As a Canadian, I find the whole saga of how our government works with the technology sector bat-shit crazy.
All of the media's coverage up here is disingenuously about tech overreach and not about how their lobbyists tried to double-dip on revenue (both demanding an estimated $329M/year[1] from tech companies, while also receiving the ad revenue from ++1.9B pageviews[2]).
The problem is there'll probably be some kind of settlement between the government, news companies, and tech. But while this drags on, the larger oligopoly of news outlets will come out alive, while smaller news outlets are really going to suffer financially.
If you want to read more about our government's recent brain-dead policies on technology you can look up:
C-11: A streaming services bill that mandates Canadian content on foreign streamers. Not horrible, but also a great way to have "This service is not available in your region." notices in your country.
DST: A "just because" global digital services tax of 3%, which will definitely be passed onto consumers, if not lead to service blockages in Canada.
C-18: ↑ This bill. Pretty much a shakedown by the government and media companies.
> This is coming from a registered liberal party member, who's socially liberal and is consistently confronted with the thought that I may actually be conservative.
A first-past-the-post system ends up in a two-party system, which means a big tent progressive party and a big tent conservative party; which in turn means nobody is fully happy with either option.
This isn't to say that multiparty democracies always function well, either. Belgium basically had no government (as in a party elected with a mandate to govern) for two years, from 2018 to 2020.
We're currently in a minority government situation here in Canada. First past the post makes no sense at all, majority of the votes get thrown out, and the party that actually won the vote didn't get the most seats.
I'm quite happy with the European content that Netflix is mandated to offer in our region. Some of what turned to be my favorite shows were Icelandic, British, Belgian or French and I'm quite sure we wouldn't have had them otherwise.
It’s perfectly normal to not agree with everything the people you voted for does.
Unless you find yourself in a position of always being a victim, and are perpetually contrarian just for the sake of it, you’re not likely a conservative.
We don’t have a “conservative” party that targets slow, but calculated progress.
This is one game where MAD is the winning move to play. I'd like for Meta et al to block Canadian news. I'd also like for Canadian news to block Meta et al. Their endless funnels of garbage that predominantly serve to rile people up are something we could all do with less of. And that goes from both sides.
> This is one game where MAD is the winning move to play. I'd like for Meta et al to block Canadian news.
I don't know if this is MAD. I personally would start using facebook again if there were fewer news and misinformation.
If they blocked news in Europe as well that would be great. News and politics killed facebook and most social media. Politics are important for any society but they should not dominate every conversation platform as it currently does. Essentially, news have been transformed into a completed shitshow turning the internet into the new TV.
I agree. I'm not big on social medias (except this site) but I have absolutely no use for post-2012 Facebook. Banning news sources from it would improve it considerably in my eyes.
The best I can tell, meta is deliberately overapplying the law in an attempt to rally public sentiment against a law they don't like.
An example of this is where meta has basically "regionally suspended" some news accounts. Some Canadians (a/b testing) going to Instagram pages owned by a News Orgs see "sorry, blocked, bitch at the government." But the law doesn't say news orgs can't use social media unless Meta pays them.
It's not the first time Canada has seen this sort of bad behaviour from entitled companies. I've seen literally this overapplication strategy in other instances.
Perhaps the law should be tweaked. Perhaps it should not be. But this actively damages my view of Meta. maybe the fact they hate this so much is an indication the government is doing something right.
Maybe Canadians will be inspired to get their own news instead of consuming whatever viewpoint Meta deems acceptable (and yes I think actual domestic journalism is a better source than Meta).
Problem being that despite the fact that getting your content hoovered by socials is stealing ad revenue - Facebook etc al have declared themselves the only sites on the internet that matter, and if they aren't linking to you you don't matter.
Something does need to be done about this, this is something - whether it's the right something or not is debatable, but I find the idea that this is just smug news orgs getting their justified comeuppance silly.
The law is not limited to content appearing on the news companies' websites. It applies to "news content" created by an "eligible news business" and "made available" by a "digital news intermediary".
The definition of "news content" is quite broad [0]. It's likely that basically all content posted by a "news business" on social media would qualify. So I don't think it is an example of overapplication. If the government wanted to ensure that the news companies can continue posting on Meta social media sites, they shouldn't have gone for such an aggressive scope on every dimension.
