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Bill C-18: Google to remove news links in Canada over online news law (ctvnews.ca)
383 points by matbilodeau on June 29, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 484 comments



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."

https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...


> 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.


This would include HN


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.


so then it depends on if HN ever embarasses the CRTC or the government. Better toe the line else be designated


I don’t think HNers will be losing any sleep over the inability to link to a couple of CBC articles!


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.


I suspect, in practice, it means an ambiguous new power that can be leveraged in any way that seems useful at the time.


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.


I have heard it only applies to Google and Facebook at this point in time. I doubt any other companies would be even capable of complying.


Why wouldn’t it apply to Microsoft, Apple, Twitter and Reddit if it applies to Google and Facebook?


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.


No, the issue in this case is linking.


This is false. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36528169

Having any portion of the text present is enough.


> 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.


>While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt.

The problem is media companies have been pushing this exact blueprint for d years. decades. It is a terrible, terrible template.

If countries want to tax big tech and give the money to media organizations, they should be honest about it. Laws like this distort reality.

>the current balance between news organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task.

This doesn't make sense. Newspapers want links to their stories. I've even seen media organization paying "internet brokers" to advertise stories.

The law has the economics of the internet backwards. To receive a link is to benefit, everyone knows this except the government.


> This doesn't make sense. Newspapers want links to their stories.

Newspapers want monetization. There are three ways linking to stories equal monetization:

* Newspapers get enough ad money through these link. This mostly doesn't work.

* Newspapers cut their costs and deliver shitty clickbait.

* Newspapers get funded by "philantropy". This ranges from newspapers independently funded by trust funds to newspapers being bought by magnates.

Overall, we can see that linking is far from enough for most newspapers to publish independent, quality work.

> To receive a link is to benefit, everyone knows this except the government.

This appears to no longer be true. Groups benefiting from internet are mostly eyeball brokers, not content distributors.


Newspapers lost monetization when they lost their classifieds business.


4: Links bring in readers who then decide to support the journalism.

I personally believe reader support is the only viable option going forward.


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.


Well, first of all, Amp is opt-in. And second, indexing is opt-out. So the publishers are already in full control of how Google uses their content.


Or you know the fourth option - charge people money for access. Crazy I know.


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.


> except for very specialized areas [...] science

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.


>> If countries want to tax big tech and give the money to media organizations, they should be honest about it. Laws like this distort reality.

The idea that big tech would pay the appropriate amount of tax to the appropriate country is laughable.


Where does the word appropriate come in to play?


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.

What's happening here is that publishers and their owners somehow figured these pesky internet wiz kids owe them more money.


> 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.


Not to mention they often had a rich owner who ran them at a loss if need be to ensure they keep being friendly to him/her when needed.


Because what you paid is far less ( think 10x) than what it takes to run.

Traditional paper-based newspaper is ad-supported too.


> 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.


The can post a robots.txt file to say not to index.


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.


I think you can do this with

  <meta name="googlebot-news" content="nosnippet">


Why should one have to do this? The slippery slope of what is ok goes straight from this to copyright laundering via LLMs.


Why shouldn't they? This is basic fair use. Google is giving them an out they don't have to.


Fair Use isn't a thing in Canada.


[flagged]


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.


With out a verifiable “roadmap to tyranny”, must we necessarily conclude that everything is fine?


"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.

What's your take?


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.


> There's no imbalance here: newspapers produce content, search engines/social networks surface and link to it.

As evidenced by the average RoI at Google compared to news organisations.


> 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.


I expect you'll find that discontinuing their news linking service in Canada has very little effect on Google's profitability.


I agree that Canada should probably have targeted their ad service rather than which link they publish.


One is the world’s dominant gateway to the internet, the others are a handful of websites.


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.

Nobody owes anyone else a business model.


> Nobody owes anyone else a business model

But there is public interest in having newspapers. (A tax on large digital ad platforms to subsidise newspapers makes much more sense.)


Canada does have a bunch of subsidies for news already (not to mention cbc is gov funded)


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.


That's a classic case of prisoner's dilemma though.

By acting at national level, news publishers (partially) avoid that dilemma.


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


If no-one pays, then society as a whole clearly disagrees that it is a public good. Or, at least, that it is a public good worth the expense.


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.


Don't want people stepping on your property? Shoot them down, why bother calling the police!


> 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?


Twitch.tv vs Kick.com is a bit more complicated, right?

Twitch claims it loses money on big streamers[1] and Kick is almost certainly being subsidized by online gambling company Stake[2][3].

[1] https://twitter.com/djfluffkins/status/1479362350566109184

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/12/06/trainw...

[3] https://www.bonus.com/news/stake-com-founders-own-kick/


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.


Google the search engine is critical internet infrastructure, and innovation into it is stagnant from a user's perspective.


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.


If there were any quality journalism to be found and to be needed by people, posting headlines wouldn’t prevent them from clicking the link.


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.

CBC has received $1.2 billion annually from the federal government (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporat...) and is very ... government friendly ... in matters like the trucker protests.

I remember more independent press around 2000-2010, where there was true opposition in the media. I see nothing like that now.


> 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.


I disagree that its welcome. I think its just a shakedown.


> 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(?):

    https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/21/google-agrees-to-pay-french-publishers-for-news.html
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.


How is Google and Meta removing links to news businesses that really on eyeballs to generate revenue a good thing for those Canadian businesses?


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


If robbing is good for Canadian businesses and the citizens running them and working for them then good for them.


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.


Snippets are explicitly declared in the metadata of a web page. Those previews only appear because the publisher explicitly asked for them to be used.


Well for Google specifically isn’t your ranking severely impacted if you don’t include them? In that case it’s hardly a choice.


How tightly does Google check if the preview matches the real content?


> bad thing to interfere with the ability to access information on the Internet for reasons of nationalist politics

Or after 20 years, non Americans recognize information control should be more nationalized instead of under perview of US companies.


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.


Are you paying for Reuters, New York Times, WaPo, et al right now?


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.


Guess: you were running iOS and your parent was running Android


It did have some benefits for consumers (and some drawbacks also). That doesn't really change what they did to publishers with it though.


On the other hand, less people arguing over news articles may be what the world needs.


Fully agree. The unfortunate part is Canadians don’t seem to care.


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.


> I'm sure if a (hypothetical) Canadian big-tech impacted news organizations similarly, they would also have been a target of this law.

Very unlikely, IMHO. The CRTC isn't in the habit of making decisions that harm large Canadian companies.


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.


It’s not dumb nationalism, it’s typical lobbying, sold as nationalism.


What's new?

We have been using that same excuse to block out Japanese and Chinese goods in various eras.

Just feels weird the Canadians are copying our playbook


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.


[flagged]


I don't think it adds anything to the discussion to personify and sexualize these companies.


I appreciate most of your argument and I also agree that we can't just use nationalism to dismiss laws like this BUT

"We may not agree with their laws but it is their right"

This statement can be used to justify any law. We are also not debating whether it's their right but if it's a good law.


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.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech


What a bad take from the EFF!

> 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.


But what does it mean exactly to be open? Are you allowed to monetize via ads on the work of others or no?


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.


Facebook, Instagram, etc. are not "open", so the argument doesn't work.


Then maybe the government should focus instead on forcing them to be open?


How would a Canadian government force an American company to be more open?


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.


> The internet should be "open,"

Which RFC is that?


"The Internet is for End Users":

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890


RFCs are technical specs. This is a question of ethics.


While I agree with them, it's important to note that the EFF is very pro-big tech and is largely funded by them.


