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Respect to Meta for having the courage to stand up to the media lobby in Canada and turn off news in response to this law. I'm happy that Google wrung concessio

Respect to Meta for having the courage to stand up to the media lobby in Canada and turn off news in response to this law. I'm happy that Google wrung concessions out of the government, but it would've been better for the open internet had they stuck to their guns and removed news links as well.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Respect to Meta for having the courage to stand up to the media lobby in Canada I'm not sure what's going on in Canada for Meta to be seen as the "good guy". Feels like rooting for Hitler to defeat Stalin.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Indeed, and the funny thing is that FB itself became a more pleasant place after people stopped being able to post rage-links to news articles anymore. Though I've since de-activated my account, so I can't say if that's still the case.
- vivekd 3y ago
  There's a huge portion of people here that really hate our government. I'm one of them. This whole law was a result of legacy media lobbying for that law, a lot of smaller Canadian media outlets and small content creators opposed it. Everything is like that here, the government is ruled by special interests. Even this law, the government abused parliamentary process and the COVID situation to avoid having this law debated in parliament before it was passed. They don't care about democracy, they don't care about the rule of law, they don't care about anything, they just do what benefits them and their friends. I hate Canada's politically connected elite, and honestly prefer facebook
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >Everything is like that here, the government is ruled by special interests. [...] Everything is like that here, the government is ruled by special interests. Don't wanna sound like a conspiracy nut but it's like that basically everywhere. The rich need to get richer, the poor need to tighten the belt. Democracy needs constant supervision (who watches the watchmen?) and checks and bounds with accountability, otherwise, leaders left unaccountable and democracy left unchecked slowly devolves into a kleptocracy.
    - robocat 3y ago
      > basically everywhere Does one counter-example disprove the rule? I'm likely just naive and my eyes are not sufficiently opened - but I don't see a lot of obviously corrupt activity here in New Zealand. Corruption seems fairly endemic in most other countries I have visited. It isn't just a size thing because the problem seems to be worse in smaller countries and larger countries. 5 million population might be necessary but it's clearly insufficient to prevent grossly obvious corruption (other ~5M pop country examples). I'm hoping not to discover that our new government is more corruption friendly: so far they are appearing a bit less moral than the previous one.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Sure, there's good examples out there of democratic governments with high transparency and low corruption like Finland and Denmark, but too few of us have the privilege of living there. Granted, there are worse places to be in the world right now than Canada (most of Africa, certain parts of SE Asia, Russia, Eastern Ukraine, etc), but why I think Canadians are so loud(not Canadian BTW) is that they witnessed a steep drop of their living standards and purchasing power withing a much shorter timespan than most developed countries (the same phenomenon is happening everywhere in the west) so you feel let down and hopeless when you know those from just a few decades ago had it so much better than you, and you're stuck in a cycle of relative poverty by comparison despite busting your ass off, while those in leadership positions are favoring those already financially well off instead of the struggling little guy. I know the feeling because a lot of Europe is in a similar boat right now, albeit less severe than Canada.
      - wepple 3y ago
        > Does one counter-example disprove the rule? No, NZ is an outlier. Regularly rated the least corrupt country on earth. “Basically everywhere” still holds. Also, whilst NZ may not have explicit corruption such as bribing police directly, the grandparent post suggesting that special interests affect govt is still true. Jacinda was supposed to be the one shining hope that many believed would bring in CGT and she admitted it would never happen. The wealthy property owners (including most MPs) wouldn’t let that happen.
monkeynotes 3y ago
I rarely support Meta, but in this case I do. I think it was a total dick move on the Canadian govt's side. Poorly understood their position, poorly understood the implications, poorly understood the problem space overall.
llm_nerd 3y ago
The law literally only applies to Google and Meta, both of which make billions from the Canadian marketplace. Trying to cast this as some big open internet thing is not convincing. Holding Meta as the good guys is pretty tenuous as well. Long, long before Meta had to do anything, like a crying, gnashing baby they blocked every source of news, across all of their properties, with a callout to Canadians declaring why. I pray that they stick with it, but I'm going to tell you the reality that Meta is going to make a similar deal, probably within days. Because they make enormous sums on the Canadian market. And they have always pulled (or been pushed), aggregated and summarized news because it makes them money. The frequent claims on here that it's some incidental thing, if not some grand benevolence, is rather detached from reality. And with every passing day more Canadians are just turning away from Meta properties because of their embargo. Again, I pray they actually stick with it and become irrelevant here (it is a toxic company that can be trusted with nothing), but they won't. To play off what the other guy said, it's a pretty bizarre position to hold Meta as the good guys. If they have a position on something, it's an extremely good indication that that position is not a good one.
- wvenable 3y ago
  This is a very poor argument. Laws and actions are good or bad based on their own merits and and not because of which parties support it or not. This link tax is a bad law. It's bad for the Internet. And thus it is also bad for Meta. > And they have always pulled, aggregated and summarized news because it makes them money. Not even accurate as news companies actively provide this content in their meta data explicitly for Meta to use. If they didn't want their content summarized they could stop it any time.
  - llm_nerd 3y ago
    The "link" tax is a tax on mega American tech companies, and was written to target literally only two companies on the planet. It has nothing to do with the internet at large. Anyone who claims otherwise is either poorly informed, or a bad faith actor. The histrionics on this topic are not useful. >This is a very poor argument What do you even think the argument was? I said that Meta's position is an indicator. Don't pretend I said anything more, or strawman a counterpoint based upon nothing. >Not even accurate What a picking at nits. While I was talking about both companies generally, Facebook basically became the "go to" back when they absolutely did scrape news, similar to Google. Publishers started directly pushing their content there because they had basically no protections from it being pulled (you know -- "open internet" and all) and Canadians were conditioned to hit the "news" tab on Facebook as the homepage for news. Again, my greatest hope is that Meta sticks with it. No news on FB, Threads, Instagram or elsewhere. A total embargo. That'll show em!

