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Even if you agree that Google should have to prop up Canadian news organizations—which I don't, but for the sake of argument—predicating that support specifical

Even if you agree that Google should have to prop up Canadian news organizations—which I don't, but for the sake of argument—predicating that support specifically on hyperlinks seems like a terrible precedent to set. Any site of any size should be free to link wherever it wants, freely.

whythre 3y ago
Yes. Adding more walls to the increasingly walled gardens of the internet is terrible.
randomdata 3y ago
Especially when the news organization is free to deny the request referred by a linking party who has not offered the expected compensation. It is not clear why a new law is needed here when existing contract law already sufficiently covers the issue.
- wubrr 3y ago
  How would news organizations deny the request referred by a linking party? Are you talking about a technical denial - as in reject the HTTP request? I guess technically they can base something like this on HTTP referer header, but you can have links without referer info as well.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Referrer is exactly how you would do it. The idiocy here is that most of these publishers are likely customers of Google's ad networks anyways, and the clicks through to the articles are yielding ad revenue to them, and they likely are getting analytics and tracking that identifies exactly where the inbound traffic is coming from. It feels like a shakedown by people who are in other parts of the business totally disconnected from the web content / publishing arms, who likely know better?
    - wubrr 3y ago
      Referrer is basically optional though, you can specify a link to have no referrer : `<a href="example.com" rel="noreferrer">link</a>` , among other ways. It's true that the links only increase the revenue/traffic to their website though, so they should really be supporting the referrers rather than blocking them.
      - randomdata 3y ago
        > you can specify a link to have no referrer : `<a href="example.com" rel="noreferrer">link</a>` , among other ways. But you wouldn't do that if you want the link to resolve. If you don't want it to work, why would you go to all of the trouble of creating the link in the first place?
        Dylan16807 3y ago
        And block people that use a bookmark or share the link via chat programs? I think almost no sites would do that.
        randomdata 3y ago
        They would if the users affected do not impact their bottom line. After all, the whole point of this is to keep out users who are not paying their 'fair share' via Google/Meta by proxy. But also, the technical solution to bookmarks and small-scale sharing between friends is quite obvious. You don't need referrers to solve that problem.
        wubrr 3y ago
        Huh? The link would still resolve and work, just the referrer header wouldn't be set.
- acdha 3y ago
  What happens when they set a referrer policy no-referrer? I’m sure Google and Meta would say that’s to protect user privacy. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Referrer-Policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
  - randomdata 3y ago
    The simplest option is to treat it as a rejection. Users aren't going to be dreaming up (choosing a recent article at random) URIs like /politics/federal/chiefs-of-ontario-says-trudeau-s-carbon-price-is-discriminatory-and-demand-a-review/article_9c995f63-1e26-56c6-9048-79781a9b649c.html in order to get there without some referring party. Negotiations between Google/Meta and the news organization when defining the service contract can explore alternative options (access token, for example) should it be an imperative, for some reason, that the referrer still be inaccessible. People are allowed to talk to each other.
    - Y_Y 3y ago
      And if somebody sends you the link in an IM? Or if the browser fakes a referral from the news sites landing page?
      - randomdata 3y ago
        Any IM service not operated by a major tech company that the news organization wouldn't also want to collect compensation from is going see such a small number of referrals, who cares? Same goes for the number of people who are going to take the time to hack around it. Who cares?
    - cesarb 3y ago
      > Users aren't going to be dreaming up (choosing a recent article at random) URIs like <long url> in order to get there without some referring party. What about bookmarks? I don't think clicking on a bookmark on your browser is going to send any Referer header.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
Google/Meta do more than link, though. They also grab a hero image and an excerpt. Likely fair use, but definitely getting into the grey area. I don't know how the Canadian law is worded, but it would be much more acceptable to me if Google/Meta could get out of paying if they only linked and didn't excerpt images or text.
- randomdata 3y ago
  Open Graph, which all the major news organization in Canada use, was created by Meta/Facebook to ensure that the news organizations have editorial control over what is "grabbed". If the news organizations want them to have less information, all they have to do is give less information.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    Canadian journalists could have done this without the government by adapting tactics similar to unions. A union strikes not because they want to withhold work from their company, but because even though both the company and the union members want to work, the strike shifts the power balance. Similarly, Canadian journalists could have gotten together to withhold links from Google & Meta until they got a better deal. They'd both be worse off during the duration of the strike, but negotiations could get a better long term deal. And in this metaphor, Meta is doing a pre-emptive lockout. The biggest difference is that the government is helping journalists combat the defector problem.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - AlecSchueler 3y ago