> it's important to note that the EFF is very pro-big tech and is largely funded by them.

I find that a puzzling comment. EFF has a strange way of showing its allegiance to "Big Tech".

What do I not know? How does the EFF demonstrate its allegiance to them?

I took the EFF's work on privacy as an impediment to "Big Tech"'s business model. How am I wrong?


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."


exactly. like how else they'll get the money? do you the random people donate?


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.


> The people that control our media and telecommunications in Canada could fit in a compact car.

Spot on. In Canada it's about the handful of the oligarchs who have control over almost everything. It has nothing to do with the average plebs


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.

It's so bad its upside down.


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.

Not sure what will happen this time.


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.


I forgot all about that.

> 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.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/06/after-8-years-google-news-...


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.


> 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.

Then the solution is to modify your `robots.txt` file to prohibit these snippets.

Of course, no-one actually does this because they're well aware that the headlines are what drives attention and clicks.


> Surely news publications benefit more from Google/Facebook providing links to their content?

To paraphrase a great Canadian -- Yes they probably do. And don't call me Shirley.


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!


Just Canadian politicians being Canadian politicians...that's really all the context you need.


I recommend this podcast episode on the financial interests involved: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/podcast/episode-172-marc-edge-on...


Look at the constant internet censorship pressures in the UK.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree unfortunately.


> 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...


Then there surely is a source for that somewhere. Otherwise it's just as fair to assume it's not a mutually beneficial relationship.


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.

Looks like something similar was enacted in Australia, and Google/Facbook settled: https://www.reuters.com/technology/australia-says-law-making...

And an update from Google's blog from 4 hours ago: https://blog.google/intl/en-ca/company-news/outreach-initiat...


Liberal politicians will pass any law seen as harmful to US tech companies consequences be damned.

It's like California but on a national level, still not quite as insane thankfully.


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…


I agree


Which state are these big US tech companies based in again? I may have missed it.


They wanted to move to Texas, but unfortunately Texas hates electricity.


Delaware?


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.


I agree with this take-- and this is probably why Google and Meta were the only companies included. What about Reddit, Twitter, (and even HN)?

The counterpoint here is that this bill is very protectionist in nature and aims to give something to the Canadian news & media industry.


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 real problem is that newspapers would just like to take a percentage of Google revenue, because they're a big company.

If that's the case, let Google do its own reporting and write its own headlines. It's not like it doesn't have the money. Problem solved.


Then Google would probably get antitrust complaints from including their own news but not competitors' news sites.


That would be a great outcome for Google wouldn’t it? Just cover national news using paid reporters and capture all of the ad revenue.


> That would be a great outcome for Google wouldn’t it? Just cover national news using paid reporters and capture all of the ad revenue.

They already capture most of the ad revenue.

And Google is notoriously bad when it comes to paying humans to investigate issues, as shown by their absent customer service.


> 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.


You might be underestimating the amount of traffic Google sends to publishers through Google News.

I have worked for two major newspaper companies. I might know a little bit about this.


Could you share the percentage of traffic coming from Google News, roughly?


What's big now by Google is Google Discovery. It's shown on Chrome.


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.


Pablo Rodriguez, is that you?

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.


Are you saying that the entire information content of the article is actually just packed into the title?


How much would Google be hurt if it just stopped indexing news sites?


Do you remember actual newsstands?


Do you remember actual newsstands?

I do. I remember when the newspaper was 10¢.

The guy working the stand didn't let you stand in front of it and read all the headlines in every page of every newspaper and magazine for free.

"I'm only reading the headlines" would get you a slap upside the head.


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 did this all the time and I don't remember getting slapped.


I was curious how link taxes panned out in other places they were tried and found this: https://www.techdirt.com/2021/06/21/as-predicted-smaller-med...

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.


Isn't price discrimination the whole point of having a private sector?


Maybe, or maybe the law will be scoped narrowly via the bench.


> 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.


Well, the users of Facebook/Google would like to link to those sites, and Facebook/Google would like to keep those users...


Yes the users want that content, but generally not as much as they want other content that Facebook could show instead


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.

[1] Source: https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/politica/2023/04/50899...


So if I understand correctly, those companies are now going to be forced into paying for products that they cannot just stop using?


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".


> good luck with that, let's find out how much of your companies' revenue we were driving

I really wish these big techs would do that to Brazil. They made enemies of the current administration when they opposed their censorship laws.


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.


This doesn't happen automatically, it's something websites have to set up: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/c...


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.


This is the way it's always worked. News orgs are asking social media companies to display the summary and image

https://css-tricks.com/essential-meta-tags-social-media/

They're not generating anything


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.


Google News does just show the title.


No, it also has the first ~140 characters of the article.


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.”


Who decides what the tariff is?


The de facto government.


Someone might correct me, but I believe that’s what France did.


I think you are right. I vaguely remember French publishers losing revenue after Google News stopped referencing them.


I recall Google eventually doing a deal with the French publishers. You can find many articles like the following coming out around the same time

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/report-google-wi...


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.


Only fake accounts that post news links.


> “fair terms”

The scare quotes are actually warranted here. I’d love to see how you can come to fair terms when the other side know that you cannot walk away.


The obvious way to beat that game is to stop carrying Brazilian news before the legislation is passed.


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:

https://news.google.com

I just opened it on a browser with no ad blocker and scrolled to the bottom. There are no ads in there. It's all news.


> The law mandates that social networks cannot cease publishing the content

So, how does Brazil stop them from withdrawing from Brazil entirely?


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?


Because they're Lula's propaganda machine. Same reason he wants the internet censored with his fake news nonsense.


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.


I demand royalties for my shit posts!


So these news orgs are getting free advertising, and they want to be paid on top?


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.


The law also include "indexing" and "ranking" under the definition of "makes available". So even crawling the sites requires an agreement now.


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.


This is only going to kill Canadian news outlets more than they're already dead.

If you're not on Google, you don't exist to 99% of the world.

I expect their readership to fall at least 50% overnight.



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.


News outlets usually provide RSS feeds.

Don't they allow to show the contents of those feeds on websites?

And isn't showing the content of the RSS feed "fair use" anyhow?

When I look at the content of the Toronto Star for example:

https://www.thestar.com/content/thestar/feed.RSSManagerServl...

My gut feeling is that showing those short snippets with a link to the articles should be fair use. Am I wrong?


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.


When I visit https://news.google.com I only see very short excerpts like "Supreme Court Rejects Affirmative Action at U.S. Colleges".


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.


Will news stories that are just rewrites of other news stories pay the original now?


> 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?).


Sure, laws are human constructs.

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"?

Wouldn't that also make search engines illegal?


> Wouldn't that also make search engines illegal?

Seems like yes. From the article:

"The tech giant plans to remove news links from its search engine, Google News and Google Discover for only Canadian publishers and readers."


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.


Rip canadian news sites.

This seems like an incredible self-own. News aggregators drive traffic and relavence. If anything news sites were getting the better end of the bargin

Luckily the beaverton is unaffected: https://www.thebeaverton.com/2023/06/editorial-with-news-blo...


This bill was a pretty naked shakedown for money and it was obvious to everyone who read it. Even the intentional targeting of specific companies rather than trying to make a general policy raises lots of questions. If linking news is actually harmful and needs to be compensated it needs to be compensated when Apple, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter or such do it to. Everyone knows this wasn’t really because anyone believes linking is harmful to news media. If the news media wanted to they could set their robots.txt to prevent any scraping of the content but they don’t because they want the links. We even see from Google’s own blog that they were participating in the political process and were open to solutions that compensated Canadian News Media by for example creating a pool of money to distribute. But that both a link tax and uncapped liabilities were a non-starter and a potential existential threat to the business. It’s no surprise that Google and Meta delinked the news. I just hope the taxpayers don’t have to continue funding Trudeau’s idiocy until the next election. But there is no real hope of the NDP flipping on this so that hope is probably in vain.