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>Respect to Meta for having the courage to stand up to the media lobby in Canada I'm not sure what's going on in Canada for Meta to be seen as the "good guy". Feels like rooting for Hitler to defeat Stalin.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Indeed, and the funny thing is that FB itself became a more pleasant place after people stopped being able to post rage-links to news articles anymore. Though I've since de-activated my account, so I can't say if that's still the case.
vivekd 3y ago
There's a huge portion of people here that really hate our government. I'm one of them. This whole law was a result of legacy media lobbying for that law, a lot of smaller Canadian media outlets and small content creators opposed it. Everything is like that here, the government is ruled by special interests. Even this law, the government abused parliamentary process and the COVID situation to avoid having this law debated in parliament before it was passed. They don't care about democracy, they don't care about the rule of law, they don't care about anything, they just do what benefits them and their friends. I hate Canada's politically connected elite, and honestly prefer facebook
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Everything is like that here, the government is ruled by special interests. [...] Everything is like that here, the government is ruled by special interests. Don't wanna sound like a conspiracy nut but it's like that basically everywhere. The rich need to get richer, the poor need to tighten the belt. Democracy needs constant supervision (who watches the watchmen?) and checks and bounds with accountability, otherwise, leaders left unaccountable and democracy left unchecked slowly devolves into a kleptocracy.
  - robocat 3y ago
    > basically everywhere Does one counter-example disprove the rule? I'm likely just naive and my eyes are not sufficiently opened - but I don't see a lot of obviously corrupt activity here in New Zealand. Corruption seems fairly endemic in most other countries I have visited. It isn't just a size thing because the problem seems to be worse in smaller countries and larger countries. 5 million population might be necessary but it's clearly insufficient to prevent grossly obvious corruption (other ~5M pop country examples). I'm hoping not to discover that our new government is more corruption friendly: so far they are appearing a bit less moral than the previous one.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Sure, there's good examples out there of democratic governments with high transparency and low corruption like Finland and Denmark, but too few of us have the privilege of living there. Granted, there are worse places to be in the world right now than Canada (most of Africa, certain parts of SE Asia, Russia, Eastern Ukraine, etc), but why I think Canadians are so loud(not Canadian BTW) is that they witnessed a steep drop of their living standards and purchasing power withing a much shorter timespan than most developed countries (the same phenomenon is happening everywhere in the west) so you feel let down and hopeless when you know those from just a few decades ago had it so much better than you, and you're stuck in a cycle of relative poverty by comparison despite busting your ass off, while those in leadership positions are favoring those already financially well off instead of the struggling little guy. I know the feeling because a lot of Europe is in a similar boat right now, albeit less severe than Canada.
    - wepple 3y ago
      > Does one counter-example disprove the rule? No, NZ is an outlier. Regularly rated the least corrupt country on earth. “Basically everywhere” still holds. Also, whilst NZ may not have explicit corruption such as bribing police directly, the grandparent post suggesting that special interests affect govt is still true. Jacinda was supposed to be the one shining hope that many believed would bring in CGT and she admitted it would never happen. The wealthy property owners (including most MPs) wouldn’t let that happen.

monkeynotes 3y ago

I rarely support Meta, but in this case I do. I think it was a total dick move on the Canadian govt's side. Poorly understood their position, poorly understood the implications, poorly understood the problem space overall.

llm_nerd 3y ago

The law literally only applies to Google and Meta, both of which make billions from the Canadian marketplace. Trying to cast this as some big open internet thing is not convincing. Holding Meta as the good guys is pretty tenuous as well. Long, long before Meta had to do anything, like a crying, gnashing baby they blocked every source of news, across all of their properties, with a callout to Canadians declaring why. I pray that they stick with it, but I'm going to tell you the reality that Meta is going to make a similar deal, probably within days. Because they make enormous sums on the Canadian market. And they have always pulled (or been pushed), aggregated and summarized news because it makes them money. The frequent claims on here that it's some incidental thing, if not some grand benevolence, is rather detached from reality. And with every passing day more Canadians are just turning away from Meta properties because of their embargo. Again, I pray they actually stick with it and become irrelevant here (it is a toxic company that can be trusted with nothing), but they won't. To play off what the other guy said, it's a pretty bizarre position to hold Meta as the good guys. If they have a position on something, it's an extremely good indication that that position is not a good one.

wvenable 3y ago
This is a very poor argument. Laws and actions are good or bad based on their own merits and and not because of which parties support it or not. This link tax is a bad law. It's bad for the Internet. And thus it is also bad for Meta. > And they have always pulled, aggregated and summarized news because it makes them money. Not even accurate as news companies actively provide this content in their meta data explicitly for Meta to use. If they didn't want their content summarized they could stop it any time.
- llm_nerd 3y ago
  The "link" tax is a tax on mega American tech companies, and was written to target literally only two companies on the planet. It has nothing to do with the internet at large. Anyone who claims otherwise is either poorly informed, or a bad faith actor. The histrionics on this topic are not useful. >This is a very poor argument What do you even think the argument was? I said that Meta's position is an indicator. Don't pretend I said anything more, or strawman a counterpoint based upon nothing. >Not even accurate What a picking at nits. While I was talking about both companies generally, Facebook basically became the "go to" back when they absolutely did scrape news, similar to Google. Publishers started directly pushing their content there because they had basically no protections from it being pulled (you know -- "open internet" and all) and Canadians were conditioned to hit the "news" tab on Facebook as the homepage for news. Again, my greatest hope is that Meta sticks with it. No news on FB, Threads, Instagram or elsewhere. A total embargo. That'll show em!