provide tangible user benefits, and competition is just a click away yet most newspapers fail to deliver a competitive value prop to visit/subscribe directly compared to the traffic they get from Google/Facebook. The reality is that the newspapers derive great value from Google/Facebook traffic (lets them get more ad money + subscribers) whereas the value of the newspapers to Google/Facebook is marginal as they are just more content in a feed/aggregator. There's no racket going on here just incentives/products/reality all around. If anything the Canadian government's asks are the real racket/shakedown. I recommend reading this article from Stratechery if you want a more thorough breakdown of the incentives from when Australia tried to do something similar: https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargaining-code-breaking-down-the-code-australias-fake-news/ https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargainin...

riku_iki 3y ago
> and competition is just a click away yet most newspapers fail to deliver a competitive value prop there are many points where big tech abuses their monopolistic advantage making competition not fair.
- natdempk 3y ago
  I don't disagree there are some instances of this in other areas, but in the case of links to news websites I don't think there's a meaningful argument against customers choosing which URL to visit as it relates to competition.
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    fb+google have monopoly on links discovery, customers can't open news URL unless visit google or fb and watch all their ads and give them data.
    - DocTomoe 3y ago

kaoD 3y ago

Then how come the media backtracked this exact law in my country (which actually came into effect) as soon as they saw their audience plummet?

summerlight 3y ago

> They systematically took these audiences away from the content providers It sounds like those audiences have an equivalent chance of organically discovering those news without centralized search engines or news feed systems? Then what's the value of those systems? If they don't provide any values, then why don't those audiences just go to the new website instead of clicking a link from Google/Facebook/whatever.

Affric 3y ago

And only made possible by the fact that levels of neutrality were enforced lower in the stack. These tech giants would not have been possible if the telecoms companies had the power to leverage their platforms for advertising. That's not to say the social media model wasn't revolutionary. It was like the emergence of the Gnathostomata. But it seems crazy that people's online identities are tied directly to the companies trying to manipulate them.

ta8645 3y ago

If you are correct, then those newspaper businesses will now enjoy an economic upturn, since Google and Meta no longer allow links to them on their platforms. But I think we'll see it hurt the Canadian businesses instead. At the very least, it will hit the small independent companies very hard, since it was the primary method readers found them in the first place. This may have the unfortunate side effect of reducing the number of players who can meaningfully contribute to public discourse in Canada.

doctor_eval 3y ago
> If you are correct, then those newspaper businesses will now enjoy an economic upturn, since Google and Meta no longer allow links to them on their platforms. How does that follow? My position is that Google and meta have monopolised the audience. If links to news are no longer published then obviously the traffic is going to go down. > But I think we'll see it hurt the Canadian businesses instead. Obviously - that’s exactly why they’re doing it.
- relativ575 3y ago
  > My position is that Google and meta have monopolised the audience. Meta have said that people don't come to them for news - [0]. Do you have numbers to counter? What prevents Canada's government to create a news portal, then promote it everywhere, including on Google and Meta, telling people to go to that website for news? People who are looking for news will surely be visiting that site now, since they spend less time on FB. Call it news.ca. Of course big businesses will benefit. The smaller ones will inevitably suffer. > Obviously - that’s exactly why they’re doing it. Seems to be the government's intention too. They've been very well aware of it. [0] - https://about.fb.com/news/2023/06/changes-to-news-availability-on-our-platforms-in-canada/ https://about.fb.com/news/2023/06/changes-to-news-availabili...
  - ulrashida 3y ago
    > Meta have said that people don't come to them for news - [0]. Do you have numbers to counter? I think the question is does Meta have any numbers to this effect? Their quote is literally: "In contrast, we know the people using our platforms don’t come to us for news." Meta seems to want it both ways as they state elsewhere: "Though news article links make up less than 3% of what Canadians see in Feed, we estimate that we sent Canada News Page Index-registered publishers more than 1.9 billion clicks in the last 12 months ending in April 2022." So it's both a tiny part for Meta, but also a big part of the Canadian news ecosystem.

benedictevans 3y ago

Thea's a lot of rhetoric, so let's get really specific about how these laws are supposed to work. You do a search. You get ten blue links. One of them is to a newspaper website. Google has to pay that website - but not any of the other 9 websites. You see a cool web page. You post a link on Facebook for your friends and say 'hey, read this!" If it's a link to a newspaper, but not to any other kind of website, Facebook has to pay them. Google and Facebook not 'co-opting their content.' You need to be really clear about this - we are talking about links. In Meta's case it might be a link posted by the newspaper itself. Let's extend the principle here: someone posted a link to my website on Hackernews - so Hackernews has to pay me. Really? They post it on Reddit and Reddit has ads, so I get a percentage of the ad revenue. Really??

doctor_eval 3y ago
All of this is arguably true, but conveniently forgets Google News and FB’s algorithmic feed, among other products. There is so very much wrong with the way search works - its opacity, the enormous reach of Google advertising, the way Facebook manipulates sentiment to sell advertising. This law may be clumsy, but lazy rhetoric is still bullshit.
- benedictevans 3y ago
  Google News is tiny and irrelevant - that's not what the law is about. Again - do you really think that if you do a web search, and one of the results goes to a newspaper, then the newspaper should get paid? And none of the other links?
  - doctor_eval 3y ago
    > Google News is tiny and irrelevant - that's not what the law is about. According to SimilarWeb, Google News ranks #114 globally (all websites), and #7 in the News category. https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.google.com/#overview https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.google.com/#overview It is much larger than WAPO, and not far behind NYT. Which makes it significantly larger than any news provider anywhere else in the world. So maybe I'm weird but that hardly seems "tiny and irrelevant". > do you really think that if you do a web search, and one of the results goes to a newspaper, then the newspaper should get paid? And none of the other links? From the context, I doubt that you're arguing that everyone should get paid, so I'm not sure what your point is, because I don't see why they shouldn't. If you do a web search and one of the results goes to a newspaper, and you click the result, then the newspaper can monetise that. I don't have a problem with that. If you do a web search and it presents enough information that the user can answer their question without clicking, well, that's an interesting problem. The answer would not exist if not for the provider, yet the search engine makes money and the provider of the result does not. This is particularly true when the search engine pops up a news box as a result. So if a search result provides useful information to a user, and the search engine makes money from providing that answer despite it being sourced from elsewhere - why shouldn't the source of that information be compensated? As I said above, this law may be clumsy - it might not even be possible - but my objection is to the lazy rhetoric surrounding the issue, which is still bullshit.

elpool2 3y ago

The part you quoted and called bullshit is factually correct though. CAN has told Meta and Google that if they show links to news sites (which do drive business to those sites) then they have to pay those news sites. It’s not a characterization, it’s what has actually happened. How can you deny that?

doctor_eval 3y ago
The part that’s bullshit is this: > they have to pay the newspaper for sending business to the newspaper That’s an opinion. Another way to explain the situation is: they are being forced to pay for content that they’ve monetised at the newspaper’s expense. There are several other ways to view this situation, but Ben Evans has decided to push this version, which makes it sound like big tech is being somehow generous by sending traffic in the first place. In fact, Google and Meta in particular have been pushing news producers against the wall for years.
- elpool2 3y ago
  They have to pay for showing links, and those links do send traffic to news sites. That is indisputable. You’re phrasing is just incorrect, honestly. Linking to a website is not at all taking the site’s “content”. And monetizing search results doesn’t do anything “at the newspaper’s expense”, what expense has a news site incurred by someone sharing a link to their site?