Many people who would otherwise be appalled at laws like this seem to want to rationalize this because its specifically targeting Google and Meta.
Sometimes taking the simple view is correct: It's a bad thing to prevent sites from linking to one another. It's a bad thing to interfere with the ability to access information on the Internet for reasons of nationalist politics.
> It's a bad thing to prevent sites from linking to one another. It's a bad thing to interfere with the ability to access information on the Internet for reasons of nationalist politics.
Would this prevent embedding links into your posts? I thought it's about platforms displaying enough information discouraging the person to visit the news site. I get that they want people to stay on their platforms 24/7 but I also get the other side wanting a slice of the advertising cake.
I thought so too, and thought that removing the sites from Google Search was a bit bullyish, but it looks like the bill specifically targets links in (2)(b).
"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."
> the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced
Do they define "portion" in more detail anywhere else? Otherwise, it's sounds like it's saying that using a single word that's contained by any news article means that "news content is made available", which is obviously absurd.
No, it only applies to specifically regulated "digital news intermediaries" who are selected for regulation according to the criteria:
Application
6 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 it would be up to the CRTC to decide whether or not to put HN on the list of "digital news intermediaries" by applying the above 3-part test. Given that HN is a (relatively) small forum, compared to Google or Facebook, it's unlikely for that to happen.
The law tries to sort of sidestep this issue by just upfront saying that it only applies if you have a "significant bargaining power imbalance" over the news companies you're displaying.
Basically it only applies against you if you're big/important enough. I assume in practice this means Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Apple, and probably some others. Reddit, I suppose.
Essentially if the news orgs have the ability to cancel you, you don't apply. Considering the amount of funding the news orgs in Canada take from the government, seems like the government just wants a better stick.
Apple and Microsoft generally get their pay from licensing fees rather than advertising fees and are therefore not in competition with news media companies. Reddit has generally been a fairly niche player, although if things change it might get covered. I don't know whether Twitter is as important as people have said it is, or if it is niche: it seems both Canada and a few years ago Australia both decided it was niche. And if anything, I gather than Elon Musk's purchase has made it less dependent on its limited advertising revenue and more dependent on subscriptions etc; if so it is even less in competition with news media organisations today than it was when Australia reviewed it.
Remember that even though people misleadingly call Google and Facebook tech companies, they are in fact advertising companies; and although people speak of news companies, they have generally seen news, opinion and analysis as tools for connecting eyeballs to advertising i.e. they're effectively advertising companies. This bill is about the direct competition between the two kinds of advertising companies - traditional, ~domestic companies with close and personal ties to the people who govern vs new, foreign companies who don't have such essential ties to politicians as journalists do.
If it were literally just about the provision of news, then Canada and Australia fund the CBC/RC and the ABC/SBS so why would they be so fussed? There are people who today make a living from podcasts and substacks who could not make money from traditional advertising/media companies. News would be provided.
(In fact, just to bring the point home, the original version of Australia's equivalent bill didn't allow the ABC and SBS to participate, because as government-funded media organisations they didn't suffer from the transition of advertising from news-sponsoring to tech-sponsoring in the same way as private companies.)
When they said uncapped financial liability, I took that to also mean any meta user's post or search engine result that displayed the content could expose them financially - If I were a malicious actor, I would flood meta with posts from bots, and the equivalent to google results like posting too much of the article in the website's header.
> 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.
I whole heartedly agree - I think subcription is an immense boon to services like these... that being said, if Google parses most of your article into their news tab and then only serves up an amp'ified version of your site it can be quite difficult to actually present users with an option to subscribe. I'm a Canadian and I don't like C-18, but I also think that search/aggregation companies have far too loose a leash right now and are curating an environment where they'll take home all the revenue.
I don't think there has ever been a successful media organization that relied on subscription revenue, except for very specialized areas (business press, science, hobby).
In general, the costs of running a journalistic organization (one which discovers news for itself, not just repackaging news from other media) far outweigh what people are willing to pay for this. Remember that newspapers, even in the times before radio was widespread, were always dirt cheap.
Not to mention, there is a problem of competition. Facts can't be copyrighted, so nothing can stop me from buying a subscription to NYT and reporting everything they write, in my own words, charging much less if I want to. Sure, I don't have their reputation, but if their subscription were high enough to cover their costs alone, plenty of people would chose to trust me.
For that specific example, science publications don't create any content, nor do they have paid staff curating collected content. That kind of helps their bottom line.
These organizations are closer in their model to Google than they are to news organizations (ie they gatekeep a specific type of resource that content producers need).
From what little I know from business press, in my business area they also get a significant share of their content for free, although it is much less predatory than science publications.
> Remember that newspapers, even in the times before radio was widespread, were always dirt cheap.
Not anymore - I used to buy the New York Post to read in a bar from time to time, and it was 25 cents (and arguably overpriced then). It’s how 1-1.50USD depending on day, if you can even find a copy.
Well yeah, but if your local mom and pop diner has to pay, why not google too? That's what the governments are for, aren't they? If google doesn't want to pay taxes in (eg.) canada, they can stop doing stuff that earns them money there.
So, if big companies and small companies are being treated differently, the governments are not doing their jobs and have to be replaced by someone who will do it.
> There's no imbalance here: newspapers produce content, search engines/social networks surface and link to it.
The imbalance is that as platforms, newspapers cross-subsidize content. Interesting headlines attract readers to the newspaper, but once in hand readers are likely to continue reading the other, less unique articles. (See also why newspapers carry sports scores and comics). An investigative report is by itself a money-loser, but the overall effect on net readership is a win.
Aggregators break newspapers as platforms. Google et al provide extra discoverability for a single article, certainly, but then there's no lock-in to keep readers on the (now) website, reading more and seeing other ads. Headline-and-summary view might even result in zero-click satisfaction, denying the outlet even that first impression.
