“The agreement would see Canadian news continue to be shared on Google's platforms in return for the company making annual payments to news companies in the range of $100 million, a source with knowledge of the negotiations told CBC News.”
Yeah it’s a shakedown. I don’t see them getting any money out of Facebook though. I actually think Facebook is a better experience for users without news.
Facebook, all Meta properties no longer allow sharing anything considered news in Canada. If you put in a link to a news site it will be blocked. At one point they were event blocking news satire. People sharing news now will drop in an image instead of a link. Much less useful.
I think news sharing on Facebook mainly leads to outrage spirals and toxic engagement. That’s why I say the platform is better off without it. I’m disappointed that people have been able to circumvent the block with screenshots though.
I'm not sure if this is what you meant but just in case, from the article: "Meta [...] ended its talks with the government last summer and stopped distributing Canadian news on Facebook and Instagram".
If you're doing business in a country, naturally you need to deal with the regulatory environment of that country. Its surprising to see such explicit american chauvinism when discussing this issue.
I'm as much against american hegemony as the next frenchman, and I still consider this wave of "we'll make google pay for the traffic they send our way" regulations to be bullshit.
It's carriage drivers making the automobile industry pay them a fine for the crime of making them obsolete.
> It's carriage drivers making the automobile industry pay them a fine for the crime of making them obsolete.
That's utter nonsense. If google is sending traffic to a site, then naturally they consider that site valuable in some way. Nothing about google makes news "obsolete", and in fact google is basically just a website for finding news articles (and other content). The Canadian implementation of this law, unlike the Australian one for example, gives google the option of excluding these news sites from search results entirely if they consider them unnecessary. That google has chosen to negotiate a deal instead demonstrates that google recognizes the value these sites provide.
We have a userbase that, in general, prides itself on reading the article. Far too many here still don't make it past the headline. Do you think Google is actually sending traffic to articles posted by the news orgs, or are people more likely scanning headlines and confirming their biases? At most (on average) I'd expect clicking through and skimming the sub-headline
Canadian here, many Canadians oppose this law and have a negative view of the CTRC. Many did not agree with the level of control over online news content that the Canadian government sought with this bill.
I'm Canadian. It's obviously extortion. Unless you take the position that linking to someone on the internet harms them.
In the regular world, people pay for links. Google had to ban the practice of paying for links because links are so valuable. And people still do it.
It is nonsensical to argue that links are a cost. So, this law was an attempt at a shakedown.
And it didn't work very well. Meta walked, and this deal with google exempts it from the law if it pays $100 million. All existing deals with the media were cancelled too.
This only applies to specific firms, and no one else. That's hardly typical.
Arguably it violates international agreements Canada has signed, as they essentially agreed to a level playing field for local and international firms.
I'm no fan of Google, but if it was me making the decision I would have told them to pack sand. Google is providing them with a service, not the other way around.
They should not have settled. Probably ran the numbers and for ad+search revenue and noticed it was worth it for $100m. If/Maybe you are making 300m then it's okay to give up that 100 to keep 200.
I'm not taking sides but the issue is Canadian content. Because both countries share the same language, but there is a huge mismatch in economic might, Canadian content finds it hard to compete with American content. Mexico doesn't have the same problem largely because of language.
It's advertising. Google drives traffic to the articles.
If Google stops linking to news articles, media companies would be the bigger losers than Google would be. Admittedly Google isn't Facebook -- it's value to users comes from indexing everything. This is probably why they accepted this deal.
As a Canadian, I wish that they'd just gone ahead and blocked Canadian news.
There’s no way Google would have agreed to pay $100 million if they didn’t have good reason to believe they’d lose even more than that by not having news.
It’s purely a cost of doing business thing, which is why I think the calculation is different for Meta. On Facebook there’s just so much content to fill the void that news isn’t such a big loss.
> If Google stops linking to news articles, media companies would be the bigger losers than Google would be.
Only on the margin. If all countries in the world simultaneously imposed this law, and google stopped linking all news articles world wide, then Google would be the bigger loser than media companies.