      It comes down to culture and what kind of onus society expects to put onto worker to create and police de facto legislation, which is prefered in some places to allowing the state to enact the same de jure. They could have done this but now they don't have to.
    - 3y ago
oh_sigh 3y ago
Is it based on hyperlinks? I ctrl-f'd on the c-18 bill and there was no reference to "link". I would imagine the law is more about using the blurbs from the news outlet, not the link itself.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  Nope, it is the link itself.
- jsnell 3y ago
  The relevant part of the text is: > (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.
drawkward 3y ago
>Any site of any size should be free to link wherever it wants, freely. Maybe that was true in the days before big tech, venture capital and advertising monetized the internet, but the internet has been vastly changed by those three groups, and not always for the better. They certainly do make a bunch of money though!
- ouEight12 3y ago
  So.. we should break a fundamental aspect of an 'open and free' internet by introducing a link tax, just because the horse and buggy people haven't taken the last 25 years to figure out how to sell automobiles by now?
  - drawkward 3y ago
    The free and open internet died long before this link tax.
jsnell 3y ago
It's not at all clear what these payments are predicated on, the deal structure is obviously very different from what the bill originally required. All that's being annouced is that Google is paying $70M/year for something, but it might not be for links. That's what happened in Australia's law from a couple of years ago. The law was ratified, but doesn't actually apply to any company, so what the law said was totally irrelevant.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
It is amazing the web-illiterate/ignorant way this is being reported in Canada, too. Lots of mention of Google "posting" or "publishing" content, when all it's doing is linking to the publisher's own site. I'm no fan of Google these days, but I wish they had played hard ball on this. This is a total joke.
- drawkward 3y ago
  >when all it's doing is linking to the publisher's own site That's not true, however. It is also often including a summary and an image, which is certainly republishing or reposting the content. In no way is it "web-illiterate/ignorant" to refer to it as such, because it is more than just a link.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Google News is ridiculously spartan. It's very old school Google. A headline, a classification, and sometimes a thumbnail. No description or summary or text of any kind Facebook, yeah, that's something else. One thing that is legitimately bad about that is the way the content can be posted on whatever wall and then a pile of unmoderated public comments put on it, that the publisher has no control over.
    - kridsdale1 3y ago
      Heaven forbid.
  - rossjudson 3y ago
    I highly encourage you to read Google's statement on how it supports and handles news. The word "often" is load-bearing in your comment, and this provides the details. https://blog.google/supportingnews/#overview https://blog.google/supportingnews/#overview
tannhaeuser 3y ago
"Link tax" is clearly chosen in bad faith, like in other cases where that wording had been used. What's really happening is that Google Search shows previews of large parts of articles such that visitors don't go to origin sites to generate page impressions/ad playouts. Which is especially problematic since Google/Alphabet is either an ad provider on the skipped news site or its competitor.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure I've seen multiple critiques that this specific law is in fact a link tax, and doesn't care if there are previews or not. Is that wrong? Sure, google currently has previews, and a law could be written to target previews, but I don't think this law targets previews.
  - SiempreViernes 3y ago
    It does target previews very explicitly, but it also has a much broader condition that I imagine is there to prevent Google and others from making previews something technically not provided by them but instead created by some payload they give the users of their website.
- nradov 3y ago
  How many characters of preview would be reasonable? 50? 100?
  - soganess 3y ago
    Why would you even use number of characters? A better criteria is: what fraction of people does it stop from visiting the source (because they got the information they were looking for from the summary). Yes, yes that system has it's own problems, but it is more holistic that string.length().
    - nradov 3y ago
      Determining that fraction would require the search engine to run a series of A/B tests with varying preview lengths, and keep detailed records of test results. That seems like an unreasonable burden.
acdha 3y ago
The law explicitly requires a power differential and $1B in revenue, so almost any other site won’t be affected. I do wish there was more distinction between a link and content display. I think there’s a very real concern that summaries lower click-through rates, which Google has been pushing for years and will be turbo-charged with LLMs summarizing content in the future. It would be interesting to see if there might be some future nuance around that.

