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.
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.
This isn’t correct. News media can, if they want, completely restrict google/meta previews or even disable google. Meta/google are huge revenue drivers for media.
But through a complex narrative the media has pretended that google and meta take their money, and so they got the govt to blackmail google/meta.
It didn’t work with meta. The blocked news (one of the options the law allowed). The media squawked because this hurt them, while meta is doing fine.
Ultimately now CBC can’t share on meta, and lost any deals it had with google/meta. They’ll get a portion of Google’s $100 million and that’s it.
Google is complying by removing news. The government is just throwing a tantrum because they didn’t understand the realistic consequences of their law.
How in the world will the government use force to make them stay in the news business in Canada? Do you realize how absurd that is and draconian and just terrible?
> The move follows the passage of Canada's Online News Act, aimed at boosting revenue for Canadian journalism outlets by mandating compensation from companies like Meta and Google's parent company, Alphabet, for hosting and linking to their content.
I'm also Canadian and feel the same. I don't like Google or Meta but this is just the media trying to be greedy. If the incoming likes from Google were harmful they would have configured a robots.txt. They are just trying to lobby laws to get extra money. But they were too full of themselves to realize that they need Google and Meta at least an order of magnitude more than Google or Meta needs them.
The same thing happened in Australia and as soon as Facebook blocked links they cried uncle. Maybe if these news articles actually did research rather than focusing on clickbait headlines they would have learned about that.
> Many people who would otherwise be appalled at laws like this seem to want to rationalize this because its specifically targeting Google and Meta.
It's not just a matter of the targeted companies being Google and Meta, even though these two especially deserve it.
It's the simple realization that good journalism requires good money, and that the current balance between news organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task. It is also true of other type of content creators, by the way: there is a structural imbalance between content creators and content brokers. This is even more true with Google's zero-click efforts.
While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt.
People in support of this need to consider how this type of legislation affects the integrity of the internet.
This bill is not about supporting independent media like they claim. This is first and foremost a link tax, and the result of it is damaging to free press. Independent media sources depend on traffic from social media platforms to function. They themselves are often the ones sharing the links to their own content to drive traffic and readership from in which they monetize through ads. Furthermore, many of these local publishers leverage their social media following to share content on behalf of other local businesses through sponsored articles and posts. The Canadian government playing strong man here when repeatedly warned of the outcome is putting independent media companies in serious jeopardy of remaining solvent.
Meta and Google are in the right here, and I hope they continue to stand their ground. If they cave on this issue, it sets a terrible precedent that jeopardizes the health of the internet as we know it. Companies should not have to pay the source whenever a link is shared on their platforms. It's just backwards.
If you are talking about situations where they are scraping and displaying the contents of an article, that is a different issue, and seemingly not one that is the primary target of this bill.
Presumably he's talking about the intent of the law, which seems to have been to ensure news outlets actually receive money for linked articles. It seems that the government didn't expect Google or Facebook to just stop linking to Canadian news instead.
Canada appeared to be attempting to emulate countries like Australia, Spain, France, etc that have passed very similar laws. It seems like the tech giants were perfectly happy to just cut ties with Canadian media rather than make a deal however.
Bill C-18 changes the rules for linking by requiring two companies, including Google, to pay Canadian news publishers simply for linking to their sites.
I live in Canada and I'm 100% on meta / Google's side.
If you mandate that to link to you I must pay you. Then you get to deal with people not linking to you. It's a bad law, and it's basically mugging tech companies to prop up big news orgs.
This law is a link tax. It means the government wants Meta and Google to pay every single time a link to a Canadian news source is shared on their platform (from what I understand, including even in private messages to friends). As far as I'm aware, it will also apply to Google in that they will also need to pay to index/show links to Canadian news in their search results like you described.
Just like how it was tried (and quickly repealed) in Australia, news orgs in Canada will see their traffic plummet massively and significantly, and then scream bloody murder to have this law rolled back.
Google and Facebook (along with other social media sites) are the primary method by which news orgs have their individual articles percolate through the population. This law cuts that exposure off at the knees, and by proxy, any revenue gained from having readers pulled into these articles.
Most people don’t go directly to a news org website to read news. I don’t. No-one I know does. We just see interesting articles as they pop up in our social media.
Pulling out of that market is far easier
In response to a new Canadian law requiring payments to news organizations, Google said it will remove links to Canadian news sources from Google Search and Google News for users who access the services in Canada
Google and Meta had each been funding journalism — actual journalism, not vulture capital clickbait — voluntarily, which they are now not. Google is now paying $100m, most of which goes to huge corporations. Meta pulled out altogether, slashing traffic to canadian media sites by half.
Don’t be misled. This is not government trying to protect Canadian journalism. This is a few rich, mostly billionaire-owned telecom/media companies working as hard as they can to keep out competition.
It’s not Google’s fault that Canadian media oligopolists have no interest in paying for good journalism. Their only interest is in continuing to profit from lackluster offerings while holding down the pay of journalists by ensuring they have very few employment options in the country.
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