It's important to acknowledge the problem: Google extracts more monetary value from the news industry ecosystem than the the value it creates.
I am not entirely sure if forcing Google to pay that difference is the correct solution, or whether helping evil media companies in this way is the right thing to do, but the problem exists.
> If all countries in the world simultaneously imposed this law, and google stopped linking all news articles world wide, then Google would be the bigger loser than media companies.
Large media sites would perhaps benefit from that but in general I don't think that's the case. I get almost all my news from link aggregate sites like Hackernews and Reddit. If I didn't get news links from those sites, I'd end up consuming less news. Especially local news.
> It's important to acknowledge the problem: Google extracts more monetary value from the news industry ecosystem than the the value it creates.
I don't think that's the problem. The problem is that news just isn't that valuable anymore. The only reason it was as profitable at all was local monopolies on distribution. Craigslist did more to kill media profitability than Google could ever do. Now you just have a thousand media companies all writing an article on the same current event and trying to capture a few eye balls mostly from being linked to elsewhere.
Some news isn't valuable anymore. In the world we're going towards, wouldn't it be fair to expect that reliable/verified news will increase in value? Similarly, what is the true value of local news that would otherwise go unreported?
It's important to consider what someone would pay for news directly alongside the value that a healthy media ecosystem plays in a healthy society. It's not called the fourth estate because someone thought it would be fun.
Whether I agree or disagree this doesn't have anything to do with governments legislating that Google pay the largest media companies some money for linking. I absolutely see value in a healthy media system but massive companies owned by billionaires paying each other would not fit that definition for me.
Those 1000 --media-- news companies have been created in part by Google. Google created a game, where the website with the best SEO would bubble up to the top of their news results - not the website with the best editorial standards. This was Google 'commoditifying its complement'. In the absence of Google (but even in the presence of social media like HN or Facebook), there would be far fewer news websites that would be rewriting/summarizing the work of the actual journalistic newspapers. And in such a scenario the fewer news companies would actually make enough to continue to do serious journalism.
This is a lot more apparent if you look at other languages, which are not indexed as much by Google. There the status of news companies is a lot better.
"The new regulations will allow Google to negotiate with a single group that would represent all media, allowing the company to limit its arbitration risk." - I'm sure this will be a large and diverse group representing the growing diversity of media in Canada, either that or it will be Rogers, Bell and Postmedia doing what they usually do, which is really nothing of value.
I always thought the intention was to get the same deal as Australia: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-56163550. It's not a surprise that Canada's media industry wanted the same deal and the government was willing to go to bat for it.
The BBC article from 2021 linked above even says "The law is seen as a test case for similar regulation around the world."
So what the Canadian government and journalists are telling me is that they'd like any outlet that doesn't loudly opt out to be considered government shills.
I think the only thing that matters is getting the news to readers one way or the other. The biggest problem here is that most news outlets publish underfunded garbage if not click bait.
An even weirder perspective: What if they didn't kill reader?
This looks like a capitulation for the Canadian government to save face. The goal was to provide continuous money for Canadian media (based on clicks not a 100 mill lump sum to an organization representing all media) and more importantly to give legacy media clicks - privilege their content over other content.
Google and facebook refused, and I think this is Canada's government and their media lobbyists bowing to a watered down money payment to save face after not getting what they actually sought for
Meta is still out. No news media in Canada can share their articles there anymore. And Google has been exempted from the law - that's how the govt and google reached an agreement. The law called for google to bargain individually with each publisher, but instead google negotiated a $100 million payment with the government in order to have them not apply the law.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
If that case is beyond "who cares?", which I suspect is not, once the user is granted access to the news the first time then they can be given subsequent access regardless of referrer.
Users are going to be opening links from emails, SMS/MMS/RCS, other apps, and sites which do care about their users' privacy so, yes, this would be a problem for many people.
It can only be a problem for the news agencies – and only if those users are a significant number to impact profitability. If those users don't matter, restricting their access doesn't matter. Who cares if someone who isn't helping your bottom line can't access the content you expect payment for? That’s the whole point of this – to keep out those who are not helping the news business.