This might just be a change that the industry must adapt to, in the same way that television and radio news took over the news-breaking role. However, it is more than a trivial threat to the fundamental business model of a news outlet; it's not (just) superficial greed.
Personally I'd be happy to see the ad driven model die. It used to be that people bought newspapers or didn't read them. They still had some ads, granted, but far less intrusive than today's web ads with their colours and animations.
I'm huge into supporting good journalism, and think we need some sort of intervention here. But I'm very very strongly opposed to this new law. If news sites want to charge for their content they should put it behind a pay gate.
I pay for news, but insultingly they STILL feed me ads. There is no tier that I can pay for that will eliminate the ads. I really don't have much sympathy for them given their refusal to somehow adapt to the times and offer service that users feel valuable enough to pay for.
It used to be that you could get a paper for a quarter out of a machine on the street. That quarter covered printing and delivery. the newspaper had a classified ads section (plus inline ads, plus ad inserts) which actually funded the people who make the newspaper.
> If news sites want to charge for their content they should put it behind a pay gate.
This is the 'trade journalism' model. Here, good journalism still exists, but the price is more than most people would afford. People buy trade journals when the news is important, with direct financial implications that justify the cost of admission.
General journalism, however, is something close to a public service. It's better in a vague, hand-wavy way to have an educated citizen body that's informed about current affairs, but few individual citizens derive much value from their own knowledge. (This is also why people tend to gravitate towards 'entertaining' news, by some definition. Come for the sports scores, stay for current events.)
In this model, the benefit of news is externalized. I benefit when other people are educated. This is a classic market failure, and it suggests that a reader-pays framework will underprovide news.
How do they say "You can index the story in your search engine, but you cannot borrow the text or images of our content for use on your own news site or info panels"?
Google and Meta (or Twitter or anyone else) don't 'borrow' them. Websites explicitly declare what image and snippet they want anyone to use to summarise a link in the metadata on the web page. it's a choice by newspapers to place that image and text below the link.
Care to provide verifiable details and a timeline for "look like North Korea and China"?
Because otherwise this smells like sensationalism to me. Hate is already defined in Canadian law wrt hate crimes, btw, and that predates the Trudeau-monster by decades.
"Everything is fine" is a position taken by nobody afaict. But if someone is going to make brash claims they better have more than just bluster otherwise they're actively worsening discourse IMO.
What claims can be made with current information in your opinion? Is the Trudeau regime , just another run of the mill Canadian government or possibly something more sinister (or at least more corrupt).
I don't claim to be super-knowledgeable on this topic but IMO the current government is marginally competent and so far I'd say they seem about as corrupt as the Liberals normally are, which is to say: unacceptably. I'm not sure they're any worse than previous iterations, but history will decide. The emergency measures act stuff seems like it was mishandled to me. I find the leadership to be heavy-handed with the virtue signalling, but they're playing to the crowd in the same way that the Conservatives play to the anti-woke crowd - I despise it on both sides. They're doing a whole pile of nothing about healthcare and the housing situation, and I think it'll cost them the next election.
In a world with better options I'd never vote Liberal, but since the Conservatives can't seem to come up with a coherent environmental plan to save their lives (and have abandoned what was originally their carbon tax plan because "The Liberals like it so it must be bad"), and the best leader they can come up with was encouraging people to buy crypto right before it crashed, they still seem like the better option. And I say this with a sour taste in my mouth.
My take on carbon tax is it is mostly an income redistribution scheme which moves wealth from the middle to lower classes while reducing the size of the middle class.
If it does have a material global impact on carbon emissions it will only be a result of somehow shaming other countries to reduce their own emissions. While I can’t find any estimate of how much the carbon tax will reduce emissions, our empty country only has 1.89% to work with. So the forest fires are not going to stop as a result of the tax alone.
I suspect what will happen is other countries will innovate their way out of the problem while Canadians embrace pointless atonement leaving the country weaker and poorer as a result.
Entirely plausible, Canada as a country coasts on our relative affluence and resource base far too much, I'd like to see us pushing money into R&D for technological solutions as well.
I know what you're saying about our contribution to emissions, but I feel like the most basic principle of good faith when you're trying to get another party to do something like this is to deal with your own shit first, otherwise it's just hypocrisy. Every country in the world can look at their own contributions and say "well, most of it isn't our fault, so why should we fix it until somebody else does?". Rightly or wrongly, Canada likes to think of itself as a world leader, so let's put our big boy pants on and step up.
“Big boy pants” and “stepping up” are meaningless phrases intended to elicit and irrational emotional response. Let’s instead focus on the phrase “solve the problem” and work backward from there. The current carbon tax scheme does very little to concretely solve anything - entirely hinging on factors outside of our control such as the ability to influence China.
> As evidenced by the average RoI at Google compared to news organisations.
Not a good metric.
The ROI difference is because of both entities being in different industries, and other things unrelated to the power balance. We can similarly compare the ROI of a news organization and say a restaurant and lament that there is an imbalance of power.
Just tax big companies more liberally, in general and everywhere. No need to target so specifically, e.g. there is so much value in all the data that citizens all around the world are providing, almost for free… maintenance costs for supporting usage are low in comparison, check yearly investor reports for profits.
Then we’d not only have enough financial resources to subsidize a free and healthy press but also for other worthy endeavours like better health care, open source software, science, etc.
All without hampering with basic pillars of the web.
> 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.
Slogans like "good journalism requires good money" don't really bring any reasonable argument to the table, let's be frank. Neither good journalism nor good money is defined for everyone, and the correlation between the two is not really established. One may say media corporations used to have an unwarranted political influence, and excessive revenues during the TV era, and now things are settling to a level which is more normal than the past which media people would like to bring back.