Deeply shameful, as a Canadian. I did not ask for this.


Yeah, it doesn't look like they asked every single individual Canadian what they wanted. But here are the details for what was driving this.

https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/fair-re...


You have it backwards. Thats the way they justify what they already had planned. That didn’t drive this, that’s the post-decision excuse. “We consulted with stakeholders and press decided they really wanted that money”


Meh, as a Canadian, this might not be perfect, but I am happy whenever the government attempts to revitalize Canadian heritage and remove American influences.


As a canadian, this is a disaster of legislation, and I don't celebrate attempts at anything that are so bad for the internet. The precedent this sort of legislation sets will break the internet and also make companies leave canada in fear of having legislation targeted at them.

And for no gain at all. No Canadian heritage will be saved, and this doesn't remove american influences because google and meta were going to be charged for linking to canadian news, not american news. Still 100% ok to link to american news. This legislation does the opposite of what you're claiming.


Also Canadian, and I agree. But I also think their recently passed legislation concerning online streaming services was a bad move.


I am super happy with that law.


Everyone is allowed to have bad opinions, but if you can't even provide logical reasoning for them, then they don't matter at all because its not persuasive. Your support for this link tax law was poor reasoning and its likely your support canadian content laws are similarly flawed.


Not you specifically, but the majority of Canadians are in favour of the principle.

https://mediapolicy.ca/2022/11/09/nanos-survey-shows-public-...


On some very loaded questions. Holy crud. Had they just asked "Are you in favour of tech companies like Google and Facebook paying news companies for linking to their articles?" perhaps the outcome would have been different.


The linked article says that the survey was commissioned by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and the line of questioning seems very leading to me. I wouldn't put too much faith on the accuracy of the poll.


The majority of Canadians (maybe incl yourself) voted for this though.


Canadian media asked for it.


Media in Canada is in pretty dire straits right now. It looks like one of the last left-ish leaning papers (Toronto Star) is about to be gobbled up by post media. A huge swath of broadcast news media is owned by just one company, Bell which predictably leads to stories like "Top Bell Media executive urged CTV to avoid ‘negative spin’ on coverage of parent company". Plus the current batch of conservative leaders (PP, Danielle Smith, Ford..) all have an axe to grind with what they portray as leftist and woke media. Particularly the CBC, they'd love to see that dismantled. Then there's all the wonderful personalities involved like Conrad Black.


> all have an axe to grind with is portrayed as the leftist woke media

Are you calling the media woke, or are you saying that Conservative leaders are calling the media woke?


Sorry if not clear. I mean how it is being portrayed by conservative leaders, not a label I give it myself.


Thanks for clarifying!


So, would this law make the Star even cheaper, for acquisition, as it reduces the reach of the Star?


Important to note that the CBC is state-funded and even the previous leader of the ultra left-wing party, Tom Mulcair, has recently accused the CBC of having a heavy left-wing bias.


I don't know about heavy but CBC is definitely left-leaning. I feel like that should be curbed with some watchdog for media impartiality (not sure how it could be implemented?) instead of doing away with it entirely. The reality is (at least in Quebec), we don't have much to replace it.

This is also a new development in journalism at CBC, older journalists tend to value reporting over opinion pieces, whereas younger journalists feel like it's their "duty" to push their opinion onto the readership which is an extremely toxic ideology.


Right, who could forget PP asking Elon Musk to get the CBC flagged as state media in the same class as Xinhua and Russia Today.


Great job missing Tom Muclair who was the one mentioned in the comment.


I would like to see the CBC dismantled. The CBC no longer fulfills its mandate of serving the general public.

Your comment, "Top Bell Media executive urged CTV to avoid ‘negative spin’ on coverage of parent company" equally applies to CBC and the current government or leading political party.


This doesn't mean it should be dismantled it means additional laws should be put in place to make this type of thing illegal for the politicians to do.

The CBC is the only chance left for some sort of even keeled news in Canada.

Otherwise maybe some YouTube personalities might make a showing - I'm sure the farmer into the middle of Alberta will watch that.


If the CBC is worth keeping, it can build a sustainable business and generate revenue and profit by creating content people want to consume like any other successful business, and without anti-competitive government handouts.


Between legacy news organizations complaining about links and the censorship of news coming from blacklisted areas of the world, what will social media and news aggregators be left with?

Also, I have to believe that some of these outlets will go under without social media traffic. You can get Canadian wire service content from any US website that decides to publish it.


My understanding is that Australia created a similar law and both FB/Google came to the bargaining table.

Does anyone know what’s different this time? Is the law different? Is Canada a less valuable market?


That's not exactly what happened. Facebook stopped serving Australian news stories and the Australian news industry immediately surrendered to Meta's terms.


How can you negotiate once the law was on the books? I assume that negotiations were attempting before the law was passed.


If you were meta and wanted to go to that bargaining table, would you want to have a good understanding of the value that these links are providing you and your users? Would you maybe try to get that understanding by running a small test in the wild where you disabled these links for some users?


Presumably Meta has learned that media linking is not worth negotiating with hostile governments.


Like weather reporting, journalism (in the 'what happened' sense, not all of this 'analysis' crap) should be funded by the public. The independence of the journalism department must be enshrined in law, but further I imagine a system where anyone can apply to become a journalist assuming they meet minimum requirements. You submit your accounts, and if they pass quality checks (including rejecting editorial content and passing basic fact checking) they get published and you get paid. Multiple accounts of the same event may (and should) be posted, and so then the reader can build a picture from those varied sources. This is citizen journalism, funded by the government and lightly edited, its purity spelled out to the literal letter by law. It's the only way out.


Can someone ELI5 the argument for the bill?

My impression is it's something like "news websites provide content that creates engagement which drives ad revenue, and the news websites want a piece of that revenue."

Is my understanding correct? Also, I can see how it applies for Facebook, how does it apply to Google?


Not to argue in favour of the bill, but I think the idea is Google's whole business model relies on others for content, so a slice of that revenue should go to the content creators (even though the content creators gain from Google, and can generate their own ad revenues).

The Liberal party is also trying to protect Canadian content (again, not to defend or advocate for this policy), and I'm sure this is part of it, even though it may ironically backfire and end up hurting Canadian news outlets.


This is the standard Canadian policy for decades in TV.

https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/cancon/mandate.htm


Where are the adverts on google news? I haven't seen a single advert there in 10 years, and I just looked very carefully in case I somehow missed them, but no, there are none.


Even within the search results, there will be ads. If you search "what happened in Canada today", Google will link some news and there will likely be a sponsored link or some form of income-generating item for Google. Then there's the data you're generating as you use Google to navigate to the content you want, which can also be sold. Google connects you to content, every dollar they make is dependent on a non-Google creator, with the exception of maybe some Maps/Earth use-cases.


I just tried, and didnt see any ads on news searches on canada news, or other news searches. Do you see any?


The fact you think YOU need to see ads next to search related to news DIRECTLY means you don't really understand Google's modus operandi.

They make money by building a profile from your usage. And then selling that profile to advertisers. They make money by having news, because they can build a profile based on what you click and sell ads to those same websites you visit.