Now, each successful entrance into an article via allowable referrer would come with an access token to allow future access absent of referral. When sharing in the small scale, the news agency can simply allow these links to be shared. But if the reach grows wide, suggesting that a major tech source has picked up the link and should be using their contractually settled upon authentication mechanism instead, then the token can be invalidated.
> You should want their views a lot, not try to keep them out!
Views don't pay the bills. They only want viewers who are willing to pay to play (even if by proxy). C-18 ensures that payment is made, else user access is restricted by legal force. Which is the same outcome if it were done by technical force. They don't care about the restrictions on users who are eschewing payment in either case.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like that could backfire since "scabbing" would be really easy, especially for less scrupulous news organizations more strongly tied to corporate or political interests than actual news reporting.
Basically while Reuters or AP are "on strike", Drudge Report, Jacobin, or Fox News would step in and become the de facto news sources across all of social media.
This is what I was getting at in the last sentence of my comment. The reason it's a government action rather than a collective action is that way it prevents defections, aka scabbing.
Devil’s advocate: “You can choose what to give us and we’ll display it… but if what you give us isn’t good enough, who knows what might happen to your links’ prominence on our site?” isn’t quite some fully-voluntary thing when Google’s the one saying that.
not sure which part you are calling bullshit. Facebook certainly controls the how much a post is circulated, but it doesnt control which links people put in their posts, or how often they post.
The idea that facebook should have to pay a fee each time a user decides to share a link to news is stupid.
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.
>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!
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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().
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.
This is a popular myth about the way the law works in Canada. The myth may be based on how the Australian version works, I wouldn't know. But here in Canada, this is the relevant text of the bill:
> digital news intermediary means an online communications platform, including a search engine or social media service, that is subject to the legislative authority of Parliament and that makes news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada
"Making available" includes just links. In other words, there is no qualifier in the bill what-so-ever that requires that previews and snippets be extracted and provided. A single link with no text or any other content whatever qualifies as "making available."
I suppose I could have included other "relevant" sections of the bill. But there's a reason I linked to the full text.
> "Making available of news content
(2) 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."
So not only is there no qualifier saying that content needs to be reproduced, but (b) specifically says that "facilitating" access BY ANY MEANS counts as "making available."
Indexes don't work without consuming the news content first in order to build the index, right? So it's reasonable to argue that a news search index is a derived work that draws some amount of value from the source news content. Without the news sites offering their news for free to google's spider, google's index would be useless. You could make a similar argument for aggregators since they usually display excerpts and thumbnails.
This line of reasoning is dangerously close to saying that mapmakers need to pay license fees for your land to be shown on a map because "without the land your map wouldn't be very valuable."
What if I create a search product that directs you to a site, based on information gleaned from another site?
Trivial example: a "Top 10 Topics in the News Today" list of Wikipedia links, based on scraping a news site's front page daily
On the one hand, "It's free info and scraping should be allowed." On the other hand, if everyone did that, it'd highjack all of the news site's visitors, depriving it of revenue and destroying the very resource it's built on.
Sure, but the act only applies if you are as powerful as Google (Section 6: Application), and since they are the primary target the scope needs to be broad because Google can be counted on producing the most bad faith reading of any law to try to escape paying for the practice of scraping content from journalists in an effort to keep the traffic on their own pages.
The text of the bill says that links are "news content"? A pure hyperlink does not make content available, since if the target server goes down the link is useless. It just directs the user to the content.
Unless somebody loses a court case over hyperlinks, it feels extremely disingenuous to claim this law is going after hyperlinks when Google's content was blatantly more than hyperlinks (they provide excerpts).
The definition of "making available" is actually very broad, presumably to head off at the gate whatever technical work-around Google was planning to use to bypass a the more narrow "the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced".
Like, I can see Google pivoting to providing custom links and a script that runs in the users browser that will dynamically produce the snippets on the pages without the content technically going trough their servers...