Don't want people gazing on your property? Erect a fence. Nothing prevents media sites from implementing access controls to only allow paying customers.
No one pays. Journalism is a public good that will not exist if the current status quo continues. It’s in societies interest to ensure that doesn’t happen but everyone wants to free ride
There are plenty of news websites with paywalls, it's common amongst conservative media. It's primarily the left wing media that thinks the government should tax tech firms instead of newspapers being required to charge customers.
…what? I’m not familiar with Canadian papers, but at least with American news sources most of the national newspapers have paywalls regardless of ideology (NYT, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal), while television news (CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC) and right-wing sources tend to be ad supported (Breitbart, New York Post), and more left-wing sources usually tend to be some form of donation funded (Jacobin, Mother Jones). If this were passed in the US, the big winners would be right-wing sources and the television news networks.
> 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.
Let's go 100%. Will journalists then pay people who they report on?
>> While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt.
I normally agree with release early, collect data and iterate. I'm not sure the law, with a bill of this impact, dependent on a bunch of politicians with obvious bias, who just went on summer vacation for 3 months, falls into this category.
> there is a structural imbalance between content creators and content brokers
As seen in Twitch.tv vs Kick.com where streamers are dropping Twitch and migrating en-masse to Kick. Abusing the content creators can backfire. However Google is in a different situation; they have a virtual monopoly on content discovery and not existing on Google basically means not existing at all. How do you fix that? Is Google an internet-utility? Should it be regulated as such?
I suspect Hollywood accounting going on here: paying inflated egress to AWS, their own property with one of if not the highest margins on egress in the business.
It's not a utility. Search might be, and the state is welcome to start its own search engine and run it as a utility, paying zero innovation wages as utilities do.
It is not internet infrastructure at all. It's a consumer tool, potentially about to be replaced by AI.
Another thing about utilities: water or electricity are fungible goods, easily measured. Search is rather trickier to decide what a good outcome is, and the thought of paying for politicians and administrators to debate search rank orders for eternity seems a terrible use of money.
Finally, things like water supply have been around for tens of thousands of years. Thinking search hasn't done so much in the last 10 maybe be a little short term! Thinking it will be around in the long term at all, and thus worth converting may also be a little short term.
The average consumer's experience of the Internet would be drastically altered if Google didn't exist. From the functional standpoint of a user, Google is internet infrastructure. Whether it's a utility or not is a different question, but I argue that it is definitely internet infrastructure since people's life and usage of the web would very disrupted without Google. It may end up replaced, like the phone was. That's not relevant as to whether people use and rely on it like infrastructure.
> It's the simple realization that good journalism requires good money
If this were about good journalism then the law wouldn’t be necessary at all. The revenue these companies are generating from the journalism content is from displaying a headline. The whole point of the law is that the actual content of these articles is so utterly worthless, that users can’t even be bothered clicking on it. A substantial portion of those users derive all of the limited value that they believe it has by reading the headline alone. There is no legislative solution to that problem. This is law is only a solution to the problem of useless businesses being selected out of the market by their consumers.
We need proper paid subscriptions again, but we have the chicken/egg problem that people only pay for extremely high quality sources, but there are none.
> 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.
then why were most news publications as bad as they are now 20 years ago? maybe they just suck. I learn more from HN that some news site ever did.
When I read american aerticles about my country, they are just plain WRONG.
> While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt.
First attempt for Canada maybe. Australia did it a few years ago:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56163550
The first draft of that law was initially written by the news companies themselves, and was a hilarious exercise in overreach. (For example, the first draft insisted news companies be allowed to edit joe citizens posts to the media companies Facebook page.) The version put before parliament was watered down and vague enough that after Facebook stopped posting Australian news, a compromise was reached that oddly didn't require a change to the legislation (and the media companies got far less).
But Australia wasn't the first either. The Australian media companies got their idea from the French(?):
I agree with some other posters here. It's not welcome. It's a shakedown from dinosaurs grasping for straws, and to accommodate them the pollies stretched the definition of copyright even further.
It was obvious it wouldn't work, and clearly hasn't worked in Australia. The newspapers are still posting large losses, still shutting down newsrooms. It's inevitable they will disappear in their current form. The newspapers business wasn't selling news or doing investigations to create news. Their business is the same as Google's: selling ads. The news was always just the bait they used to get people to read their ads and they shamelessly copied it, often with only a few words changed, between mastheads. Each had their own little area they sold to, the size largely determined by how far you ship dead trees in about 6 hours. Now the BBC, CNN, The Guardian and the other remaining big ones can reach the entire world now, so we don't need thousands of little mastheads all repeating the same news items. These big news rooms do a far better job that the little ones at gathering news, and selling ads. And so, the little mastheads will die.
It's bad law because in order to cover this use case, they banned creating 10 or 20 word summaries of a 200 or 300 word article, expanding copyright accordingly. That had to do that because at least in Google's case, as all Google every did was post a few words and a link to the actual content, on the newspapers site. Copyright terms have already been stretched well beyond their utilitarian justification, probably by an order of magnitude. This stretches the definition of what is covered by copyright by a similar amount. Admittedly this stretch is fairly harmless here, but if it leaks into other domains we will have a mess on our hands.
> Many people who would otherwise be appalled at laws like this seem to want to rationalize this because its specifically targeting Google and Meta.
That was exactly the sentiment in Australia when similar laws were passed there. Many, many people just said "Good, it's about time Google and Meta paid their fair share of taxes".
But they completely misunderstood they are not taxes at all, it's the Australian government collecting money, by law, to give directly to Rupert Murdoch (by law)
Yeah, the biggest winner under the Canadian law will be the American hedge funds who own PostMedia, the company that owns the vast majority of Canadian newspapers. But that's good apparently, since at the least the money doesn't go to those icky tech nerds.