I do on YouTube before videos from CBC News. I actually don't on Google search results, but the search data you generate in the process of connecting with news sites can be used for a multitude of profitable uses-cases, including selling targeted ads elsewhere on the internet.


On YouTube I would think the CBC receives the same monetization deal as any other YouTuber.


So isn't that in favour of what this bill is attempting to accomplish?


a piece of meal is normally the case of adsense. the problem i guess is either flat fee (which would break the bank in Google's local account) or big overhead fee (e-invoicing, regulatory auditing, etc)


That's basically the issue. And Google because Google News.


The argument is always that these companies are using and benefiting from news for free. Now, they aren't. It's weird to create a new kind of property right and then complain that companies are choosing to simply stop doing the thing that triggers the new right.


They didn't want to create a new property right, they wanted money to move out of Google's pockets and into news agencies' pockets. Link rights were just a means to do so. The state chose to use this tool because commercial benefit is very legible[0] to states and copyright is a familiar hammer[1]. It was thought that big tech was gaining $X from having news on their site and that they could make $X * 0.3 of that move into the pockets of news companies. When you see that kind of situation, you invent a new kind of property right to make the people benefiting from the resource have to pay into something.

Problem with this model is that it's too simplistic. Big tech doesn't sell news. They sell ads. In fact, the main reason why news companies are ailing today is because big tech siphons off much of the ad revenue that they would have sold directly before the Internet. Google or Facebook can take the 5% that news companies might ask for and just... deduct it from their ad revenue somehow. They control the analytics behind this and news companies are in no position to credibly question them. The only way to stop this madness is to ban economic centralization - i.e. enforce antitrust law by breaking up all these companies and forcing them to be sold to different competing owners.

Governments, of course, don't want to do that. This is not because they've suddenly become right-libertarians or ancaps. This is because large monopolies are both legible and corrigible[2]. Google, Facebook, or Reddit is far more likely to pay a 5% link tax than, say, hundreds of individual Fediverse instance operators. This is, of course, a regulatory curse - the bigger you make the organization, the more likely that organization can exert power back upon your government. This is not solely the function of generalized abstract "corruption." Economic power is itself a form of political power and letting companies grow too big is like Congress delegating legislative power to the President.

[0] Legible meaning that the organization can understand it at an institutional level.

[1] As in, if all you have is copyright, everything looks like a nail.

[2] Corrigible meaning that the organization is capable of maintaining regulatory controls over the target organization.


My read on this is that news organizations are upset that Google/Facebook are taking profits by providing cached content that makes people not want to actually click their links.

If this is the primary concern, though, then wouldn't it make more sense to draft a law regulating content caching, rather than the pay-per-click approach? It seems like a law that said "Sites that serve any content which wasn't part of a 'you can cache me' section need to pay for that content" would address the concerns of both parties here.

This would solve the alleged issue that news organizations are bringing up, while also making it totally clear what the consequences are. If you don't want Google to be able to use your content within search results that's totally fine, but you can't then also be mad that they don't surface your content in search results.

Seems like letting news site determine what content Google can cache for its results, and then letting Google determine ranking based only on that data would be a completely reasonable compromise. As it stands now, though, Google is directly incentivized to just never surface these websites, which hurts everyone involved.


> It seems like a law that said "Sites that serve any content which wasn't part of a 'you can cache me' section need to pay for that content" would address the concerns of both parties here.

Because you can't have your cake and eat it too. If Google can't cache the whole article, they can't provide search for the article. That's why publishers are serving the full, unpaywalled article to Google: how do you index an article you can't cache? The publishers—today—can simply serve the paywalled versions to Google.

The publishers want Google to keep a copy of their data to offer search services to Google's customers, but then want Google to pay for the privilege.


> Because you can't have your cake and eat it too. If Google can't cache the whole article, they can't provide search for the article.

Yeah, this is exactly the point that such a regulation would bring up. Businesses can't expect Google to both use your data and not use your content in their search results.

If you say "I don't want Google's indexers to read my content and surface it to people that haven't clicked my site", that's fine -- Google won't be able to index your content (as requested), though, so your site won't appear in search results.

This seems like a situation where the cards are much more clearly on the table, and my expectation is that no reasonable business would choose to have Google not index their full content.


> If Google can't cache the whole article, they can't provide search for the article.

Google can index the articles independently of serving their entirety to visitors. Might as well claim that wikipedia can't have articles covering movies without acting as the worlds largest piracy site.

> but then want Google to pay for the privilege.

On the other hand Google wants all the articles for free, but doesn't have any motivation to share the users or ad impressions they attract.


That's sort of the thing, though: what you're describing isn't what publishers seem to be upset about or what Google is doing. In my entire life, I have yet to see Google put someone else's article on their site (with or without ads). Take a minute to look through Google News and show me where Google is republishing anything.

What's happening (afaict) is that Google is showing the excerpt of the article surrounding the user's query as they do with every other search result. The publishers are claiming "well, Google makes money from users searching for our stuff, therefore we should get a cut".

To borrow your analogy, the evolution of this bill is publishers demanding a share of Wikimedia donations because they use their articles as sources. Why should Wikipedia have revenue built on the reporting of a third party and not share it?


> On the other hand Google wants all the articles for free, but doesn't have any motivation to share the users or ad impressions they attract.

AFAIK Google doesn't show ads on Google News, they don't show ads on news queries, and they send the users to the news site via the link. There is no revenue to share, and the users are being shared to the extent that is possible given they're humans who have free will and will decide themselves which articles to read and which not.

> Google can index the articles independently of serving their entirety to visitors

I don't know what you're referring to here. AMP? The news site has to do extra work to enable AMP, and the entire point of AMP was always the cache. (But the revenue from the ads on the AMP page goes to the publication, not to Google). The search cache? The news site can opt out. The snippet? They can opt out. Images? I'm pretty sure they actually have to opt in for that, by emitting specific meta tags. The title? That is mandatory, but for the simple reason that you have to give the searcher something or they won't click through.


It is trivial, absolutely, absurdly trivial, for any site to opt out of Google caching.


How long till they will beg to be re-linked?


Not only will they beg, they'll offer money to be linked... like all advertisers.


Beg, nothing. They'll mandate Google link to them and pay the tax.


You generally can't force someone to do business with another company. You can tax a company and give that company to another organization. But you can't force google to run google news in a given jurisdiction.


That may be mostly true in the US, but many other parts of the world are more authoritarian.

For example, Australia passed a law forcing Google to negotiate with news publishers regarding payment.[1]

When France passed a law requiring that Google pay news sites for linking to them, Google tried to stop linking to those sites. In response, France sued Google for half a billion dollars for antitrust violations.

1. https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/25/after-facebooks-news-flex-...


Facebook and Google pulled out of news after that law was passed. They only returned when Australian publishers agreed to negotiate outside the law.

For France, the devil is in the details. Google has agreements to fund news in many countries. This is generally a bribe it pays publishers not to pursue laws like this. Whereas the Canadian law seeks fairly unlimited payments.

So the question in the French case is how much Google could actually be forced to pay. It sounds like they can still accept an unreasonable deal.

https://www.politico.eu/article/french-competition-authority...


Startup idea: Canadian news, but based on US based website.


It would be a pretty decent idea, if there wasn't a significant risk to get nuked by regulation in a couple years.


I guess news outlets are realizing late that what they sold to the masses is largely the headline feed which is something the internet can re-aggregate for free. On the internet they can’t rely on gatekeeping the distribution to be their moat so they need regulation.

If it wasn’t Canadian outlet favouring, a generalized form of this bill would be like saying, aggregate feeds shouldn’t aggregate their competitor aggregate feeds for free.