1. Meta was the other "initial target." And so if we're in a mindset where we just dislike Google or "big powerful corporations that will stop at no end to ... whatever" then the application of the bill ALREADY hit a point where we can start to see how loosely the regulators will interpret Section 6. And according to the wording of that section, they just need to consider the "size" of the entity,"strategic advantage", and "prominent market position" in order to determine if they decide that the digital news intermediary has "a significant bargaining power imbalance."
2. With respects to what you think Google might do in order to try and "work around the law" ... I'm not a lawyer, but from what I've heard from lawyers, courts tend to be very intolerant towards people who try and apply a strict interpretation of the wording of a law in order to try and skirt around what it makes illegal. Common law, precedence and judicial interpretation really exists in large part to try and avoid that type of thing. Judges will look at things like the intent of the legislators, past court decisions and the intent of the accused in order to determine whether the accused is in violation.
In other words, Section 4 "Purpose", would be considered:
> Purpose
4 The purpose of this Act is to regulate digital news intermediaries with a view to enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contributing to its sustainability, including the sustainability of news businesses in Canada, in both the non-profit and for-profits sectors, including independent local ones.
As well as Google's intent. If the court were to gather that Google's intent was to try and work around the law, they go back to the Purpose, look at Google's actions and the EFFECT of their actions and will say "Sorry, you don't get to do shit like that to try and weasel your way out of the law. It still applies." And those types of actions can often be used as evidence of an intent to break the law, so any lawyer would likely advise their client to not even consider doing slimy shit like that.
Ah, its a good point that the main target is the even more bad faith actor in the form of Facebook! Even more reason the technical criteria has to be broad.
I am however confused why you think the law being applied to the company having 91% of search in Canada is mission creep, you never actually say why claiming that Google has a "a significant bargaining power imbalance" is "loosely" interpreting the criteria....
And sure, the state might have a good chance of winning the court case about Google and Meta trying to avoid the law by not technically delivering the snippets themselves, but it'll take years for sure to go trough the courts. And why would you accept those several years where the damage the law is trying to prevent continues because you wanted the technical definitions to be narrow as when you already had criteria on company size.
> I am however confused why you think the law being applied to the company having 91% of search in Canada is mission creep, you never actually say why claiming that Google has a "a significant bargaining power imbalance" is "loosely" interpreting the criteria....
I think you misunderstood my point.
I'm not talking about applying the law to Google, specifically. I'm not even saying that the government & regulators are "loosely interpreting the law." I'm saying that the criteria, as set out in Section 6 is itself intentionally loose to the point where it gives broad, sweeping and arguably arbitrary power to the regulators in order to decide who qualifies and why. That, if challenged in court, they only have to argue that a "significant bargaining power imbalance" exists because of some degree of consideration to "size" of the target, "prominent market position" and "strategic advantage." If that's not extremely broad and sweeping, I don't know what is.
Personally, I don't want my government and it's regulatory agencies having that type of unconstrained broad discretion. It allows them to:
- selectively target certain entities over others
- while in doing so, has the potential to create an unfair market environment while claiming that their goals are to achieve fairness
- it gives them a very broad paintbrush with which to select these entities
In your follow-up point about legal cases and years and cost of going through the court system .. if any target of this law wanted to challenge being targeted by the CRTC ... that's the exact type of lengthy and costly legal process that they would have to go through in suing the CRTC for exemption. It would be incredibly costly for the entity targeted, while having virtually zero consequences for the CRTC and the government if the courts were to rule in the entity's favour.
Just imagine how open to corruption this law is. The CRTC can "punish" certain entities while giving "favours" to others by choosing to leave them be and not target them.
Except that the actual text of the law does not match your claim. It's about "facilitating access to news content by any means" including an "index" or "aggregation". Not about reproducing large chunks of the original content.
And it should be pretty obvious that this is the case. If your interpretation was correct, Meta would not have removed Canadian news sources entirely. They'd just have removed the previews (hell, the news companies could have removed the previews themselves; they already have the controls for that).
>If your interpretation was correct, Meta would not have removed Canadian news sources entirely.