Governments are there to serve their citizens, not the interests of foreign multinational companies. If this is good for Canadian businesses and the citizens running them and working for them then good for them.
What about the citizens not running those businesses? This may not exactly be a "great firewall", but it seems like your argument could be applied equally to that, and it's hard for me to believe it's really a "good" for citizens in general
I've always considered linking perfectly fine, but what to me is shady when platforms start to summarize or preview content of the link to the point where that functions as a substitute for the site.
There needs to be a distinction between reference to content and the content itself. When platforms start to profit from other people's work without their consent that shouldn't fly. Google search's primary purpose is to make links discoverable and I don't think anyone ever took offense to that. But in recent years companies have started to deliberately blur that line by showing more content upfront, essentially to turn themselves into a middleman and choke content producers. It's perfectly legitimate to not allow this.
We have seen that in other markets this type of law has hurt not helped publishers.
This is Canada but it can easily be any country. We need a fix, big tech has monopolized ad revenue and is choking out the publishers. The quality of newspaper stories has deteriorated over the years and local news has suffered to the point of almost being nonexistent. Also, we now have very few companies that dominate the news. Look at how big the New York times has gotten. It's now the national newspaper in the US. All the other newspapers are nipping at it's ankles. It's a direct result of the fact that other newspapers can't compete without a steady flow of ad revenue. Big tech has sucked all the money which makes it hard for any newspaper to survive, specially regional ones. We need a fix.
These News orgs haven’t adapted. They’re sitting around publishing long winded, biased stories on their shitty Wordpress implementation with sketchy ads wondering why they’re failing.
I’d happily pay good money for high quality news / journalism presented appropriately for the medium. That means a lot of concise real time information, coupled with long form discussion and debate. All packaged up in a modern, high quality web app, with auxiliary mobile applications.
No I’m Canadian, and those are American. I subscribe to Apple News for access to some Canadian sources, including my local newspaper. Though I don’t think it’s very good.
It's a little more nuanced than "many people...rationalize...because it's specifically targeting Google".
It wasn't that long ago that Google was forcing AMP onto the same publishers by making it a requirement to appear in the news carousel. That forced a lot of unwanted intrusion into content that wasn't Google's to mess with. Including a forced banner in the most valuable space, hijacking right/left swipes to navigate to competitor publisher sites, etc. They have a strong demonstrated history of doing the wrong thing in this space.
Though, I agree, this law and the outcome aren't the solution.
AMP made the internet on my phone work. Most sites seem to dedicate 50% or more of the screen space to advertisements and load very slowly -- AMP sites were just crazy more performant -- I'm not saying AMP was the right move to make, but, it was trying to solve a real problem (similar to this bill also likely being the wrong move)
AMP worked like shit for me. Any time I had weird behavioural issues with a site, I’d look to the address bar and spot AMP. Using an extensions to prevent AMP stealing my clicks has made my phones browser work much better.
I don't see how we can call this nationalistic politics. I'm sure if a (hypothetical) Canadian big-tech impacted news organizations similarly, they would also have been a target of this law.
Many of the biggest tech have origins in US and any country trying to make a law regulating businesses and technology within its borders is bound to impact American companies one way or the other. We can take the easy route and call it just nationalism or we can try to understand the intention/reasons behind the law. We may not agree with their laws but it is their right.
Nobody denies its their right, but that doesn't mean it's not a very stupid action, motivated by dumb nationalism. You can't handwave circumstances away, as if the legislators don't know it is a cashgrab against foreign corporations and genuinely believe Google and Facebook are Canadian companies.
They're using this playbook because it worked. Look at China, they were once a big threat to American Exceptionalism or whatever and now... <checks notes>... oh. Nevermind.
I'm not justifying any law here. Saying a law is bad because it is passed in nationalistic fervor is a weak argument. It is a government's right and responsibility to make laws of their land and whether a law is passed because the current government is nationalist or not is speculative and irrelevant.
A good law can be passed with ill intentions and a bad law can be passed with good intentions. We should judge a law based on its merits and consequences but not based on who or why it was introduced.
In this case, we can discuss on outcomes of this law and how it is bad for the internet but speculating on the intentions is just a lazy argument.
Lately, the go to terms against any law impacting big tech have been 'nationalism', 'authoritarianism' and 'crash-grab' etc. Many times the laws on anti-trust or data-residency laws enacted by other countries have been termed as 'threat to democracy', authoritarian and as impacting basic structure of the internet etc.
Any country trying to regulate, promote its own tech or maintain sovereignty over its citizen's data is strong armed into abandoning them by utilizing various trade organizations, lobbying and diplomatic pressure. At the same time, there is lot of official and unofficial complaining and investigation about TikTok storing data of 'American citizens' in China.
To me this looks entirely hypocritical and any discussion that accuses 'nationalism' comes off as a bad faith argument.
The eff had an interesting article[1] about this issue (and others) as well as some alternative ways solve the issue, not that I agree with all of them.
Ultimately, this is the wrong approach. The internet should be "open," and people or companies should be free to link to whatever they want without penalty.
> Break up the ad-tech sector, open up app stores, end-to-end delivery
I thought they stood for freedom, and now they want to pass laws on how software can work?!
Their literally saying this software code can't be this way, you need to submit a PR to change how it works to match this law. If this isn't the antithesis of freedom I don't know what is.
That makes it sound like ad companies are invading the websites of news companies who are resisting.
These news organizations want to have their cake and eat it too. They rely on these platforms for traffic. Now they also want to be paid for getting that traffic. That's not how this works.
The same exact way they are doing here - pass a law requiring the company to comply with certain standards if it wants to operate in Canada and lawfully provide services to Canadian customers. Standards that could, for example, include the requirement for all content on the platform to be indexable. Or even to mandate open protocols and federation.