I guess this could potentially make the ecosystem less organized around a few big sharing platforms, but I don’t feel like this helps a lot of the smaller outlets. It feels like it maybe just works for the big ones who already have a lot of mind share and can worry less about being linked to in a feed.


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.


They went to great lengths to no mention Meta.

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 doubt that's just "don't mention a competitor" (though that was likely a factor too). Saying "two" is an important point to emphasize: if this was a national law written to target just two companies, saying so makes the sentiment clear. And on top of that, I have the impression that Meta/Facebook has much lower public approval than Google.


Although I disagree with this kind of law:

Was it just linking? Or was it providing a useful summary that essentially renders no need to click the provided link? + the link

Otherwise I can see why Google and Meta got the law, while Reddit, Apple news and others don't.


Reddit and Apple News will have the law applied to them as well, since the law doesn't include a list of sites affected, just the criteria under which affected sites fall.


So when google said 2 companies it was also as disingenuous as when they said "only linking"


It’s just linking


Now that I'm weaning myself off of reddit, my favorite "toilet reading" is news.google.com

But since I'm in Canada, I suppose I'll go back to RSS or maybe AP news.


RSS is IMO the best way to follow multiple websites, not only news.


Am I the only one who won't notice this change? I have never used google news. When I want to read news I go to the news sources. I'll read BBC or whatever other news outlet I choose. I do not want or need google to decide what I should or should not read. But maybe I am just old. Maybe people want a little robot picking and choosing content for them. Maybe websites are as dead as printed paper.


Undeniable truth remains: This is such a bad regulation


Undeniable?


Not a problem. Go to ChatGPT and ask it to tell you the top ten Canadian media outlets. You can also ask for the top ten left-leaning, right-leaning, and tech/sci/engineering outlets. Then go to Wikipedia to get the urls for each. Bookmark all the sites and write a little Python scraper to get all the headlines each day. Then, say goodbye to Alphabet and Meta.


Why not just use RSS/Atom?


Loss of news in Canada via Google won't really happen. Google and the news outlets will negotiate new agreements in line with the law. Same with Facebook. It's in all parties interest to find an acceptable compromise. Unless Google or Facebook decide to get out of one side of online ad business entirely.


Canada is a tight oligopoly and they don't like when you can read anything other than they want you too.


"because of the Liberal government's Online News Act"

That's an odd sentence. Shouldn't it just say "From the government"? Seems weirdly leading to point that it out as "because of the liberal government". I dunno, I don't read much news.


The name of the party in power right now in Canada is called the Liberal Party. That's why Liberal is capitalized.


The Liberal Party of Canada is currently the party that has the most seats, and whose leader is the Prime Minister, and whose members are various cabinet ministers.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_of_Canada

So the (capital-l) Liberals are currently running the government. So Liberal government.

There is also the capital-c Conservatives:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Party_of_Canada


Forget about Google and Meta, they'll be fine, but those poor local news sites are screwed.


If i read this correctly they will also be delisted from google search, which is almost equivalent to being erased from the internet nowadays. The newspaper business model seems to be broken but i don't think this is the way to fix it.


I think this will turn out great. As a news outlet, there are two ways it could go:

- Your revenue goes up, because people are now visiting your website and giving you ad hits instead of just seeing a blurb on Facebook.

- Your revenue goes down, because nobody cares about news unless it's dropped in their feed, and the few page views you were getting are now gone. Not to worry, you can strike a deal with Facebook and Google for them to reinstate your links for $0.

The secret third option is that your revenue goes down, you go to Facebook and Google to ask them to show your links again, and they ask you to pay them for the privilege of having your links shown.

Diclaimer: I have not yet read the bill.

Edit: After reading the bill, it looks like if Google links to any news at all in Canada, it has to participate in the bargaining and arbitration process, so their only winning move is not to play. Looks like Option B won't work unless all of the news outlets decide on it together.


> Not to worry, you can strike a deal with Facebook and Google for them to reinstate your links for $0.

That option does not exist in practice.

The companies cannot strike a deal with just one publication and not others. After having made one deal, even at $0, the other publications will just be able to name their price, because the law sets up forced arbitration with parameters that basically tell the arbitrators to give the publication what they want.


Going a step further, I think google should stop crawling websites that are paywalled. When I search for something, I want to see results that I can click on. Not some snippets from NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg and others which are heavily paywalled.


You can easily write this as a Chrome extension if you so desire.


At least the "archive" workaround still works


It's piracy, though. I'm sure plenty of paywalled outlets would be happy to see it gone.


It's not piracy, they explicitly allow this.


The open web has deteriorated to such an extent that either information is paywalled or free but has commercial motivations behind it (affiliate links, sponsorships). It turns out there's little free, non-commercial, high quality content on the web.


It turns out there's little free, non-commercial, high quality content on the web.

I disagree. I think there's a lot of it out there, in the form of blogs and small forums. It's just really hard to find, like mining for gold in the Super Pit [1]. You need to sift through mountains of rubble to find tiny amounts of gold.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Pit_gold_mine


> turns out there's little free, non-commercial, high quality content on the web.

Well, sure. Who pays for it?


No one. That's why I commented to make the point that Google should not refuse to crawl commercial content.


True. There is some great content (blogs, OS software, books, p2p networks, public libraries, academia, government), but by and large that wasn't created with monetary incentives.

Could there be a way to sustainably make enough money from visitors without making it all suck?


I think there really needs to be a micro-transaction mechanism on the web, but unfortunately it was needed ten years ago and there still isn't one.


Yes but the crypto folks didn't do that, they were busy chasing nfts.


There have been a lot of ridiculous things in cryptocurrency land, but what's wrong with Basic Attention Token? It has been around for six years and seems to solve the problem of paying content creators via microtransactions. The only wrinkle is that finance laws force everyone to verify their identity with a government-issued ID before transacting BAT.[1] This is a problem for all microtransactions, not just cryptocurrency.

1. https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032158891-Wha...


...And then we're back with the underlying conflicting interests surrounding governments guarding their citizen's privacy. Yes absolutely we want all our citizens to always use unbreakable and untraceble communication channels. Except when law enforcement needs to surveil and pry on the bad guys.

And where it's impossible to tell difference from a (pseudo) random stream of numbers.


It’s certainly possible. Wikipedia is free. It won’t be too hard to replicate wikipedia’s model to create a Reddit replica.


Google isn't circumventing paywalls. Most paywalled sites whitelist search engines so that their content gets crawled and more people visit them.


When I search for something I want the best results for the query, and sometimes those are behind a paywall.


At a certain point, if you want a subscription service, why wouldn't you just do something like suscribe to Bloomberg News, then get all your news by going directly to their site rather than going through a search engine or aggregator. If you're looking at an aggregator, inherently you want to see many possible sources, including ones you may only read once a year. Nobody is going to subscribe to hundreds of separate sources individually just to read them once in a blue moon.

Ironically, the predatory and terrible academic journal industry is probably the only thing out there right now that comes close to getting this right. Rather than expecting anyone to subscribe to each journal individually, they give a bulk subscription to an entire publishing service that then grants access to many journals.

If someone out there offered a $20 a month service that granted access to Bloomberg, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, WaPost, Financial Times, all in one, I'd gladly buy that. But there is no way in hell I'm subscribing to all of those separately. Even if the aggregate price was cheaper, I wouldn't want to do that.


1. There is much paywalled information online that is not in the form of a subscription, but instead one-time fees.

2. Just because you paid at the paywall, doesn't mean you have to subscribe for life. You can pay to get the information you need and then instantly cancel any subscription.