Meta's actions prove absolutely nothing. I could similarly say that Google didn't remove any news, therefore the law has zero effect?
Meta has, for months in advance of anything coming into force, embargoed Canadian news and replaced it with an appeal to the reader. That is political action, and it seems to have failed given that the government didn't blink. Now that Google has an agreement, it looks especially silly.
If Meta continues their embargo of Canadian news, personally I consider that a good thing. The Canadian public accepting that Meta is not a good source or "homepage" for news is a wonderful outcome of all of this.
Are news articles considered intellectual property, like books? If so, wouldn't it already be considered piracy for Google to copy and redistribute significant portions of the articles? If so - and if this law is not actually a "link tax" like you claim - then what is this law really preventing?
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.
Most of the time it's not worthwhile though because few companies will pay, and at some point breaking the web starts losing you votes so politicians will back down first. Except when it's Google..
This Act applies in respect of a digital news intermediary if, having regard to the following factors, there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news businesses:
(a) the size of the intermediary or the operator;
(b) whether the market for the intermediary gives the operator a strategic advantage over news businesses; and
(c) whether the intermediary occupies a prominent market position.
---
So a new search engine most likely won't initially have the size and market position necessary for the law to apply.
Who qualifies as a news organization under this law? Can any random declare themselves a "journalist"? Or do the benefits accrue only to Trusted Sources approved by Your Friend, The Government?
The govt is actually not applying C-18 to google. That's the deal that was signed: google makes an annual payment, and the govt doesn't designate them as a news provider.
So just like in Australia, the applies to nobody. The text of the law isn't very relevant, the whole thing is intended as an elaborate shakedown.
If I understand correctly, Google agreed to pay proportional to the number of human journalists an organization employs. If so, that's an awesome detail in this age of AI journalism.
There are some exclusions for foreign owned outlets.
news business means an individual or entity that operates a news outlet in Canada. (entreprise de nouvelles)
news content means content — in any format, including an audio or audiovisual format — that reports on, investigates or explains current issues or events of public interest and includes such content that an Indigenous news outlet makes available by means of Indigenous storytelling. (contenu de nouvelles)
news outlet means an undertaking or any distinct part of an undertaking whose primary purpose is to produce news content and includes an Indigenous news outlet or an official language minority community news outlet. (média d’information)
Eligible news businesses — designation
27 (1) At the request of a news business, the Commission must, by order, designate the business as eligible if it
(a) is a qualified Canadian journalism organization as defined in subsection 248(1) of the Income Tax Act, or is licensed by the Commission under paragraph 9(1) (b) of the Broadcasting Act as a campus station, community station or native station as those terms are defined in regulations made under that Act or other categories of licensees established by the Commission with a similar community mandate;
(b) produces news content of public interest that is primarily focused on matters of general interest and reports of current events, including coverage of democratic institutions and processes, and
(i) regularly employs two or more journalists in Canada, which journalists may include journalists who own or are a partner in the news business and journalists who do not deal at arm’s length with the business,
(ii) operates in Canada, including having content edited and designed in Canada,
(iii) produces news content that is not primarily focused on a particular topic such as industry-specific news, sports, recreation, arts, lifestyle or entertainment, and
(iv) is either a member of a recognized journalistic association and follows the code of ethics of a recognized journalistic association or has its own code of ethics whose standards of professional conduct require adherence to the recognized processes and principles of the journalism profession, including fairness, independence and rigour in reporting news and handling sources; or
(c) operates an Indigenous news outlet in Canada and produces news content that includes matters of general interest, including coverage of matters relating to the rights of Indigenous peoples, including the right of self-government and treaty rights.
Public list
29 (1) The Commission must maintain a list of eligible news businesses and publish that list on its website. An eligible news business is only included on the list if it gives its consent.
> Trusted Sources approved by Your Friend, The Government
This. From the C-18 bill:
Requires the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (the “Commission”) to maintain a list of digital news intermediaries in respect of which the enactment applies.
