Seeing how the Liberals have behaved during this whole process makes me feel like they've traded the classic middle-of-the-road pragmatism they were known for for blind ideology. Which as a voter sucks, because I can't think of a single party right now that would actually make evidence-based, expert-informed decisions for our country.
This is how Canadian news sites will die. The only reason Canadian sites are accessible to most is because of search engines. The major search engines and social media platforms could easily remove Canadian sites will little loss. Facebook has already done it and has received little decrease in usage.
Canadian news needs search engines more than the search engines need Canadian news.
The problem is not search engines per se, but how those engines work. When the search engine pulls so much more than just a link, there is no need to actually go to the site. That means the only party making ad revenue is the search engine.
Then you have platforms like Twitter and Facebook that have a "pay to promote" system. AYour feeds are not just what you've decided to follow sorted by how you prioritize things, but sorted by who has paid the most, including content that you never actually subscribed to. That means if the CBC, or anyone, wants to actually be seen by their followers, they have to both pay and provide enough content that makes visiting the site less necessary. So on top of reduced opportunity for ad revenue or to gain an actual subscription, they have to pay to get that reduced opportunity.
Yes, I know that the sites have some control over how much beyond a link they allow to be pulled, but the nature of human attention means that being too restrictive is basically equivalent to not existing.
To be clear, I don't have a solution. The current legislation is not the answer, but something needs to be done. I'm starting to think that news and journalism needs to be supported the way we used to support the arts. Government funding with very, very few strings attached. But I can see lots of problems with that, too.
When the search engine pulls so much more than just a link, there is no need to actually go to the site. ... I don’t have a solution.
Luckily you don't need one. Facebook came up with the solution a long time ago – one that all the major media sites adopted. It's called OpenGraph. It lets the publishers decide exactly how they want to present their content on these sites. Give too much information and the users won't click? Change what information you specify. It all happens on the publisher's side, so they are in full control.
OpenGraph is definitely a great idea. That still leaves the problem of paid content getting pushed to the top.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The federal government has put a price tag on what it would like to see Google and Facebook spend under an act requiring the tech giants to compensate media for news articles.
Draft regulations released by the government Friday outlined for the first time how it proposes to level the playing field between Big Tech and Canada's journalism sector.
Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, which blocked news on its platforms in anticipation of the act coming into effect at the end of the year, immediately expressed its disappointment with the proposal.
"We're carefully reviewing the proposed regulations to assess whether they resolve the serious structural issues with C-18 that regrettably were not dealt with during the legislative process," Google spokesperson Shay Purdy said in response to the draft.
The two companies have long lobbied against the legislation, with Meta claiming news is a tiny fraction of its business and removing it would result in little revenue loss for the social networking giant.
Google's president of global affairs Kent Walker, meanwhile, has said the legislation "exposes us to uncapped financial liability" and claimed it's being targeted just because it shows links to news, "something that everyone else does for free."
The original article contains 751 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
They'll just block Canadian media until the government caves
google will block all of canada until the government is quickly overthrown by all the Canadian corporations that are utterly fucked without google services. It would take a day at most.
Do you want to kill the internet? This is how you kill the internet.
This is how you isolate your journalism industry to get zero traffic
Seems like that would hurt Canadian journalism rather than kill the internet?
The whole idea the internet is interlinked sites. Then again the whole idea if the internet was also a robust, reliable, multi-nodal, non-corporate architecture for redundant transmission of data, so we’re headed into the shitter already.
But, more to the point, if you start charging people for links you break the purpose of being able to link things. It will kill Canadian journalism first, but it will wound a portion of the internet in the process. And if it spreads it will do net harm to both sides, everywhere.
Just like the original comment this seems like wild overstatement.
If these websites were someone's blog linking to a news article, I'd agree. They're not and they're not merely linking content. This isn't the open web, it's not the internet. These are platforms with captive audiences. Once you put that in the thought process, it flips the argument on its head.
And if Facebook and Google simply refuse to link to the sites that charge the money to link to them. What will happen then?
It's simple, they can either take it or leave it. If the assessments of profitability of this content are accurate, it will still be profitable for Google and Meta if they cave to demands. They'll hem and haw for a while, but they'll take the deal. At the end of the day, they're capitalist corporations, and they won't simply leave money on the floor.
That $234 M would be roughly 2% of the $11.2 B in revenues the two platforms are making in Canada. Does the Canadian news segment account for more than 2% of that revenue?
Not sure there's much reason for Meta to cave: Meta's Canada news ban fails to dent Facebook usage
Daily active users of Facebook and time spent on the app in Canada have stayed roughly unchanged since parent company Meta started blocking news there at the start of August, according to data shared by Similarweb, a digital analytics company that tracks traffic on websites and apps, at Reuters' request.
Another analytics firm, Data.ai, likewise told Reuters that its data was not showing any meaningful change to usage of the platform in Canada in August.
Doesn't seem like news was providing Meta much value.
If I was the head of either of those organizations, which clearly I'm not, I would leave it. I I don't want to set a precedent for a global link taxation system I'd have to pay on all of my traffic and all countries. And once it's demonstrated on news, slippery slope applies, and then applies to More and more linked content until it applies to all links.
So I think foregoing the Canadian profit would make sense from a business perspective
Too bad for the platforms the floodgates have already been opened. Australia has already implemented similar legislation in which they caved.
https://www.wired.com/story/australia-media-code-facebook-google/
I don't think it's in the nature of capitalist corporations to put long term strategy over short term profitability.
"Then, at 1 am on February 26, 2021, news content started to reappear, reversing users’ feeds to how they always looked. But behind the scenes, tech’s relationship with the media had permanently shifted.
Google and Facebook did not leave; they paid up, striking deals with news organizations to pay for the content they display on their sites for the first time. The code was formally approved on March 2, 2021, writing into law that tech platforms had to negotiate a price to pay news publishers for their content"
I think you should take note how they made the law after the deals were struck. Canada however has already ascended their version into law, prior to the deals. There is nothing to negotiate in Canada. Abide by the law or get out.
Facebook and Google have already destroyed the internet, by making hundreds of millions of people think they are the internet.
I am a Canadian and I do not support this at all. They should stop linking to anything hosted in Canada.
so is Musk the good guy again for compensating creators?
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