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Meta said that to Australia too, but ultimately caved. We need to not let ourselves be frightened by the threats of corporations. They are meant to serve our society, not the other way around.
I believe in democracy over corporations.
I believe in journalism over social media.
Honestly, look at the state of social media today. The libertarian ideal internet has clearly been a complete failure. The libertarian ideals in the technology field has just been an abdication of responsibility. And some horrible corporations and foreign adversaries have filled in that vacuum.
The old school internet libertarians refuse to accept the reality of this failure. So now we've reached the point where massive corporations are using the oligopoly power over information distribution to strong arm democratic countries to avoid having to pay taxes. And out of habit and denial the libertarians take the side of Mark fucking Zuckerberg.
All to desperately cling on to an ideology that's so obviously been a failure. Painfully obvious.
When your ideology demands you defend a massive corporation trying to strong arm a democracy to avoid paying taxes, maybe you should consider the possibility that your ideology might be flawed?
For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if
(a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or
(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.
21 An operator must participate in the bargaining process with the eligible news business or group of eligible news businesses that initiated it.
39 An arbitration panel must dismiss any offer that, in its opinion,
(b) is not in the public interest because the offer would be highly likely to result in serious detriment to the provision of news content to persons in Canada; or
(c) is inconsistent with the purposes of enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contributing to its sustainability.
Sounds a lot like the named companies aren't even allowed to say "no I don't want to display links at that cost anymore.". And it includes indexing for searching, even if you only included the headline with no preview link, or allowed people to like/upvoat posts with links to news sites in them.
So you have to negotiate if named, and the news sites reject your offer, you go to arbitration, and of the arbiter doesn't like your offer (and by the text "I don't want to show news anymore" MUST be rejected) then it goes to whatever the news corps offer was.
If it just said "hey, we decided your previews generate too much value and violate copyrights, you need to pay royalties or else show the bare links" well, that would be dumb but fair. But being forced to transact seems bad.
Sounds a lot like the named companies aren’t even allowed to say “no I don’t want to display links at that cost anymore.”
Are you saying news sites should be able to prevent linking to their site altogether? Seems like that would be giving too much power to the News sites, and then there would be complications if a user on the social media site were to link to their site somehow. What would the penalty be if a social media site linked to a news site that prohibited them from doing so?
Also doesn't seem like something a news site would want to do.
No the opposite. Those sites (G/FB) will be forced to negotiate with the news sites over how much money they now owe them, and the tech companies can't say "no I'm out I don't want to pay X" as that seems to violate the rules passed to the arbiters saying they must reject an offer if it means Canadians get less news.
So meta pulling links is gonna get contested, and they will be forced to hand over a bag of cash to pay for all the linking they have done.
If they don't want to pay, they don't post news. Which is exactly what facebook is doing right now.
Same deal as for me and you really. If a news site charges a subscription I either pay the subscription and can see the news. Or I don't pay it and don't get the news.
Even if it's ad supported, most news sites require me to disable the ad blocker to see the article. I can decide to disable the ad blocker and see the article (and they get paid that way), or I close the tab and not see it (they don't get paid, but I don't get the article).
Why do you think a massive corporation shouldn't have to pay for the things me and you have to pay for?
Do you agree that indepedent Canadian media should also get paid?
I don't think they should.
Most independent media is just worthless opinion columns, political activism made to look like news, and on some occasions just straight up disinformation.
Sure some of it may be ok, but if you try to write legislation that comes out as "all left leaning independent media gets money, all the right wing independent media can go pound sand" it's just the government trying to use legislation to promote their party. That's a really bad precedent.
So as much as I'd like to see the good independent journalism funded by this, it doesn't seem feasible to do that without also funding disinformation.
I actually agree with this law stopping Facebook or Google basically showing the entire article so you never leave facebooks site and facebook makes all the revenue while offloading the costs to serve and create the content to the news organisation. Seems ridiculous and parasitic. I agree just a link is overreach but something had to be done and maybe it can just be scaled back a bit. Making someone else incur the cost to create something you then sell and they have no way to stop you is just morally wrong.
Those snippets you see are provided by the news organizations. If they think showing those snippets is costing them clicks then they have the power to change the snippets. Those snippets are provided to convince people to click through.
In some cases Google does things like their AMP links which truly do steal clicks and ad revenue, or they'll parse through a link to provide an answer to your search part way through, or if they show more than the provided snippet. Those are the kinds of things that might be legitimate to target.
Yeah for sure thats what I mean. Anything the news organisations cant control themselves is a no no for me.
It would actually be pretty interesting if we could put them in control of that but in an automated standard way.
Just like there's the snippets, there could be a thing built into the article that details the cost of doing more than showing the snippets with all the needed details.
Then the bots could parse through the content and big tech could throw their AI at it to decide their own cost benefit analysis and either they show the free content and the site takes its chance at a click through or the consuming site pays the fee to show the extra content and potentially save their user the click for whatever reason.
