this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Lol Meta has some good PR. The government did not stop Meta from sharing news. They stopped them from profiting off someone else's work without paying for it. Meta was told they had to start paying and decided to stop showing it entirely.
The Government telling meta and Google they'd have to pay to link has led to this entirely predictable result, and the companies said they would block links since very early on in the process. Independent experts (e.g., Michael Geist) also said that C18 was a bad idea.
It's ridiculous to complain about someone complying with laws that you (the government) drafted and passed.
The laws aren’t even in effect now. They pulled it as a bargaining chip like they did in Australia. They could show wildfire news for free right now and choose not to.
I don't really fault them for getting their filtering/blocking systems setup and tested ahead of time before they are liable, considering the estimated cost of $329.2 million per year between Google and Meta:
https://www.pbo-dpb.ca/en/publications/RP-2223-017-M--cost-estimate-bill-c-18-online-news-act--estimation-couts-lies-projet-loi-c-18-loi-nouvelles-ligne
They didn’t have to pay to link — they had to pay to publish. As in, links are fine, adding a summary based on the content of that link is not.
That said, C18 was definitely a bad idea, and Meta spun it to their advantage.
Considering the undue influence Meta had over WHICH news people saw, I think Meta made the right choice.
And ~~Twitter~~ X - shame on them for requiring login to search for emergency hashtags. But nobody’s talking about that one.
From the text of the bill: https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-assent
(b) sounds like just linking or indexing it would count as making it available, and thus require payment.
That seems to be backed up by at least a couple of the news sites: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-bill-c18-online-news-law-explained/
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/online-streaming-news-bills-whats-next
They told Meta that they had to pay to so much as host links to news sites on their platforms.
ie they had to pay to literally direct users to news sites, where news sites would make money off advertising to them, allowing the news sites to double dip. If anyone's got good PR, it's the news sites (would you believe it, the news sites have good connections with the press?)
There were ways to stop Meta from scraping news sites, but they decided to effectively stop them from even sharing news. They could've stopped the bill at purely "reproducing" news, but no, they got greedy and decided to make them pay for the privilege to give news sites free advertising. Why on earth would Meta agree to that, and why is it surprising that they just turned around and said no?
Also to be extra extra super clear, the news sites ALWAYS has control over the view of snippets and previews and indexing via HTML headers, HTTP headers, and robots.txt. They're just pretending they didn't have full control over how that was displayed.
I seriously do not understand where this idea of "profiting off someone else's work" even comes from. I am on Meta's side here 100%.
Me too, and I'm not even a fan of meta to begin with, but paying to link to another site is a pure violation of the way the Internet was supposed to work.
I don't even like Meta and I agree, the law is horrible
If I need to pay a news company every time I decide to text you a link to their site because I thought it was interesting, I'd stop linking to them too.
I didn't pay much attention when this was happening. Are there size requirements or something? How does lemmy.ca or sh.itjust.works avoid paying?
There's no set size but there needs to be an imbalance of power:
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-assent
I hate meta and I actually went out of my way to get my family and friends off of their platforms, but in this case I don't think they're in the wrong. Even if we roll with the logic that they should be paying for these links, then what is wrong with them deciding to not profit off of the links now by not showing them? Isn't that the right thing to do?
It seems to me the news agencies and the Canadian government just wants extra revenue, and when their plan didn't go as expected they're now just crying and bit**ing about facing consequences of their actions.