> is either a member of a recognized journalistic association and follows the code of ethics of a recognized journalistic association or has its own code of ethics whose standards of professional conduct require adherence to the recognized processes and principles of the journalism profession, including fairness, independence and rigour in reporting news and handling sources; or
Doesn't sound transparent to me. What does "fairness" mean? "Independent" of whom? "Recognized" by whom?
That's in theory. In practice, it's the same CRTC that shutdown a right-wing radio station in Quebec for saying "offensive and insulting remarks"[0] and that recently considered banning Fox News from Canada[1]. It's hard to believe that they are really objective and impartial.
Meta left news in Canada and isn't set to return - no news media can post to Meta platforms. Now media outlets have lost a good chunk of their organic business model and are reduced to begging. The government implemented a large media tax subsidy as a result of how much C-18 cost the media so far.
And all pre-existing Meta and Google deals have been cancelled. This $100 million is all there is.
I think search engines should be opt-in, not opt-out. Just linking to something is fine, but search engines also takes content and uses it to earn money. One example is the cards on Google where they extract content and shows it alongside ads.
Nothing else I can think of works like this. Generally if you take the work of others without being allowed and use it to make money you'll end up in trouble.
Now, for most people the trade-off is worth it, but it should not be the default. It should be a quick opt-in using robots.txt.
This is such a bizarre way of thinking that's utterly antithetical to how the internet works. If you publish something publicly on the internet, people can see it and link to it. If you don't want that, gate access behind a paywall or login, or don't publish it all. Publishing it publicly and then demanding conditions on how it is accessed is kind of nonsensical.
Generally the problem is not the link itself, it's the headline and any included blurb/summary/image from the article. The problem being that users see & gain the content solely when viewed from the link aggregator, without ever actually visiting the originating website and participating in its monetization methods. A bare "http://..." URL probably would not have raised the same objections, but also no one would actually use a link aggregator that is just bare URLs.
Both sides have a point here. I'm not sure where I end up on the issue myself.
> it's the headline and any included blurb/summary/image from the article.
Why would that be a problem? Open Graph was created by Meta exactly so that these news sites have editorial control over those details. And the Canadian news outlets have adopted Open Graph, so that is not an issue. If they don't like what is shown, they have full control to change it. The headline/blurb/image you see is what they have specified. That is what they want you to see.
The real problem is that reporting the news doesn't pay very well anymore and certain news players were on the hunt for a government subsidy to offset that reality.
> If they don't like what is shown, they have full control to change it.
Sure, and then some other news agency that does include more content in their metadata will be shared in the aggregator instead, because it will at least bring in a little revenue. It's a race to the bottom, and the outcome for the original reporter is the same: no payment for their work.
> The real problem is that reporting the news doesn't pay very well anymore
Well, yeah! That is the problem! Google is getting the money that used to go to the news agencies. This is one attempt at a fix.
> and the outcome for the original reporter is the same: no payment for their work.
What provisions are in this bill to ensure that the money ends up in the reporters' hands, and not the media agencies' hands? Without that then you still have the exact same "race to the bottom" scenario – with the reporter seeing no payment for their work.
What provisions are in this bill to ensure that the reporters are able to create their own brand to break free of the media agencies? If the intent is to see Google/Meta drive the traffic and also pay the reporters, the middleman agency serves no purpose.
> I think search engines should be opt-in, not opt-out
If you put your site on the public internet, you are effectively opting in. In addition, robots.txt is trivially easy to configure if you really don't want your site to be crawled by specific parties' crawlers.
The news corporations absolutely want their sites crawled, to the point that if Google unilaterally stopped crawling their sites they would run to the courts to file lawsuits.
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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
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.
CGT doesn't really help fix the problem of property prices appreciating. I like immigration, but I still recognize that 30% immigrants has a huge impact on property prices.
If you want to fix the problem of wealthy landowners then you need to look at a better solution than CGT.
Labour actually brought in some good policies that helped reduce inequality. And some crappy ones too (I saw the effects of their lending policies on friends trying to buy their first home).