[0] "content — in any format, including an audio or audiovisual format — that reports on, investigates or explains current issues or events of public interest"
Spitballing here, but perhaps the argument could be made that news posted by a Canadian news organization to Instagram might potentially-count as news they need to be paid for if it's shown to other users on that platform? Not sure whether it has to be content that's directly hosted on their own website...
The news organization's Instagram profile -- which contains a link to their website -- would almost certainly count as content to be paid for.
I mean, I'm sure Meta is motivated to pick an expansive reading of the bill in order to pressure the Canadian government, but what you describe doesn't sound inherently outside the bounds of "we want to avoid all activities that we're required to pay you for".
Reading the text of the law it would count as news if it ties to any issue or event of public interest. I'm actually having difficulty thinking of a post by a large organization that wouldn't fall under that definition.
Reading the law, if a news outlet makes a post that counts as "news content" such as commenting on any ongoing public issues (including this very topic) then Meta would be potentially liable for it under the law. So unless Meta has lawyers review every single potential post made by a news outlet the simplest approach is to just block all news outlet accounts.
> The move follows the passage of Canada's Online News Act, aimed at boosting revenue for Canadian journalism outlets by mandating compensation from companies like Meta and Google's parent company, Alphabet, for hosting and linking to their content.
Advertisers and PII farmers basically use news channel posts to generate revenue, and often scrape critical parts of the article, or even just outright steal the contents in whole.
I’m not sure about the execution, but I do agree with the sentiment. Google and Facebook being allowed to steal your content just because they’re massive is a huge problem.
If the law was restricted to cases where Google / Facebook had actually scraped the content from the page and was redisplaying it, I suspect we'd be seeing far less objections. Instead, it overreached so hard that it's left Hacker News broadly supporting Facebook's actions, which is pretty wild.
Ignoring how it even applies to pure links with no content ("click here"), a lot of the previews you see on Facebook are using special meta tags that're added to news articles for that purpose. If the news orgs think that using that content for a nice preview of their article is bad for them, they should stop deliberately providing it.
(I think the `og` meta tags are a better argument here than `robots.txt`, because the former is the news orgs actively helping their content get redisplayed, while the latter is Google they-would-argue saying "we're stealing this unless you tell us not to", which sounds far sketchier.)
We sort of agree, in that I believe we're both saying that the law is currently doing something bad, but that preventing unauthorized reuse of the news org's content isn't necessarily unreasonable.
However, I don't think calling it an execution issue is quite right. The basic concept built into the law is that telling someone where to go to get the news is a thing you should have to pay to do. We can imagine a far more restrained law that just forbids or requires payment for scraping-and-redisplay of article text... but that'd genuinely be a different law with a different goal.
Huh? News organizations are explicitly asking third parties to take their content and helping them do so... I'm not sure how that is an argument for third parties taking that content by force. In fact they're now complaining that Meta is no longer taking their content at all. So really not sure what argument you're trying to make here.
What a complete load of garbage. News organizations are asking to be paid for their stolen content.
They are rightfully complaining that tech giants are now attempting to forcefully allow stealing content so long as you’re large enough.
It’s funny, because right now, you’re basically saying that Reddit is correct to forcefully take over subs that are locking down in protest of killing third party apps for the purpose of having better ability to spy on your activity and pump ads.
Same shit dude.
When a liberal government does it = bad
When a sub fights a corporate spy network = good
Funny how that works. Personally, I just enjoy not being a hypocrite.
It sounds like you don't actually understand the contents of the law. It has nothing to do with "stolen content" as you put it. Just the act of Facebook linking to a news article without any information from the article (title, snippets, images) is enough. How is that theft in your mind?
I have no idea of where your reddit analogue is coming from.
Meta blocked the news content, no more stealing according to your own line of argument, how is that a bad outcome? You can't have it both ways that this is stealing so it's bad but that not stealing is also bad because "reasons."
Throwing in a bunch of random insults and statements about liberals and corporate spy networks doesn't make for an argument or a useful discussion. Stick to reddit or twitter if you want to go down that route.
This is exactly backwards. Google will happily not index any of your content with a simple robots.txt file. These companies are desperate for Google's traffic. They should be paying Google for it!