The word used was "open", and you wouldn't be able to force a company to open itself to intellectual theft at the hands of a foreign government. You're reducing a complex legal/rights policy into "wats the problem just do it guys" mentality. You can't even get rights to index something niche, like the Ontario Opera archive catalogue without running into several unions and trade rights representatives. To think that everyone from Google to Netflix could just do this is hilarious.
People are so often surprised when the money in an industry funds an industry group. It's especially egregious in the defense industry when people turn it into conspiracy theories saying like "this think tank is a puppet because they got money from the people with money."
Obviously a bake sale and all the members of the think tank have to work gig economy jobs in-between research, writing and speeches just to keep the lights on in a dinky little conference room of the sub-sub-sub basement of the Pentagon they rent out.
Perks of the job mainly consist of being able to sporadically say “Gentlemen. You can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!” and having critics in the mainstream media that hate your guts and will—uncompensated!—drop your name on a frequent basis and imply you are much much much more important and influential than you actually are.
EFF always struck me as a more specialized version of the ACLU (for internet and digital privacy). I think they are pro-tech in the sense that tech can empower people and they are sensitive to the ways that the government and various actors attempt to turn that value proposition upside-down and subvert people's rights and quality of life.
Surely news publications benefit more from Google/Facebook providing links to their content? It's a mutually beneficial relationship. I'm a bit puzzled as to why this was pushed, I'd love some context for this.
Canadian media has always enjoyed some protectionism from the government. It's old, entrenched players wanting, and getting, something for nothing. The people that control our media and telecommunications in Canada could fit in a compact car. This doesn't have anything to do with the average person. It's all business and lobbying.
And now CBC won't be on Google, Twitter (over gov funding label), or Facebook(?)
I won't be surprised if we (the taxpayers) end up having to support them even more. Who knows maybe they'll have to pass more tax subsidies for the other major players too.
But does anyone actually win from this? Has someone behind C-18 run the numbers and found a way that this would increase revenue for Canadian media companies?
I don't see how Meta and Google weren't completely predictable, and I don't see how Canadian media benefits from getting shut out. I am so confused.
its going to do the exact opposite of what they said its going to do. Google and meta will disable linking to canadian news sites, canadian news sites won't receive the revenue from those visits.
Meanwhile american news is still free to share in canada, so linking to american news will be the norm and the act to protect and fund canadian news will create an increase in consumption of US news and will remove money these companies already receive from google traffic.
This is the textbook definition of the "Lucas Critique" in that people/companies adjust their behavior to changing laws, often undercutting the supposed benefits of policy goals.
Asa Canadian, I can safely say that any other country's news coverage would be better than the cesspool of US news would be on the table.
This isn't a one way street either. Entrenched big tech use news and any other carrot to keep people locked into their closed platforms. Google Search, Google News, Facebook etc.. are just that much more ripe for disruption having one less bullet to keep the average person plugged into their walled gardens.
You aren't locked into any news platform at all. They're all totally open and you're free to use any you want. You aren't removing a bullet to keep someone plugged into a walled garden here - as I said there's no restrictions on sharing US news, only canadian news. Google and facebook will continue to share US news and it will be the only news Canadians see from them, in effect reducing the reach of Canadian news and promoting american news consumption in canada.
So this bill does the opposite of what it claims to do - it reduces the reach of canadian news, increases the reach of american news, and reduces the amount of money coming in to canadian journalism. Its literally the opposite of everything it claims.
In Australia, similar laws were implemented and Google and Meta eventually made deals to pay a number of media companies for links. I assume that's the outcome the government is hoping for.
This same thing happened in Spain, several years ago. The government passed a law charging google for linking to Spanish media sites. Google said "gracias, pero no" and stopped linking to those sites. The publishers immediately got upset about the loss of traffic to their websites.
Mike Masnick's schadenfreude alone could have powered a small nation for a week.
> Last November [2021], Spain overturned the 2014 law and instead signed on to a European Union copyright directive that lets publishers negotiate their agreements directly with platforms.
On one hand, yes, it drives traffic. On the other hand, no, because lots of people just read headlines and maybe they can do that without clicking.
But realistically this the current Canadian government trying to shake down google and facebook for money to transfer to the ailing news industry in canada. The merits of the position for a link tax are pretty bad, and don’t really matter to the issue at hand. The government already gives hundreds of millions in grants and tax incentives to make the current journalism landscape in canada possible, without even looking at CBC the national broadcaster.
This is just a shake down job. They see google and facebook have a ton of money and the government thought they could threaten them into parting with some of it. The government doesn’t care about the implications of a link tax on the web, or mutually beneficial relationships, or any of that. It’s a shakedown.
>> because lots of people just read headlines and maybe they can do that without clicking.
I agree; I'd argue you don't have much of a valuable service if all users need is a headline. Print media needs to give up the traditional shallow breadth fueled by advertising and go niche, and go deep. Cable TV should learn this lesson as well.
I think traditional media needs to go deep and needs to go local.
If I open up the local paper and see associated press articles that’s not the right content for them. I can see that anywhere, probably before the newspaper is delivered.
It needs to be local journalism about things that matter. Actual local issues, hard journalism about local politics and city hall and whatnot. That’s what’s missing from the big sites and when it is there its sort of after the fact. They need to be investigating not just repeating press releases.
I don’t know about cable tv - its essentially a syndication not a local thing. I think the internet will kill it off. Now that the lines to the home aren’t a moat around being a cable company every video website is the new cable company. They need to have content you can’t get on the internet and I don’t think that’s going to happen. As old people die who couldn’t adapt to internet tv, so cable will die.
Like the way a starving person's body consumes their own muscles, the local newspapers in Canada have laid off all their journalists. As a kid, I used to deliver the local newspaper to make a bit of money. I remember those Saturdays when the paper was like an inch thick and weighed a ton.