My problems with CGT are:
1: it definitely screws up incentives for anyone to make NZ more wealthy as a nation. I know this personally: even with tax rates as they are, I've got fuck-all incentive to invest (in a business or otherwise). CGT actually screws the pooch because I would have more incentive to play the property Ponzi scheme because CGT dis-incentivises me to invest in business risks.
2: why bother starting a successful business if you just get penalized after you win the game. I'm in this position: I'm an average guy that helped found a company that brought millions into NZ and it seems you don't want me to keep the small percentage that is my fair reward (for the years of work I put in and the risks I personally took).
3: CGT seems like tall-poppy-syndrome. If you want to target intergenerational wealth then target that.
I have no love for National.
CGT is definitely no panacea to the problems caused by inequality.
Too many NZers want us to join the other failed states in the world where we can all be equally fucked.
I really don't think CGT has anything to do with corruption.
If you want to argue for CGT - argue why we should tax the billionaire Peter Jackson and why it is fair. An extrodinary success that has mostly benefited NZ (economic and non-economic wins) - obvious consumer surplus - low externalities - tax supported but NZ got paid back - clear export and local gains. He was born into a typical NZ family. "His property portfolio in 2018 was estimated at NZ$150 million" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Jackson
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.
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.
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.
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!
> The "link" tax is a tax on mega American tech companies, and was written to target literally only two companies on the planet.
And you consider that a good thing? Laws that target companies by name? Your argument is that the ends justify the means. But in this case the ends is one set of large companies (some with large American ownership) lobbying the government to force other large companies to pay them for nothing. It's a gross abuse of power. Utterly unnecessary and entirely the Canadian way. This is the kind of thing that keeps the oligarchy alive in Canada.
> 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!
In this we absolutely agree. I also wish Google didn't cave. Of course, they didn't really cave though, they just did a side deal so this law wouldn't apply to them. This whole thing is just stupid and wrong.
> Facebook basically became the "go to" back when they absolutely did scrape news, similar to Google.
If any of these companies violated copyright then by all means let the media companies sue them.
What I find incredible about this overall controversy is how Canadian news outlets begged for this law, and now they are all butthurt that they have no traffic. I have no idea why they thought they had leverage.
One side effect of this whole ordeal that I hate is the fact that fake news sites and conspiracy theory sites that masquerade as "news sites" are not blocked. The result is that platforms are filled with bad content that some people find hard to differentiate from the truth.
Really? I don't use Meta enough to notice, but I've seen several non-news websites complain that Meta is categorizing them as news websites so I imagine that most fake news sites are also being blocked.
As a Canadian this is disappointing to me. I disagree with the law. Actually, disagree is too soft. I think it is absolutely ridiculous. By Google agreeing to pay even one penny, it removes a large incentive for our politicans and regulations to realize that this was ill-conceived and to come to their senses and repeal.
How does the Canadian law compare to the Australian one? As I understand it, the Australian law had a lot of influence from people like Rupert Murdoch, specifically targeted "big tech" companies like Meta and Google, and didn't benefit small[er]/independent news organizations.
The biggest difference on the surface is the AU law focuses on aggregators providing summaries that remove the need to visit the source, where the CA law targets just references, aka links.
I'm not Canadian but have many friends and family there having worked and lived there in the past.
I couldn't agree more. The current gov went way overboard with this, and by Google caving they have just guaranteed more of the same. There's no incentive from everyday people anymore for politicians to care about this.
I'm usually pretty in-the-middle on issues, but in this case it seems ridiculous. Google is giving them a valuable service for free by sending traffic their way. If it wouldn't violate neutrality, they should pay Google not the other way around[1]. A quick logic check helps reinforce this: If appearing in the search results were a bad thing for them, then why would these companies hire SEO experts to bolster their search rankings?
[1]: Note this is regarding the "tax" for serving a link, not talking about a full preview or AI summary or something, on which I'm much more sympathetic to the site owners and think they have a legitimate case worthy of debate
> As a Canadian this is disappointing to me. I disagree with the law.