The news sites could even alter the costs in real time depending on how much traffic they think it would drive or be worth as news unfolds.
Sure. Then it should also apply to independent media. Which the Canadian bill does not. The Canadian government is picking and chooseing who news media is.
I would be happy for the law to be modified and improved. The first draft isnt always the best. Just a step forward thats all.
This is past the third reading though, it's far from a first draft .
The law of unintended consequences applies. If they take out links to established media, then what will fill the gap? In the case of some of my family, thinly veiled far-right 'blogs' substitute as news at the best of times. If media orgs that have some basis in reality are removed... What's left?
Y'know, I'm not nearly as against this concept as this suggests. News is... clearly unprofitable in the modern era, and the quality of the average news outlet has fallen drastically in the past few decades. So I'm down for some drastic attempts to recapture that value and reward good reporting.
Obviously this isn't perfect, it might even be full-out stupid, but I don't think perfect exists here, and it's worth trying something here.
Wouldn't Facebook having to pay news agencies for clicks to their articles result in the problem of low quality clickbait style articles/headlines worse? I get the point you're trying to make, but I think the way the government is going about things is a bit silly and doesn't seem apt to make things better. To me it seems like the government fell prey to the lobbying efforts of Bell/Rogers/Telus trying to squeeze more $$$.
Yeah, true. If the definition of "news" here is really as poor as "posted by a "News" site", then you're likely right that that would incentivize much of the same behaviour.
Even still though... even companies like Buzzfeed will occasionally fund "hard hitting journalism". Handing them money blindly like that, though obviously inefficient, may still serve to make more "real journalism" financially viable. And I think there's still people out there with a passion to do that, provided they could survive doing that.
Agreed in general though, even as a first pass at the idea, this is an awkward and subpar stab at it, with some obvious issues.
Isn't Vice going out of business and Buzzfeed dying? Both of them got into the clickbaiting culture war topics and both seemed to fail because of it. I still think real journalism is the way to go but it seems to be falling apart and I don't think this will fix it.
This feels more like a lobbying/corruption filled bill more than anything. The intention doesn't seem to be really to fix things, but more just to make the big corps more money.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what corps stand to make a lot of money here? This sounds like it'll cost the social media networks a fair bit of money, and the benefactors are Canadian news networks, none of which are worth a fortune, as far as I'm aware. Seems to me that Meta would've been lobbying against this a lot harder than any news sites could've afforded to lobby for it. Heck, even news sites seem shaky on it, at least based on the CBC reporter quoted in the article.
Happy to be corrected, I'm just finding it hard to figure out who the "big corps" are that would stand to benefit from this.
Well a lot of the media across Canada is owned by Bell, Rogers, or Shaw. With their current CRTC "connections" and lobbying I'd say they have a lot of power to get their way on these deals. I wouldn't be surprised hearing the CBC not as in favour since they don't need to rely on these sorts of funding sources that these other corporations may be hoping to secure.
Ah, that _is _interesting. Thanks for the heads up, I had no idea!
Yes what is a big company in these times? Google is a trillion dollar company I mean that is absolutely insane. People don't really grasp the vast difference between million and billion and now we have trillion dollar companies.
For all the open web absolutists among us, consider this.
Our democracy depends on the survival of our news media. That should be an uncontestable point. The open web in Canada depends on our democracy. Should it fail, the open web fails with it. If that isn't obvious, think what undemocratic countries do to the web and why.
This law specifically targets corporations that have an outsized market power against news orgs. It exempts everyone who doesn't.
If this law helps protect the viability of our news organizations, then it helps protect democracy in Canada and therefore the open web.
Yes, usually linking to canadian news on google and facebook provides a summary of the article as well - so many users are satisfied with reading that and dont click.
So facebook and google get the ad revenue, canadian news outlets rhat produce those headlines get nothing.
That's right. 👍
If you believe in the open web, if you believe that you should never have to pay to link to something
I also believe that I am not a faceless megacorporation. Why should I worry about regulations that specifically only apply to faceless megacorporations?
Because it’s supporting Canadian mega corporations. Read OpenMedia https://action.openmedia.org/page/121153/petition/1?
Guilbeault spewed the same garbage when he was in that seat. Like bullet points from the industry that bought them out.
This whole thing doesn't make sense to me. If the issue is the preview that facebook/google show next to the links then it should already be covered by copyright law. If they want to charge for links without preview then that's just plain wrong.
The way it targets corporations with more bargaining power than the news industry is also weird. Why does bargaining power matter? Is it because the news industry intends to extract payments from everyone later and they want to give the big tech companies no incentive to come to the smaller players' defense? Keep in mind that the biggest news orgs are big corporations themselves. Or is it written this way just to avoid naming facebook and google directly?