The Online News Act passed last Thursday and would force platforms like Google and Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, to strike deals with Canadian media publishers for sharing, previewing and directing users to online Canadian news content.
I’m Canadian, so no need for hypotheticals. I can browse my news sites directly. No trouble for me.
Also, and this is a novel idea, maybe Google et al. should abide by the rules of the states in which it operates without forms of petty protest. This is a battle between a capitalist conglomerate and the Canadian state. I’m virulently anti-capitalist, so I don’t particularly care about the profit incentives of any of these corporations or even of the private for profit news sites. The bill to be clear would ensure the news sites get paid, and that Google and Facebook do not profit off of the content their editors are writing. But Google and Facebook don’t like that, because they’re fucking capitalists who control enough GDP to fucking buy Canada. So they can fuck off then, that’s fine. Like I said before, you won’t see my crying for them.
I don’t disagree with anything you just said, I also couldn’t care less about the business loss it would be for Google/Meta. But I think people’s surprise is not about that, it’s about how this business relationship was potentially actually beneficial for the Canadian news outlets who pushed for this, since a lot of their actual traffic was coming from what Google and Meta had built, whether those Canadian editors like it or not. If that’s the case, then they’re basically shutting down an effort that was providing them free advertising, potentially shooting themselves in the foot.
They also can’t claim that they wouldn’t know it would happen, since that’s what Spain did a while ago, and that’s exactly what happened. If the issue is about reusing copy, some other countries passed laws allowing Google to provide the free advertising by showing users links and titles, but without providing any summary, and Google abided. But the Canadian law here was written to ban even the parts that may be beneficial.
If you personally go straight to news websites, then yeah, there’s no loss for editors from your usage. But the thought here is that a ton of users don’t do it like you do, and the Canadian news outlets that made this law happen are about to suddenly lose all traffic from those users.
For news aggregation and summary, I totally agree with you. For just search indexing and referring, though, I think paying just for a link that is no more than 10 words is not justified. If I post a link in this comment from a Canadian news site, should I pay a fee, too? Because section 2 part b states that access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.
I’m late to the discussion, i’m no fan of giant companies and the billionaires that run them but this isn’t the place to fight them. If you’re summarising the article and depriving the website of clicks and ad revenue then you should definitely pay the news sites, but if you’re linking to them then you’re basically helping direct traffic there. Just like what happened in Spain Google is going to pull out of Canada, the news publishers are going to realise they’re seeing a huge drop in traffic, and a year or two later they’ll be asking Google to come back.
Maybe. Its a nonsense song and dance while Canadians are facing the worst cost of living and housing crisis in our nation’s history. We had the government outright prove that the nation’s largest grocery chains are fixing prices under the guide of inflation and literally nothing happened. Two weeks of groceries for me and my family cost us nearly 350$ when I was there yesterday. The same amount was around 150$ 2 years ago. Wages haven’t increased anywhere near that much. But you get used to liberal democracy doing whatever it can to distract from the crimes of capitalists. So they’re “taking a stand” against news aggregators. It doesn’t matter either way. The working class is one bad day away from homelessness. A dispute between local media capitalists and foreign mega corporations has no impact on anything whatsoever.