Nowadays, it looks more like a newsletter than a newspaper. My late roommate subscribed to the local paper up until the end of his life. At that point, he was really only interested in the crosswords and sudokus.
Dutch newspapers are back to subscriptions. They're doing better than ever.
If your product is good people will pay for it. And there will always be a class of people who need journalism. Politicians, government officials, bankers.
In hindsight the whole internet bubble looks strange. Nobody cared about monetisation only users!
> Canadian users will still be able to search for news content from international outlets such as BBC, New York Times and Fox News.
This is really the icing on the cake for me. Not only are you losing a lot of search traffic, but now those users are going to be directed to international sources so they won't even be looking for you. What a great way to screw over national media.
> Surely news publications benefit more from Google/Facebook providing links to their content?
Probably depends.
In some cases, Google scrapes the interesting bits and people never click through to the host site. In other cases, Google has provided a way for people to circumvent paywalls.
Some of this was a strategy by news organizations - but it seems it might not work long term. I, for one, click through to far fewer Wikipedia articles now that Google includes the synopsis embedded in search results...
The source would be the organic-traffic and Facebook analytics for all those news publications. Whatever it is now, won't this take it to 0%?
I feel like a similar thing was tried in Europe somewhere a few years ago and then quickly ditched, because all the publications saw their traffic crater.
California gave birth to these companies, and has been, and remains one of our nations’s primary economic engines, despite the shenanigans of a few attention-seeking public figures…
Surely news publications benefit more from Google/Facebook providing links to their content?
Actually, no.
It might be a symbiotic relationship for a small-time blog, but for a major news organization, it isn't. The Toronto Star and Global TV don't need freepub from Google.
One example among many: Most people see the headline – the headline written by a paid headline writer based on an article from a paid journalist on a staff of other professionals with families to feed - and then move on.
Very often a headline is all someone needs or wants. That has value. Without anyone clicking through to the web site, Google is getting the value from the headline, and contributing nothing to the web site in return.
It's like saying that when Google steals content from web sites and presents it as an answer card in search results that the web site somehow gets something out of it. That's completely false. The only one getting anything out of it is Google.
This is the most ridiculous take on this that I've ever seen. Next you're going to say that newspaper stands need to pay a charge to the newspaper each time someone walks by their stall (or buys gum, for example). They have seen the headline, and then moved on.
Very often a headline is all someone needs or wants. That has value. Without anyone buying that newspaper, the newspaper stand has got value from the headline, and contributed nothing to the newspaper publisher in return.
The reality is that headlines are advertisements for articles. That's why there are headline writers in the first place. Make a better advertisement, get more sales.
In the case of Google, publishing links with headlines means publishing free ads for that website. The website most certainly benefits from that relationship, if they didn't, they would just use robots.txt to block Google indexing their website, which someone has always been free to do.
The real problem is that newspapers would just like to take a percentage of Google revenue, because they're a big company.
Yeah, the definition of news content being "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)" seems overly broad but I doubt they intend for headlines to be included.
I think the bill will lead to further litigation, specifically if a headline counts as reporting or explaining. I doubt a headline can investigate.
It does also seem to put a limit on a platform's ability to negotiate which is worrying. After 3 rounds of negotiations an arbiter can come in and decide what is a fair price and companies are not allowed to treat different news organizations differently. This seems to have room to abuse for me.
Oh no, it's not just Google and Meta. That's how it's being presented, but it's actually whoever the CRTC wants to charge. They can and will change the list at any time, with no need for oversight.
This newspaper stand argument is really, really bad. The headlines of the physical newspaper on the front page are for the purposes of advertising the newspaper.. and the newspaper stand sells the newspapers - that's a big contribution to the newspaper business!
> The Toronto Star and Global TV don't need freepub from Google.
So have those publications opted out of search and Google News? If not, it's pretty clear that they're getting more benefit from those links than they're losing to people "reading the headline and getting all they needed from it".
I assume these news organizations don't even bother writing the article, right? Because your story obviously applies equally well to their own site. Users will open the frontpage of the site, read the expertly crafted headline, and leave.
>Very often a headline is all someone needs or wants. That has value. Without anyone clicking through to the web site, Google is getting the value from the headline, and contributing nothing to the web site in return.
So the solution Google is proposing works out for everyone. Canadian news sites can ensure people go to their site for headlines and Google can no longer show information for those sites. The Canadian news sites should see increased revenue in terms of subscriptions and advertisements.
A headline's job is to provide enough information to encourage someone to read more if the story is relevant to them. If someone doesn't want to read on, no value is lost.
News sites could get rid of their <title> and OpenGraph tags, and people could share the raw story URLs without any context. No-one would click through as they'd have no idea where the URL went, though, so news sites provide these titles willingly and have full control over how they write them or what level of detail they share.
The idea that headlines like "Queen Elizabeth has died", "Madonna discharged from hospital", or "Interest rates go up" replace the need for the rest of the story for any substantial part of the target audience seems far fetched to me, and if the meat of the story is given away in the og:description.. they wrote it!
You might be underestimating the amount of traffic Google sends to publishers through Google News. Anecdotally, I get Android notifications from CBC, Global, etc. through Google News daily and do sometimes click on them.
Well then, maybe the law should be a headline tax rather than a link tax. As currently written, Google/Facebook would be free to continue providing headlines that don't link to the sources.
For those unfamiliar, Pablo Rodriguez is the Minister of Canadian Heritage under whose auspices all these censorship and control schemes are being pushed forward.
Ironically, Pablo Rodriguez is the son of an Argentine Peronista (the far-left populism that cripples Argentina to this day). The family fled the country when the war broke out. Pablo was old enough to see first hands what happens when there is no free independent press, and now he's eagerly fostering those same conditions onto Canada.