whythre 3y ago

Yes. Adding more walls to the increasingly walled gardens of the internet is terrible.

randomdata 3y ago

Especially when the news organization is free to deny the request referred by a linking party who has not offered the expected compensation. It is not clear why a new law is needed here when existing contract law already sufficiently covers the issue.

wubrr 3y ago
How would news organizations deny the request referred by a linking party? Are you talking about a technical denial - as in reject the HTTP request? I guess technically they can base something like this on HTTP referer header, but you can have links without referer info as well.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Referrer is exactly how you would do it. The idiocy here is that most of these publishers are likely customers of Google's ad networks anyways, and the clicks through to the articles are yielding ad revenue to them, and they likely are getting analytics and tracking that identifies exactly where the inbound traffic is coming from. It feels like a shakedown by people who are in other parts of the business totally disconnected from the web content / publishing arms, who likely know better?
  - wubrr 3y ago
    Referrer is basically optional though, you can specify a link to have no referrer : `<a href="example.com" rel="noreferrer">link</a>` , among other ways. It's true that the links only increase the revenue/traffic to their website though, so they should really be supporting the referrers rather than blocking them.
    - randomdata 3y ago
      > you can specify a link to have no referrer : `<a href="example.com" rel="noreferrer">link</a>` , among other ways. But you wouldn't do that if you want the link to resolve. If you don't want it to work, why would you go to all of the trouble of creating the link in the first place?
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        And block people that use a bookmark or share the link via chat programs? I think almost no sites would do that.
        randomdata 3y ago
        They would if the users affected do not impact their bottom line. After all, the whole point of this is to keep out users who are not paying their 'fair share' via Google/Meta by proxy. But also, the technical solution to bookmarks and small-scale sharing between friends is quite obvious. You don't need referrers to solve that problem.
      - wubrr 3y ago
        Huh? The link would still resolve and work, just the referrer header wouldn't be set.
acdha 3y ago
What happens when they set a referrer policy no-referrer? I’m sure Google and Meta would say that’s to protect user privacy. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Referrer-Policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
- randomdata 3y ago
  The simplest option is to treat it as a rejection. Users aren't going to be dreaming up (choosing a recent article at random) URIs like /politics/federal/chiefs-of-ontario-says-trudeau-s-carbon-price-is-discriminatory-and-demand-a-review/article_9c995f63-1e26-56c6-9048-79781a9b649c.html in order to get there without some referring party. Negotiations between Google/Meta and the news organization when defining the service contract can explore alternative options (access token, for example) should it be an imperative, for some reason, that the referrer still be inaccessible. People are allowed to talk to each other.
  - Y_Y 3y ago
    And if somebody sends you the link in an IM? Or if the browser fakes a referral from the news sites landing page?
    - randomdata 3y ago
      Any IM service not operated by a major tech company that the news organization wouldn't also want to collect compensation from is going see such a small number of referrals, who cares? Same goes for the number of people who are going to take the time to hack around it. Who cares?
  - cesarb 3y ago
    > Users aren't going to be dreaming up (choosing a recent article at random) URIs like <long url> in order to get there without some referring party. What about bookmarks? I don't think clicking on a bookmark on your browser is going to send any Referer header.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

Google/Meta do more than link, though. They also grab a hero image and an excerpt. Likely fair use, but definitely getting into the grey area. I don't know how the Canadian law is worded, but it would be much more acceptable to me if Google/Meta could get out of paying if they only linked and didn't excerpt images or text.