> If someone out there offered a $20 a month service that granted access to Bloomberg, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, WaPost, Financial Times, all in one, I'd gladly buy that.

PressReader is pretty much this, although the price is $30 and not $20.


Checkbox, unchecked by default:

[ ] I want to see results from sites I'd have to pay to access


The obvious problem to this armchair expert "solution" is that Google doesn't know what I am already paying. I pay NYT for a subscription, but Google doesn't know that. For obvious privacy reasons users don't want to tell Google what sites they already have subscriptions with. And I don't even log in to Google to do a search so there's no place to store that information even if I actively wanted to provide that to Google.


I wasn't presenting it as a perfect solution. I was observing that many people don't want to see paywalled results, some may want to see all of them because they may choose to pay, some may want to see them because they plan to use a paywall bypass, and some as you pointed out may want to see the subset they already pay for but not others. As a first pass, a binary approach seems better than nothing, and is simpler to provide than a more complex user-subscription-specific solution.


I'd pay a little if we could get rid of the pop ups and cookie banners, advertisements and click bait content. But after 30 years we're still missing the infrastructure for micro payments.

For news sites and netflix we now have subscriptions shielded by paywals, which really is incompatible with hyperlinked sites or search engines. Even if you subscribed to 1000 services, the experience would probably be horrible. The internet was designed to be free, but evidently that's not a good business model if you want to make a living.


> But after 30 years we're still missing the infrastructure for micro payments.

Sad but true. The closest we have to a solution right now is PressReader, which is just too expensive in my opinion at $30 per month.


Micro payments only make sense if the intrinsic transaction costs are (near) zero. Like reaching for your wallet to pick a coin to give to a homeless person.

With trusted third parties or block chains, the transaction costs are unfortunately much, much higher, especially initially without proper scales economics.


It could be as simple for the user as a button in your web browser to donate or pay for the site currently open in your tab. And a third party intermediary that once a month collects payment/donations and distributes. The problem with Visa/MC is the minimum transaction fee of 10-25c

But a lot of work and planning would be needed to get anywhere with such an idea.


If I'm not willing to pay for a paywall then the "best" content is not behind a paywall, because I won't read it.

My definition of "best" includes my ability to actually read the content under my terms.


If I ask you what is the best restaurant in town, will you answer that it's your mommas house because there you always eat for free?

Cost has nothing to do with determining the quality of a search result, and search engines shouldn't discriminate against paywalled content. But I think it's a good idea to let users like you check a box to hide paywalled results.


There are millions of websites out there that are free for anyone to read, including this one! Restaurants that serve free meals are not the norm, so this analogy doesn't make a lot of sense. If every website was paywalled and required a subscription, like cable TV channels, then you might have a point.


People use search engines professionally and not only for entertainment. There is an icebergs worth of important and valuable information online behind paywalls, not only articles or news. Information workers use a search engine to find the information they need, pay the cost if it's paywalled, and then cancel any subscription after getting what they needed.

Long gone are the days of "surfing the web", when most of us spent our time online just randomly browsing around.


I don't see why there couldn't also be a professional search engine. Academics have Google Scholar which is an amazing resource for them. A search engine that brought up high quality resources for professionals would seem to be pretty useful. It could potentially even have a single subscription to unlock all of the sites in a network, rather than individual paywalls at every site.


We already have professional search engines, since they don't discriminate against paywalls. No need to change that. And there are so many fields of professionals, that you'd need a ton of different specialized search engines for that.

I've come to learn that many people on hacker news have an ethos of never paying for digital content or services. Most people here make an hourly salary of $20 or more in my estimate, yet they will spend days and days of their time to avoid paying $5 for something. So you spend $100-$200 of your time to save $5. What's the rationale?

It reminds me of my travels around the world, where I'd hang out with backpackers that would spend a long time in the supermarket looking for the cheapest noodles, instead of spending their time enjoying the exotic location they were in. Or spent half the day walking along the highway to a bus stop instead of taking a taxi that would cost $5.

I think it is fair that a search engine by default should be unbiased and look for the best result for the query, and not account for price or such.


That's an insane take on what I said.

No, I won't answer my mommas house because you can't just show up and eat there as a restauraunt. It doesn't fit the search criteria you asked for.

If you ask what the best restauraunt in town is, I'll give you a restauraunt.

If you ask what the best restauruant in town is, I won't send you to a place where you can buy a "best restauraunts in town guide" for 5 bucks, because that's not what you're asking for.


This will likely have a worse effect than intended of fewer people having access to Canadian ends and instead American news or worse the meme news networks that have out educated press conferences over the pandemic.


related: the official post from Google https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36523516


Is Apple News affected by this?


Is there really anything new in this post from the news that came out last week?


Last week it was Facebook. Today it's Google too. And the impact is arguably more significant given that Google is delisting Canadian news from their core search engine (not just from news.google.com), which has 92% market share in Canada.


Didn’t they try this in Australia and it failed?


canada has always had the media monopolies control the politics, now they are just getting the dividends from that control


Most Canadian media is owned by asset-stripping American private equity firms, just like American newspapers. They just want to get paid, and have figured out a particular way that Canadian, Australian, German, and Californian legislators can be duped into it.


Globe and Mail is apparently owned by a Thompson (one of Canada's wealthiest families), and the CBC is run by the government. CTV is owned by Bell Media, part of Canada's telecom oligopoly. Global news is owned by Corus, a Canadian company. National Post is owned by Postmedia which is a publicly traded Canadian company, with majority ownership from an American PE firm. Is that what you mean?


Chatham owns dozens of Canadian newspapers via Postmedia, and dozens of U.S. newspapers via McClatchy. Their operating mode is the same in both countries: fire all the writers and editors.

I thought that Blackstone owned Globe and Mail but it seems they sold it in 2021 so your info is the current info.


To be fair, a significant number of Australian legislators are practically owned by a particular AU/US media firm, so it's no great surprise that they can be duped/ordered into trying this.


Duped would be a ... charitable ... label.


I don't see how this gets them paid, more like wiped from the internet entirely?


Well, their fantasy wishlist is that Google and Meta are forced to index their junk, rank it at the top, feature it prominently, present it to any and all visitors, and pay for both the cost and the privilege.


A fair number of people search on google specifically to get news on recent events - Google currently captures a decent portion of those users and keeps them from ever actually visiting the original sources. Users want that information though, so unless Google can tell me why the building two blocks down is currently throwing out a huge plume of smoke I'll eventually land on the actual content creator to read the information.


more like they shmoozed them to do it vs being duped.


Yeah Google never ever does this. They do not want money they just work for kisses and they are not evil at all.


Every company tries to earn money, that's not a problem. The problem is when a company tries to legislate themselves to be owed money, or eliminate competition via various means, that it becomes a problem.

Companies should earn my by building good competitive products.


One reason to advocate for a government with minimal power is to avoid the temptation to legislate preferential treatment. If the government has been granted more expansive powers, it is inevitable, and arguably rational, for those affected to try to steer regulations in a way that benefits them.


There is no vacuum in power. If it is not the government enforcing one mechanism, it will be another player leveraging another. The fantasy that if it wasn't for the government, everything would be sunshine and roses should be brought behind the barn and finished for good.


How do you define ‘power’. The unique aspect of government controls is that we grant the government a monopoly on force (imprisonment, seizure of property, etc). That is not the case with private actors and that is a significant and consequential difference in ‘power’.


The other unique aspect of government is that you can remove power by voting them out in the next election. In contrast, a private monopoly can continue to use it's influence, money, and power, without recourse forever.