Quite the contrary: the news stands would have the front page displayed quite prominently precisely so that you could read the headlines of the main stories to attract the interest of passerbys: https://p.turbosquid.com/ts-thumb/0m/ePJxnz/tlmgVado/news_st...
If outlets don't want the headlines scraped and displayed, then they're free to modify their `robots.txt` file accordingly. But they don't because they're well aware that this would reduce, not improve, their bottom line.
I honestly figured it would not even help the big sites - users would have to start deliberately going to those sites directly without first arriving there through an aggregator/search. Apparently that’s incorrect for major news organizations though still true for smaller ones (which I guess have not enough brand awareness for users to directly go to the site). I guess as it long as link taxes appear beneficial for major news organizations that can afford to lobby for them, we can sadly expect this to happen in more and more countries.
IANAL but I understand that most Anglosphere countries outside the US have very different interpretations/not as strong guarantees of freedom of expression as in the US and some other Western countries. In countries with stronger protections I can’t imagine a link tax having legs. Given that a link itself is not IP/content (I think), what would be the legal basis for displaying it on a website requiring compensation to the linked site? Though I suppose there is some precedent for requiring link removal from eg Google through DMCA, it seems different because in that case it’s driving traffic to “stolen” content.
The solution to this problem is for Google, Facebook and other web sites that link to news to limit links to web sites that agree that the free traffic they're receiving from extremely popular web sites is sufficient compensation for linking to them. In other words, block links to any web site that feels entitled to be paid for being linked to.
There are plenty of web sites that will be happy to take the free traffic and it isn't like it matters to Facebook's bottom line if their mostly elderly users are arguing over some article from Fox News (which supports the journalism cartel bill in the US) or some article from Breitbart (which opposes the journalism cartel bill). I imagine it won't take long for Murdoch to change his mind and stop trying to shake down tech companies for the privilege of sending his media outlets free traffic.
They cannot do that. The law forbids discriminating against any Canadian news business. If they link to news sites that don't demand payment but won't link to ones that want to be paid, it'd be viewed as retaliation.
The only options are to accept the rigged negotiation process and pay all news business vastly inflated rates, or to link to none of them.
> to limit links to web sites that agree that the free traffic they're receiving from extremely popular web sites is sufficient compensation for linking to them.
The problem with this is there's no direct relationship between the two. So Google and Facebook can arbitrarily decide to "punish" a paper by demoting or flat out filtering their content.
These platforms aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. They put this content on their platform because it made their platform more popular and provided value for them, and now that they've monopolized user attention, they're directly weaponizing it.
> There are plenty of web sites that will be happy to take the free traffic
So.. it's a race to the bottom. News sources are no longer selected based upon quality or user demand, but on their willingness to be used by billion dollar tech giants. I'm sure the quality of the reporting will be identical.
The news sites in Canada are owned by billion dollar media and telecom companies. Nowhere near the scale of Google & Facebook, but among the largest companies in Canada. Speaking as a Canadian, this is very much a protectionist law trying to prop up an old media business the public no longer has much interest in.
Right.. so the post I'm replying to suggests that Google and Facebook should just drop these larger publishers and instead abuse smaller publishers who "would just be happy for the exposure."
So.. your argument is, because you don't like some media companies and are willing to speak on behalf of all Canadians, the market really isn't worth protecting at all?
I don't see what is "abusive" about sending media companies free traffic. There are millions, if not billions, of web sites on the internet that would be thrilled to be "abused" by Google and Facebook in this way.
The "abuse" here is certain media companies that think they're entitled to shake down tech companies that do them the favor of sending traffic their way. The core business model of Google and Facebook, which has made them into 2 of the most valuable companies in the world, literally involves other companies paying them for ads to draw some incoming Google and Facebook traffic to their web sites. If you can't run a profitable business when you're getting an enormous inbound of free inbound traffic from Google and Facebook then you're so utterly incompetent at running a business that it is best for everybody that capitalism be allowed to work its "creative destruction" magic and reallocate those resources to somebody who can use them profitably.
I was at Facebook working on ranking when a similar thing happened with Australia.
Showing news is a net negative for Facebook and probably not very positive for Google. Facebook's short and long term metrics were better without news. Facebook and Google are basically doing charity when they link to local news sites. These laws make absolutely no sense when you think about that.
I think this is one of those things where you might think that, and the numbers might show it, and yet if you remove it human nature will surprise you. People expect to be able to find and share everything, including the long tail of their interests. If they suddenly can't, they'll look for alternatives. In the case of Google, there are a lot of alternatives and while Google just keeps getting worse, the alternatives are better then ever.
Even if a person only searches for news items a few times a month, if they suddenly can't do that, they'll just go find an alternative search engine.
Brazil is currently considering a similar law that would require social networks to compensate content creators for each republication [1]. However, unlike the situation in Canada, the Brazilian lawmakers have taken into account this scenario. The law mandates that social networks cannot cease publishing the content and must negotiate compensation in "fair terms." Personally, I find this approach to be quite perplexing.
Or fighting a legal battle (which they will hopefully fight and win), or leaving the jurisdiction and then saying "good luck with that, let's find out how much of your companies' revenue we were driving".
If they just showed the title and the link - like they used to - they it would drive revenue. But because they show a synopsis of the news, people very often don't click the link.
I'm skeptical that such explicit summaries are the only thing social networks display. Even if that is currently the case, it would be relatively trivial for a company the size of Meta to generate and show their own summary.
It might be technically simple but it’s probably legally complicated to write a summarizer that doesn’t violate copyright. Using data they are explicitly given permission to use by the definition of the field it’s in is quite different though.
If they want to operate in the country. Is google going to leave whole countries just because of being required to use and compensate local news? Essentially it's a tariff.