randomdata 3y ago
Open Graph, which all the major news organization in Canada use, was created by Meta/Facebook to ensure that the news organizations have editorial control over what is "grabbed". If the news organizations want them to have less information, all they have to do is give less information.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Canadian journalists could have done this without the government by adapting tactics similar to unions. A union strikes not because they want to withhold work from their company, but because even though both the company and the union members want to work, the strike shifts the power balance. Similarly, Canadian journalists could have gotten together to withhold links from Google & Meta until they got a better deal. They'd both be worse off during the duration of the strike, but negotiations could get a better long term deal. And in this metaphor, Meta is doing a pre-emptive lockout. The biggest difference is that the government is helping journalists combat the defector problem.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    It comes down to culture and what kind of onus society expects to put onto worker to create and police de facto legislation, which is prefered in some places to allowing the state to enact the same de jure. They could have done this but now they don't have to.
  - 3y ago

oh_sigh 3y ago

Is it based on hyperlinks? I ctrl-f'd on the c-18 bill and there was no reference to "link". I would imagine the law is more about using the blurbs from the news outlet, not the link itself.

s1artibartfast 3y ago
Nope, it is the link itself.
jsnell 3y ago
The relevant part of the text is: > (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.

drawkward 3y ago

>Any site of any size should be free to link wherever it wants, freely. Maybe that was true in the days before big tech, venture capital and advertising monetized the internet, but the internet has been vastly changed by those three groups, and not always for the better. They certainly do make a bunch of money though!

ouEight12 3y ago
So.. we should break a fundamental aspect of an 'open and free' internet by introducing a link tax, just because the horse and buggy people haven't taken the last 25 years to figure out how to sell automobiles by now?
- drawkward 3y ago
  The free and open internet died long before this link tax.

jsnell 3y ago

It's not at all clear what these payments are predicated on, the deal structure is obviously very different from what the bill originally required. All that's being annouced is that Google is paying $70M/year for something, but it might not be for links. That's what happened in Australia's law from a couple of years ago. The law was ratified, but doesn't actually apply to any company, so what the law said was totally irrelevant.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

It is amazing the web-illiterate/ignorant way this is being reported in Canada, too. Lots of mention of Google "posting" or "publishing" content, when all it's doing is linking to the publisher's own site. I'm no fan of Google these days, but I wish they had played hard ball on this. This is a total joke.

drawkward 3y ago
>when all it's doing is linking to the publisher's own site That's not true, however. It is also often including a summary and an image, which is certainly republishing or reposting the content. In no way is it "web-illiterate/ignorant" to refer to it as such, because it is more than just a link.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Google News is ridiculously spartan. It's very old school Google. A headline, a classification, and sometimes a thumbnail. No description or summary or text of any kind Facebook, yeah, that's something else. One thing that is legitimately bad about that is the way the content can be posted on whatever wall and then a pile of unmoderated public comments put on it, that the publisher has no control over.
  - kridsdale1 3y ago
    Heaven forbid.
- rossjudson 3y ago
  I highly encourage you to read Google's statement on how it supports and handles news. The word "often" is load-bearing in your comment, and this provides the details. https://blog.google/supportingnews/#overview https://blog.google/supportingnews/#overview

tannhaeuser 3y ago

"Link tax" is clearly chosen in bad faith, like in other cases where that wording had been used. What's really happening is that Google Search shows previews of large parts of articles such that visitors don't go to origin sites to generate page impressions/ad playouts. Which is especially problematic since Google/Alphabet is either an ad provider on the skipped news site or its competitor.

Dylan16807 3y ago
I'm pretty sure I've seen multiple critiques that this specific law is in fact a link tax, and doesn't care if there are previews or not. Is that wrong? Sure, google currently has previews, and a law could be written to target previews, but I don't think this law targets previews.
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  It does target previews very explicitly, but it also has a much broader condition that I imagine is there to prevent Google and others from making previews something technically not provided by them but instead created by some payload they give the users of their website.
nradov 3y ago
How many characters of preview would be reasonable? 50? 100?
- soganess 3y ago
  Why would you even use number of characters? A better criteria is: what fraction of people does it stop from visiting the source (because they got the information they were looking for from the summary). Yes, yes that system has it's own problems, but it is more holistic that string.length().
  - nradov 3y ago
    Determining that fraction would require the search engine to run a series of A/B tests with varying preview lengths, and keep detailed records of test results. That seems like an unreasonable burden.

acdha 3y ago

The law explicitly requires a power differential and $1B in revenue, so almost any other site won’t be affected. I do wish there was more distinction between a link and content display. I think there’s a very real concern that summaries lower click-through rates, which Google has been pushing for years and will be turbo-charged with LLMs summarizing content in the future. It would be interesting to see if there might be some future nuance around that.