Imagine there's a local newspaper with a community events section. The event organizers say the newspaper is stealing from them because it profits from having ads on the same page, so the government makes them pay $10 to each event they feature. The newspaper decides the community events section isn't worth the trouble and just removes it, and everybody including the government whines that the big bad corporation is bullying them. If they actually believed the original argument that it was stealing, they should be happy that they stopped!
I'm sure glad the government is focusing on important issues like this while being dismissive of the housing crisis.
They took the wrong approach. The simple answer was to tax the companies you want to pay, and then give the money to the people you want to give money to. Instead they put together this rube goldberg machine and facebook is noping out.
Unfortunately in all countries (except one) Meta et all have no income on which to be taxed as the costs to support the operation in your country are oddly outweighed by the payment for using the name they have to make to the country where Head Office is.
Tax on ad revenue based on location of user rather than income then.
If you want to play nice with local companies, have it offset against income tax, so it's revenue neutral with respect to local broadcasters and billboards, but not for international companies that transfer price all their Canadian income elsewhere.
Do you have to tax income? Can't you tax social media companies $2 per user per year that have more than 1 million members or by any other metric you like?
The income generating event occurs where someone sees their ads.
There's a simple experiment that would prove this:
Prohibit Meta from displaying any adverts on any screens in Canada.
When they complain about loosing money, say; OK you can show the ads, but we're taxing you on that money/incone you said you were loosing.
>The simple answer was to tax the companies you want to pay, and then give the money to the people you want to give money to.
The problem is that they don't want to impose a general tax, and imposing a tax on social media companies only looks suspiciously like a shakedown, so they made this rube goldberg machine to launder it.
All the parties involved primarily make money with ads. Facebook is (in)famous for their privacy invading trackers. Why not leverage FB's creepy stalker tech to mandate revenue sharing for ads related to / shown near or around the news articles shared on FB?
It shouldn't be any technically different than affiliate marketing, but instead of a product being purchased, it's ads being viewed, and it triggers whenever someone shares a URL to one of the covered news agencies.
Speaking hypothetically because I'm neither a lawyer nor an economist:
If a monopoly or a monopsony withdraw from a market in order to force a change to legislation they don't like, that feels like exactly the kind of thing that governments need to take a dim view of, or else risk becoming de facto puppets of the monop*y.
I feel like this opinion is divorced from reality.
A company removing itself from the market creates room for competition.
FORCING Meta to provide links and also FORCING them to pay for the links they provide is absurd. They have every right to depart the market. And good riddance, too-- you shouldn't be getting your news from social media, anyway.
> A company removing itself from the market creates room for competition.
Not always.
Let's say, just for the sake of the argument, that people are lazy and social (so far so good), so much so that they spend all their free time on social media (that's the excessive part for the argument).
Don't allow links of category XYZ on social media? Well, now people won't be sharing them. Opportunity has ceased to exist.
You only get competition if there's a new social network that does allow XYZ. If the old social network is dominant, this may not be reasonable or effective — if FB pulls out of Canada, some other random university student can pull off what Zuckerberg did at university, but Canadabook still won't (except by luck) get the international cachet.
> And good riddance, too-- you shouldn't be getting your news from social media, anyway.
Yup, agreed.
Im fact, go further and get rid of FB and all the rest — I'd be happy for us to go back to e-mail and IRC (and I'm only 70% sure that's because I'm pining for my lost youth when everything was simple and I didn't have any important things to worry about).
That's not facebook's problem. If you want a platform where the government compels what content is provided, you should start lobbying for the government to create such a thing.
Seriously, do you GENUINELY want to live in a world where a government can compel entities to provide information then CHARGE them for that act at the behest of other private entities who directly profit from it?
Kinda neutral TBH. Governments set all kinds of rules, that's their job. Democracies somewhat align those rules with public interest, imperfectly and with partial overlap with the imperfections of the public interest alignment from free market capitalism.
Just because I can see edge cases doesn't mean I can tell what makes them systemically better or worse.
I guess I just view it as a really bad precedent to set. The government isn't doing this on the behalf of the general population, it is doing it on the behalf of greedy newstertainment hacks that want more money in a desperate attempt to save their outmoded lifestyle.
