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Canada to keep pressure on Facebook to pay for news, Trudeau says
(www.reuters.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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Lemmy was pretty harsh about this when it came out. I was a bit surprised to see the fediverse take the side of Facebook and Google.
I thought it had good intentions. Journalism isn’t free, is becoming a service of value to Google and Facebook but without costing them anything.
I dunno, thought it was a good move.
It was/is a good move.
Some people are complaining that "billionaire media conglomerates" are going to be getting some money, but not that the large corporations like Meta and Google are making money off of others work without compensation.
Mind-boggling.
It totally disregards how the internet and the web works. Meta and Alphabet aren't copying whole articles and reposting them, they are linking to articles with a summary. You don't charge some one extra because they drive traffic towards you.
Linking with a summary of what is at the other end of the link is how the web works. Charging a toll to link to your site is greedy and ignorant.
It seems very obvious to me that social media is a net negative to media organizations. People very rarely click through to articles, headlines are clearly the most valuable part of an article.
Ultimately the way things work now is not sustainable it leads to low quality news that can barely stay afloat. How do you propose you fix it?
Then there is no value at all. Views from an illiterate user have no value.
To fix the news industry media corps have to start doing quality work not click-bait, rage-trolling, opinion pieces. Once there is something worth reading maybe there will be a case for the extraction of value from links.
Thing is, it wasn't an issue on the web before social media. So now traditional media creates content that gets posted on social media, the eyes that see the content only sees it on social media with the ads that pay the digital media company, in the end the social media is richer, the traditional media is poorer and the user is stupider because they didn't bother actually reading the content.
There 100% was link sharing with partial and full content being reposted long before "social media" arrived. "Tradidtional media" is only poorer in this current interaction because they produce such low quality content that it can be summarized in 5 words or less. If they wrote anything with depth they would have a real case for "social" platforms infringing on their copyright but you can only word a clickbait tittle so many ways and none of them are unique. Users aren't going to click through to a clearly dogshit article.
News sources need to quit cranking out click bait if they want to draw in real readers or, they can put their news behind a paywall and rely on subscribers to stay in business. If no one actually wants to pay for the "news" they produce then maybe they just suck, let them fail and something else will tke their place.
A couple thousand people sharing and not reading the articles vs millions doing so?
Proof is in the pudding, traditional media have seen an increase in traffic since Facebook blocked them.
Then keep blocking. There is no reason to set a precedent for one country saying what can and can not be linked without compensation. The blocking was done voluntarily by Alphabet and Meta and helps break up the monopoly they have on people's screen time.
It has to start somewhere though and the precedent was already set by Australia and Canada is totally free to force Meta to obey Canadian laws if it wants to offer its services in Canada and that means that the government absolutely can tell them "If you want to operate in Canada you have to allow your users to share Canadian media content."
Amp is opt in, news corps chose to suck that dick.
And does anyone use the cached link unless the original source is down?
robots.txt is also not a Google thing, it's use dates back to the early 90s and it's a signal for web crawlers, an integral and necessary part of all indexing engines, to voluntarily not crawl your site. Using it means your site does not get indexed and wont show up in search results.
The lazy producers of our C-Tier news put themselves where they are through apathy. They had decades and millions to get a head start in the digital market but instead chose to crank out click bait that looks exactly like their dead printed editions.
So the law penalizes them for just linking, even if they removed the headlines and the summary they still have to pay. Why aren't news organizations paying Meta & Google for sending traffic their way?
Meta doesn't seem to think they make very much off news at all, given they've been blocking it for months now here and have been cutting down on it globally across their products.
It's a great move.