Once you remove physical violence as a mean of interaction, you gain something else which would be violence by any other name. Government minimization is favored the most by those who would gain from the lack of counterbalance.

In the case of market economy, if you can't use violence, then the world would be split into natural monopolies and monopolies after market consolidation. Everyone else will be feudalized because someone else will control their access to water, electricity, education or whatever. Because property is sacred and we can't use violence no matter the consequences.

The ever expanding free to enter and free to participate market is a delusion, so let's not delude ourselves that it will take care of everything without us taking responsibility.


Ok, now explain how free market economies have improved the quality of life and lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in history.


Energy. Last few hundred years humanity unlocked new sources of energy. Free markets are a good distribution mechanism, but by themselves they fail at the point when there is no new input in the system. As I said above, there are some other prerequisites like free entry, free participation, plus enough information. Otherwise, the market collapses. free markets are not self-sustaining and if you want for the system to work, you should maintain it.


What do you think a monopoly is? It is almost absolute power especially in industries where barrier to entry is super high.


Monopolies can only exist with government support via protection from competition. Expansive government power makes monopolies more likely and more stable than minimal government power.


This is a really naive way to look at things. For some reason you seem to believe that people that run corporations have better intentions that people who are in the government/politics.


Nope, I'm actually pretty cynical about intentions. But the government can detain me, arrest me, tax me, fine me, etc. A corporation can't do any of that.

I'm not sure what you really mean by "monopoly" or what sort of monopoly you think can persist in the absence of government support.

Note, I started my participation in this thread by advocating for minimizing government, which is not the same as eliminating government. So I'm not trying to assert an absolutist position that free markets should have no regulation.


The issue isn't companies doing it as much as it is state-enforced regulatory capture that prefers specific companies over others.


Political influence is directly proportional to amount of money a corporation spends on lobbying etc.


Google would be perfectly free to hire a human being to write headlines in their own words and then link to articles in the press discussing that story.

"Man Bites Dog" More discussion: CBC, National Post, Toronto Star, CTV, etc.

However, Google doesn't want to pay human beings, they want to "borrow' other people's content to make a profit.

People seem to conflate "indexing your story on our search engine" with "borrowing your headline and photo for our own news site".


That's not what the law says at all. You've just made it up. The actual definition for what's in scope is:

> (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.

See point b. Simply facilitating access, for example by linking or having the article in a search index, would be enough.

(Also, really smooth move deleting your original toplevel comment and just moving it to a reply under the highest voted thread. Not even any pretense that you're replying to jeffbee, but just cynically trying to get the maximum visibility for your entirely made up claim.)


I don't think that would exempt them under the law? Have a look: https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...


There's a ton of international case law saying that a mere link is not illegal.


We're talking about a new Canadian law. How would case law be relevant?

(Laws can make previously legal things illegal.)


Laws can also be challenged in court.


Why isn't this within the remit of the Canadian legislature? Why would the court reject it?


Does the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ring a bell?


Are you proposing that the entire concept of a non-human-curated search engine should be illegal? Seems kind of silly.


It honestly doesn't seem outrageous to me. Just because this is the direction society has decided to go in doesn't make the alternative absurd. If you'll recall in the early age of the internet hand-curated link boards were actually extremely popular i.e. "I'm Billy and here's a bunch of really interesting information about sewage treatment" and then just a spam of links.

I think there's a very reasonable argument to be made that Google should simply link to the information and not extract and re-present the information that would be much fairer in enabling websites to support themselves. If the content you're creating is stolen and reposted elsewhere you're losing that portion of revenue and Google's news strategy has driven click throughs to the actual articles way down which reduces ad revenue and discourages subscription.

As a general rule, not being willing to entertain a state other than the way things currently are, is a bad habit to get into.


Did you miss the part where I said people are conflating indexing a story on a search engine with "borrowing" other people's content for your own news site?

The first can be fixed with a simple robots.txt file.

How do you tell Google they may index your story, but may not "borrow" your headline or photos for their own news site?


Showing the title is "borrowing" content? How are you supposed to refer to the site without the title? The raw URL? Imagine if book publishers sued bookstores for showing titles of their books.


> How are you supposed to refer to the site without the title?

By following the example I gave previously and only using the name of the news site and not any of it's content?

> Hire a human being to write headlines in their own words and then link to articles in the press discussing that story.

> "Man Bites Dog" More discussion: CBC, National Post, Toronto Star, CTV, etc.

In that example, "Man Bites Dog" was the headline written by an employee on Google's dime, and then you have a list of links that do not "borrow" any of the target website's text or images.

Since it's common case law that a mere link is not illegal, I don't see how a law banning a link (without using content that does not belong to you) would stand up in Canadian courts given the free speech guarantees in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.


Google need to pay for its copyright infringements ... Not exactly sure if that's what this is about though


The web may never be better than it was about 5 years ago, and that makes me very sad


Make that 25 years ago, before the FAANGs came out.


N'ah, I remember that era. Search engines were basically worthless. Google was the first one to get the formula right.

Before Google, search engines were basically just doing keyword matching and so you'd have the issue that every search for a programming topic landed you on expertsexchange. Google was the first to start leveraging click-away signal, and they were able to successfully down-sample keyword-farmers like that one and their ilk.


Search engines were bad in the 90's, but the web was much smaller and community-driven. Most of the websites people visited were created by individuals and people linked to each other to form web rings.


I remember.

It was the worst. Crawling a ring all day to find useful content was incredibly inconvenient.


Expertsexchange was one of the main reasons I began contributing to Stack Overflow in 2010-ish.


I wouldn't consider 1998 a peak. There was a local maxima in 1993, before the September that never ended. Then the rest of the 90's were exciting because of the rapid growth, but the actual state of things at the time was pretty messy. I'd personally put the next peak around 2007. Broadband was widespread but smartphones were not. Google existed but hadn't yet purchased DoubleClick. IE6, while not quite dead, no longer had a stranglehold on web development. Independent blogs and forums and RSS were still big, and hadn't yet consolidated with social media.


I'm not going back to using Alta Vista, no thanks.


The early Yahoo was pretty great. I discovered a lot of cool creative sites there, none of whom tracked me or abused my email address.


Google came out in 1998, 25 years ago.


still like the new internet to be honest.


To me the inflection point was the 2016 US election (which also coincided with Brexit).

Independent of the elections I think social media websites had by this time “perfected” engagement-driven algorithmic feeds and online news had started getting good at optimizing their content for those purposes. And around this time, anecdotally, is when I think a lot of older people started taking the internet more seriously, as real-world services like Airbnb/Uber/Amazon prime (to be fair, started earlier) became popular and middle aged people started using social media more. This, in combination with the polarizing content of the elections, made the internet into the hostile and echo-chambery place it is today. And it also attracted a lot more Government attention leading to things like GDPR (good in theory, bad inasmuch as it led to the current cookie banner bullshit) and link taxes.


Cell phones.

The shift away from desktop and laptops to cell phones is a major factor as well.


I wonder how old you are to think anything changed in 2016.

To me 2016 was just a continuation of what started before, there was no inflection then.

The 2000's are when things started to change, not 2016. And Obama's first election was when the internet started to be taken seriously by politicians (2008). It's basically what gave him the win.


> To me the inflection point was the 2016 US election (which also coincided with Brexit.)

And with the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict.


Do you mean the Russian invasion of sovereign Ukraine territory?


I mean what the hell I said.


Russian annexed Crimea in 2014. Or are we talking about "2016-ish"?