As a Canadian, this is exciting to me. I agree strongly with the goals of the law (while holding nitpicks about the actual wording). I think the fact that Google came to an agreement shows that they don't have a fundamental issue with the law either (or they could've just withdrawn from our market, like Meta). It's a win for independent media in Canada, and thereby, for all Canadians.
> I think the fact that Google came to an agreement shows that they don't have a fundamental issue with the law either (or they could've just withdrawn from our market, like Meta).
Or they calculated that the agreement is the less expensive option. We're both speculating, of course, but it's possible that they figure that not linking to news in Canada would put them at a [even greater] competitive disadvantage which could potentially cost them more in lost business as Canadian users and customers seek alternatives.
Alternatives, I might add, that are not unfairly targeted by a law granting regulators arbitrary powers to target and penalize some companies over others.
I also want to point out that the conclusion that Google has no issue with the bill because of the agreement reached is another reason I'm disappointed... because of course that's how it will be interpreted by supporters of the bill, and they will hammer that message home with a very heavy hand: "Look! Even our victims support what we're doing to them!"
> I think the fact that Google came to an agreement shows that they don't have a fundamental issue with the law either (or they could've just withdrawn from our market, like Meta).
That's a strange thing to conclude.
If the grocery store wanted to charge me 10 cents per visit for the air I breathe, I would have fundamental issues with that, but I'd still probably pay. And I'm far more motivated by emotion than a publicly traded company.
> I agree strongly with the goals of the law
I like the goals too. But I think the method is terrible, and that matters.
> If the grocery store wanted to charge me 10 cents per visit for the air I breathe, I would have fundamental issues with that, but I'd still probably pay.
Really? You'd just pay it? (maybe negotiate them down to 6 cents like google did then pay it?) I'd probably just stop going to that grocery store (eg like meta no longer serving Canadian media)
I would call it stupid, and point out that it's just an entrance fee. Like pointing out this is a special tax for specific companies to prop up news organizations.
But I'm willing to pay an entrance fee. It's like Costco but dumber. I wouldn't change stores over such a small number.
What exactly do you agree with? This is clearly just a shakedown and they're making very little effort to disguise it. Are you a shareholder of the corporations that will benefit from this arrangement?
Gotta love the regulatory capture that will come with this for that one single news collective. They'll extract a nice little rent for not really providing a ton of benefit
This Is The Way with Canada. Always has been. Regulatory capture, privileged monopoly state that simply replaced its British colonial masters with local ones. From the Hudson's Bay Company to Bell/Rogers or Suncor or Postmedia today. Doug Ford in the pocket of housing developers, Daniel Smith & PP in the pocket of the O&G sector, Trudeau in the pocket of Bay St. The two major parties are just warring clans over which sector will get to dominate us at any particular moment.
I think the US is f'd up, and I don't want to be a part of it. But I also don't want to be a part of the gross kleptocratic mediocracy that's been built here.
Only if your blog is big enough to have bargaining power with news sites. Not that this makes the law just, but it is specifically targeted at large traffic sources.
Taken in the context of Google as a whole, this seems like pretty good evidence that Google does not consider itself to benefit from monopoly power like the DOJ claims. If Google did have a monopolistic advantage, they could refuse to pay the link tax. Clearly they're worried about losing market share to other search engines.
[usual disclaimer: I work at Google but on nothing related to search or policy]
>If Google did have a monopolistic advantage, they could refuse to pay the link tax.
Or maybe they think the engineering work to maintain a whole separate search page, and revenue loss from not including links, is less than the amount they stand to pay.
I'm not sure I agree. I'm not sure I disagree either though. But it seems like it might be a false dichotomy.
For example, with a current gov like Canada, I think they'd be more worried about government action than competitors, and that's plenty of an incentive to get them to pay the money.
Next up: Canadian news agencies forcing their employees to click on their links a thousand times per day to prop up this new and lucrative revenue stream.
I'm no fan of Google whatsoever but I really don't agree with this premise that just because they're successful and their competitors haven't figured out how to compete yet that Google should then be forced to be sugar daddy to legacy businesses. The solution is unleashing your tech industry not more nanny laws.
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