There's obviously some content the government should be involved with, like inciting violence. Usually that comes with a direct penalty to the government, in the form of a fine (the effectiveness of which is up for debate), not in the form of compelling speech AND paying a private org for the pleasure of doing it.
It's not justice, it's protectionism. Which is gross. Here in America we do similar shit, and it's just as gross here. We only have car dealerships at all due to protectionism, because it'd put them outta business if people could buy all the cars directly.
Meta did not remove itself from the market. That would be forcing Canadians to no longer have Facebook/Instagram accounts, etc. IMO, that would be entirely defensible.
But Meta makes a lot of money from Canadians and their data, and they don’t want to lose that particular revenue stream. So they have suspended part of their offering to part of the people they serve in Canada because they don’t like a particular (flawed in one critical way, suboptimal in others) law. That’s anticompetitive behaviour, and it's the sort of thing that would get Canada's wireless companies slapped around when almost nothing else would (all three major wireless companies got slapped pretty hard when Rogers went down country-wide and 911 service was unavailable because of a lack of sharing agreements that should be the absolute norm).
This is nothing more than Big Gov trying to save the dinosaurs. The Canadian media giants have not evolved at the pace of technology. They have no innovated since print and radio. Of course their revenue streams are drying up. And of course Big Gov is tired of subsidizing a failing enterprise. Though, it would be interesting if Mr. Trudeau countered with blocking a Meta traffic in Canada.
Skimming that page, I think that so long as you've got a million dollars to invest in a business based in the US, and will employ 10+ people, you have a straight shot to full-on permanent residency. With other options available, depending on more complicated requirements.
It’s sort of scary how authoritarian Canada has become in recent years. From compelled speech, gun confiscation, to financially alienating political dissenters to now possibly trying to force companies to participate in things they don’t want to.
Very few countries have the historical, legal, and cultural background that favors freedom (in many senses of the word) over authoritarianism as the US. Maybe Switzerland is another example.
See Australia for another Commonwealth country that has been passing pretty dystopian laws around privacy and encryption.
It looks like the anglosphere or Western world, however you want to frame it, seems to be moving in many troubling directions. It's hard to separate oneself from their moment in time and history and particular vantage point but it does seem we have a growing number of citizens willing (or apathetic enough) to sacrifice a whole bunch of liberty for some promises of security.
Exactly, this was the scary part for me. First time I've ever seen a public emotional frenzy escalate to a point where the majority agreed to suspend due process, for things that could have been prosecuted normally
I'd say that the suspension of due process started long before those protests began, back when the various levels of government started imposing forced lockdowns, forced masking, forced injections, travel bans, and curfews, among the other violations of the most fundamental of rights and liberties.
We should also keep in mind that the majority of citizens were not in favour of such actions. If the Canadian public had widely supported such measures, then they would have been self-imposed, and just voluntarily happened. The governments wouldn't have had to resort to mandates and other forceful methods like they did.
Canada is easier to understand when you realize that there is a strong current of oligopoly behind many of its large businesses, including the news.
A few out-of-touch boomer billionaire families who have the governance-as-a-service support package can put their thumb on the scale to create "consensus" around nonsense like this.
I hope Meta and Google never restores these news outlets. My feed has gotten significantly better already.
All of the media's coverage up here is disingenuously about tech overreach and not about how their lobbyists tried to double-dip on revenue (both demanding an estimated $329M/year[1] from tech companies, while also receiving the ad revenue from ++1.9B pageviews[2]).
The problem is there'll probably be some kind of settlement between the government, news companies, and tech. But while this drags on, the larger oligopoly of news outlets will come out alive, while smaller news outlets are really going to suffer financially.
If you want to read more about our government's recent brain-dead policies on technology you can look up:
C-11: A streaming services bill that mandates Canadian content on foreign streamers. Not horrible, but also a great way to have "This service is not available in your region." notices in your country.
DST: A "just because" global digital services tax of 3%, which will definitely be passed onto consumers, if not lead to service blockages in Canada.
C-18: ↑ This bill. Pretty much a shakedown by the government and media companies.
> This is coming from a registered liberal party member, who's socially liberal and is consistently confronted with the thought that I may actually be conservative.
[1] https://www.pbo-dpb.ca/en/publications/RP-2223-017-M--cost-e... [2] https://about.fb.com/news/2022/05/how-meta-supports-news-pro...