When do you think the 2016 election was held, and when did the participants in it campaign?


Yeah I wanted to mention Euromaidan and Russia increasing its general hostile activity on the internet (overstated in the wake of the 2016 election? Yes. Literally something that verifiably happened with eg various Facebook groups for divisive political issues run by Russians acting on behalf of their government? Also yes). I do think Euromaidan was partially the root cause as it woke Russia up to the possibility that the internet could be used to destabilize its various client states as in Euromaidan or its rivals like the US.

But a lot of people will debate the actual overall influence of that vs it being a scapegoat used to delegitimize the right wing surge at the time; undeniably even if the right wing surge/political divisiveness trend was aided by Russian activity, it was still real people who engaged with it online and voted for the right wing causes.


I think the cookiewalls are older than 5 years, no?


Peak web was probably around 2010


Totally disagree, LLMs are so much better than search engines ever were.


LLMs are a complement to search, not a replacement.


That kind of proves the point: the internet is more than LLMs and search engines.


Yeah, it's also cryptocurrency and NFT's /s


it seems like the canadian government wants to use its news as propaganda in small local regions without the rest of the world being able to figure it out via searching for it.

this might also be a leeway for charging the same cost to social media sites. might this be an insidious form of censorship?

given the canadian government's strong ties to its government-funded media, this sounds like it could be concerning.


Just need the US and EU to follow suit now and the giants can get back to paying for what they use!


And in Australia it was pushed by Rupert Murdoch.

But fair is fair. If publishers want to force social media to pay for news content. Social Media has every right to refuse to pay and refuse to redistribute.


> Social Media has every right to refuse to pay and refuse to redistribute.

Unfortunately Brazil is trying to take that right away, too. Hopefully they fail at doing so.


What leverage do they have? Companies can always pull out of the country entirely.


Well, the leverage is that some profit is better than no profit, in theory.


Assuming that you don't then become locked into mandatory "agreements" (and I use the term loosely given the inability to refuse) with rates that keep going up. Leaving aside that sometimes the principle outweighs the profits; a link tax, or any other restriction on linking, is an abhorrent constraint on the Internet.


If FB and Google both leave Brazil, it will put pressure on the lawmakers to rescind the law.


Yep true, it's a game of chicken really. This is probably what will happen in Canada anyway


What are they using?


Probably cocaine. By the looks of it.


>> Walker said he wrote a letter to Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez early Thursday morning to inform him and his team of the decision.

The fact that this is being lead by the Minister of Heritage should tell you how little this has to do with actual business and technology justifications.


The Department of Canadian Heritage is responsible for media and broadcasting. The CRTC, Canada's broadcasting regulator, is also part of the department.


A side effect of this implies that if the internet platforms drop all Canadian media as a result of this law, it demonetizes all Canadian media, and then the only Canadian media that survives is what is directly subsidized by the government at its discretion.

I see why this "works" now. The effect is censorship and silencing of disfavoured outlets with the pretense of deniability. This country is a lost cause.


Possible non-sequitur:

... "if the internet platforms drop all Canadian media as a result of this law, it demonetizes all Canadian media, and then the only Canadian media that survives is what is directly subsidized by the government at its discretion."

Does Canadian media have no other revenue stream other than the Internet?


They still own cable and satellite TV. They make a lot of their money from live sports, one of the only reasons to still subscribe to cable.


Yes, let them eat radio spots.


I actually forgot about google-news. It used to be my landing page, long ago. Now my landing page is an actual (online) newspaper. I like the fact that it is well-organized, with curated content by professional reporters. I pay a little for this, but find it to be good value.

I won't miss google news. And I never saw any real value in facebook.

So, my response to this, as a Canadian, is "who cares, eh?"


I mean I'd assume you care. Either they are going to jack the price way up for you or the quality will plummet. They don't have a plan to just go without all the revenue they get from Google.


Disclaimer: Am Canadian.

The way i see it, it's a clear case of "we tried nothing and we're out of ideas" on BOTH sides. The canadian medias are boring and are mostly opinions and a few Reuters/AFP articles. On the other hand, GOOG and Meta are not even acknowledging that they're trying to bully nations around while providing a slowly worse service as time goes by and profiteering from work they acquire for free. I do understand that people weren't forced to use this service in the past and can (with some level of difficulties) remove their content.

It's not as clear an issue some would like it to be. I know that I will remove myself of both these services in the future as they are hostile (and really, i should move to my own domain for lots of reasons).


I don't see the problem. News outlets can now negotiate individually with Google if they still want the free traffic. Google will be paying $0 to them. Other outlets who don't want the free traffic from Google can choose to not receive it, as they can right now via robots.txt.


Traffic is generated by the content which is not free (most of the time) to produce. Google without content is what except an empty library?

I'm not sure why people here are defending GOOG so much.


As you say, Google without content is an empty library. But it works in the other direction too. News websites without Google/Social Media are ghost towns. Few people go to them directly.


News outlets have to compete within Google's search results. Google is, at least currently, the de facto search engine and their competition over providing all results is minimal. So Google is benefitting from the overall relationship far more than the outlets are. Not saying Google owes them, but there is a clear difference in competition between the two sides.


News websites worked fine before Google. People did go to them directly.


Speaking for myself, on the merits, Google's position makes more sense. On an emotional level, I dislike media news companies companies more than I dislike Google...which is a lot.


We share a similar dislike for media news companies.. and Google. Like i said, i find the media companies boring and they abdicated a while ago being the "fourth" power. I might also not understand all the consequences of the bill as well.


Google is stopping to show results for news outlets, so everything is fine, right? What else do you criticize them for?


It depends on whether you consider a headline and part of a sentance the content or not, I I guess.

It sure doesn't seem to me like creating a link & giving people an extremely concise blurb that hopefully entices them to follow it is the content. As an individual I expect to be able to cite things in the world and to tell people how they can read it too. Legislating that basic right away feels like madness.


Canadian here as well.

Your assumption that traffic is generated by content (alone) is incorrect. Google is certainly profiting, but the news publisher will struggle to find readers without Google. It's a symbiotic relationship, but Google is doing the REAL work. If you don't believe that, build your own website and try to get people to read your content. Believe me, content doesn't matter as much as reach.

If you want to support Canadian news outlets, then go to their websites directly. Let's see them stand on their own without Google, and see who provides the most value.

This law will kill Canadian news outlets. No one pays for their content when there's a global ecosystem of stuff to subscribe to. That's capitalism. Good riddance.


I already go directly to the websites. Have always done that.

I subscribe for a specialized publication that offers free articles because i find the publication useful.

I might be dumb but i can't understand how content matters less than reach. Without content, reach is useless. (and without reach, content is mostly useless as well..)

My take is that both are things of the past and using legal ways to fight for relevancy, each for different reasons. I don't have a horse in this race.


Canadian citizens are completely free to type a url into a bar and visit a newspaper


As a Canadian, I don't really care about this. The informed citizen model is already broken by censorship, cancel culture, corporate influence, paywalls, monopolies and a soon to be flood of AI content. Burn it all down imo and let something else take its place. I only use google news now to see what agenda/narrative is being pushed at the moment or maybe to check the weather.


> Burn it all down imo and let something else take its place.

Probably hyperbole, but catastrophic failure of our economy/institutions/society isn't something I would choose to experience.

This nihilistic attitude is dangerous, IMHO. In the extreme, it is a self-fulfilling approach with severe consequences.

Seems like we should be able to do better than that as a society.


It really has nothing to do with my attitude. Reality is the majority of the electorate doesn't know/believe/care that this is an issue.




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