Honestly? Why not. Not every country in the world is going to pass a law this silly and for those that do, do you really want to be in a business environment where the National government puts you in a position of dictating what services you must also offer in order to continue doing business at all in the country? Like what if Google just decides for whatever reason at some point in the future they don’t want to continue to offer Google News anywhere. That would be their prerogative. Whether they spun it off, sold it or just shut it down are all valid business choices they can make.
At least it’s easier in Canada where Google can go “okay, we’ll just remove you from our index that we included you in without charge that if you wanted to, you could have removed yourself from at any time.”
Sounds like you can print money out of thin air by creating social media accounts who post your "news". It may force the social media companies for proper policing the against fake accounts.
Would it have been better for these bills (CA/Brazil) to mandate revenue sharing, i.e. no flat fee per link from google, but a percentage of revenue from ads served associated w/ the link?
That would be fair enough but also wouldn't give the publishers what they want, because Google doesn't show ads in their News app or in Google News on the web:
Money. They will remain here as long as there's still profit to be made. Would be awesome if they had enough balls to tell the brazilian government to go to hell but they just aren't gonna do that as long as they're making money.
This is the same as increasing taxes then, except that instead of the taxes going to the government to vote for the redistribution, they go straight to news agencies bypassing the government.
When viewed with this angle, the next question is why news agencies get their own dedicated taxes and nobody else?
That's also what I'm getting from that, making it proportional to the views make it sure that independent investigation journalists won't get any of it.
Facebook and Google cache their content and display it on their own websites, negating the reason for clicking through to the website where the ad dollars would be generated for the content creators.
That isn't the case for google news. There is just the article title, and a link to the publisher's website. If you mean on google search: caching can easily be disabled by using noarchive.
The data they cache and display is explicitly provided by the publishers for the sole purpose of being used that way. They are free to stop providing that data, or even opt out of indexing all together.
It's not really advertising when the user is specifically searching for news content. That's like saying the halibut fisherman is getting free advertising when you go to a restaurant and ask to see the menu.
That's not a good analogy because news sites don't sell their articles to Google, they get paid when users visit their sites. Google is promoting their websites and actively directing users to them, for free. Do I need to pay NYT when I recommend an article to my friends?
It's certainly not the greatest analogy - it's just meant to claim that you can't advertise something that someone's already looking for, including when you only know they're looking for it because they came to you asking for it. Google isn't doing any promotion, they're simply forwarding on the most accurate indexed page according to your query. Promotion and advertising would be generating demand that otherwise wouldn't exist, which is not the case in this scenario. You can argue Google is promoting one page over another, but for every page that's at the top, there's a page that's at the bottom, and so it's not generally promoting the collective news media in any way.
I’m guessing if/when this takes effect, the publishers will have to buy ads on Google and FB to attract readers that would previously find the content in the said platforms?
Seems like a win for the two companies.
Also it seems like a business opportunity to start a newspaper outside Canada that does journalism for Canada. Then you’d appear in search results for free, while your Canadian counterparts would have to pay for ads to show up on the first page.
As a Canadian, I feel like this is terrible news. From a web publisher point of view, I do agree that Google is going to far sometimes by embeding the content directly in the SERP. They take it so far that most of the time you don’t even need to click on the article to get the summary.
The problem is that all of these feeds are huge and not relevant to my interest. For example I live in Toronto but the first 5 items in the CBC Toronto are not interesting to me. For example I see "It's like smoke on your wedding day — How the wedding industry is working around wildfires ". I couldn't give two hoots about people working around some smoke on their wedding. The General News category doesn't do much better.
The category of each individual item doesn't help filtering, most of them are just labeled News/Canada/Toronto.
I love RSS but I don't find these news company feeds compelling. They just pump out too much junk to fill the void of real news.
However I would definitely click through links to their site when searching for news about specific events. But they have shot themselves in the foot. Now I am just going to be directed to US sources instead.
My understanding was that the complaints was against using larger excerpts. I haven't used neither Googles nor Metas offerings, but the objection that I read in a different article was about users reading the news on Facebook, rather than letting the users click through to the newspapers.
If Google and Meta just generate free traffic for the news site, then I'm not really sure why they're complaining. If their write is straight up reproduced without permission then I understand.
My interpretation is that Google/Meta do only reproduce short excerpts, however short excerpts is all many people ever read. If those excerpts satisfy people’s interests, then they never end up visiting the actual new sites.
Even on HN it’s not uncommon to see people commenting on articles they’ve only read the title of.
> they never end up visiting the actual news sites.
I don't understand anyone who just visits a general news site and reads arbitrary articles. I understand with physical newspapers, because they deliver it to your house in the morning and there was no alternative but to subscribe to multiple papers. I have to think that only senior citizens do it now. I only pay for outlets because I want them to be healthy and to continue publishing, and I don't personally care about some major city's establishment paper, and don't care whether it shuts down.
> And isn't showing the content of the RSS feed "fair use" anyhow?
Fair use and copyright are 'artificial' legal constructs, so if they were defined in an 'arbitrary' way to begin with, they can be redefined to add or remove provisions. These online publishing laws could tweak those provisions.
Also: when an RSS/Atom feed is published, it is still copyrighted, and the terms and conditions would/could perhaps be defined what "fair use" is by copyright holder (maybe?).
But what is the situation in Canada now? Did they really put a law into place which says "When you link to a page with a short excerpt to show what the link is about, this is now a copyright violation"?
Seems like this will be much worse for the media companies. It isn't like most people who clicked on news while casually scrolling their feed are suddenly going to start going to all these news sites direct.
Sometimes taking the simple view is correct: It's a bad thing to prevent sites from linking to one another. It's a bad thing to interfere with the ability to access information on the Internet for reasons of nationalist politics.