2y ago

TechDirt: As Canada Passes Corrupt Link Tax, Meta Says No More News Links In Canada

www.techdirt.com

As Canada Passes Corrupt Link Tax, Meta Says No More News Links In Canada

TechDirt’s Mike Masnick gets it exactly right in covering Canada’s C-18 bill:

If you believe in the open web, if you believe that you should never have to pay to link to something, if you believe that no one should have to pay to provide you a benefit, then you should support Meta’s stance here. Yes, it’s self-serving for Meta. Of course it is. But, even if it’s by accident, or a side-effect, it’s helping to defend the open web, against a ridiculous attack from an astoundingly ignorant and foolish set of Canadian politicians.

And just generally points out the huge holes in Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez understanding from the Power & Politics Interview.

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Meta said that to Australia too, but ultimately caved. We need to not let ourselves be frightened by the threats of corporations. They are meant to serve our society, not the other way around.
- Sure. Except, if you read the article, this is about a fundamental discussion about paying to link to things. Should every post to Lemmy pay the website it links to?
  
  There's nuance to be had. Lemmy.ca isn't Meta or Google. It's one or two guys running a server in a non-profit capacity. No one here is making profit, we're just folks sharing links related to our shared interests. That is not true for Meta or Google. Those guys are making money hand over fist. These are not the same situations and there is no reason we have to treat them the same legally.
  
  Maybe. It depends on what's linked and how that affects the system. Linking isn't any different than downloading something which we know is ultimately copying information. There are nuances to copying in regards to copyright laws ethics, etc. And of course it wouldn't be Lemmy, the app, paying. Maybe not even Lemmy, the instance owner, or the poster since neither of them are profiting from that linking.
I actually agree with this law stopping Facebook or Google basically showing the entire article so you never leave facebooks site and facebook makes all the revenue while offloading the costs to serve and create the content to the news organisation. Seems ridiculous and parasitic. I agree just a link is overreach but something had to be done and maybe it can just be scaled back a bit. Making someone else incur the cost to create something you then sell and they have no way to stop you is just morally wrong.
- Sure. Then it should also apply to independent media. Which the Canadian bill does not. The Canadian government is picking and chooseing who news media is.
  
  I would be happy for the law to be modified and improved. The first draft isnt always the best. Just a step forward thats all.
  
  The law of unintended consequences applies. If they take out links to established media, then what will fill the gap? In the case of some of my family, thinly veiled far-right 'blogs' substitute as news at the best of times. If media orgs that have some basis in reality are removed... What's left?
- Those snippets you see are provided by the news organizations. If they think showing those snippets is costing them clicks then they have the power to change the snippets. Those snippets are provided to convince people to click through.
  In some cases Google does things like their AMP links which truly do steal clicks and ad revenue, or they'll parse through a link to provide an answer to your search part way through, or if they show more than the provided snippet. Those are the kinds of things that might be legitimate to target.
  
  Yeah for sure thats what I mean. Anything the news organisations cant control themselves is a no no for me.
- Nah I said I dont mind links already.
I believe in democracy over corporations.
I believe in journalism over social media.
Honestly, look at the state of social media today. The libertarian ideal internet has clearly been a complete failure. The libertarian ideals in the technology field has just been an abdication of responsibility. And some horrible corporations and foreign adversaries have filled in that vacuum.
The old school internet libertarians refuse to accept the reality of this failure. So now we've reached the point where massive corporations are using the oligopoly power over information distribution to strong arm democratic countries to avoid having to pay taxes. And out of habit and denial the libertarians take the side of Mark fucking Zuckerberg.
All to desperately cling on to an ideology that's so obviously been a failure. Painfully obvious.
When your ideology demands you defend a massive corporation trying to strong arm a democracy to avoid paying taxes, maybe you should consider the possibility that your ideology might be flawed?
- 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.
  21 An operator must participate in the bargaining process with the eligible news business or group of eligible news businesses that initiated it.
  39 An arbitration panel must dismiss any offer that, in its opinion,
  (b) is not in the public interest because the offer would be highly likely to result in serious detriment to the provision of news content to persons in Canada; or
  (c) is inconsistent with the purposes of enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contributing to its sustainability.
  Sounds a lot like the named companies aren't even allowed to say "no I don't want to display links at that cost anymore.". And it includes indexing for searching, even if you only included the headline with no preview link, or allowed people to like/upvoat posts with links to news sites in them.
  So you have to negotiate if named, and the news sites reject your offer, you go to arbitration, and of the arbiter doesn't like your offer (and by the text "I don't want to show news anymore" MUST be rejected) then it goes to whatever the news corps offer was.
  If it just said "hey, we decided your previews generate too much value and violate copyrights, you need to pay royalties or else show the bare links" well, that would be dumb but fair. But being forced to transact seems bad.
  
  They're trying to bring Must Carry rules for cable TV to the internet.
  
  Sounds a lot like the named companies aren’t even allowed to say “no I don’t want to display links at that cost anymore.”
  Are you saying news sites should be able to prevent linking to their site altogether? Seems like that would be giving too much power to the News sites, and then there would be complications if a user on the social media site were to link to their site somehow. What would the penalty be if a social media site linked to a news site that prohibited them from doing so?
  Also doesn't seem like something a news site would want to do.
- Do you agree that indepedent Canadian media should also get paid?
  
  I don't think they should.
  Most independent media is just worthless opinion columns, political activism made to look like news, and on some occasions just straight up disinformation.
  Sure some of it may be ok, but if you try to write legislation that comes out as "all left leaning independent media gets money, all the right wing independent media can go pound sand" it's just the government trying to use legislation to promote their party. That's a really bad precedent.
  So as much as I'd like to see the good independent journalism funded by this, it doesn't seem feasible to do that without also funding disinformation.
Y'know, I'm not nearly as against this concept as this suggests. News is... clearly unprofitable in the modern era, and the quality of the average news outlet has fallen drastically in the past few decades. So I'm down for some drastic attempts to recapture that value and reward good reporting.
Obviously this isn't perfect, it might even be full-out stupid, but I don't think perfect exists here, and it's worth trying something here.
- Wouldn't Facebook having to pay news agencies for clicks to their articles result in the problem of low quality clickbait style articles/headlines worse? I get the point you're trying to make, but I think the way the government is going about things is a bit silly and doesn't seem apt to make things better. To me it seems like the government fell prey to the lobbying efforts of Bell/Rogers/Telus trying to squeeze more $$$.
  
  Yeah, true. If the definition of "news" here is really as poor as "posted by a "News" site", then you're likely right that that would incentivize much of the same behaviour.
  Even still though... even companies like Buzzfeed will occasionally fund "hard hitting journalism". Handing them money blindly like that, though obviously inefficient, may still serve to make more "real journalism" financially viable. And I think there's still people out there with a passion to do that, provided they could survive doing that.
  Agreed in general though, even as a first pass at the idea, this is an awkward and subpar stab at it, with some obvious issues.
For all the open web absolutists among us, consider this.
Our democracy depends on the survival of our news media. That should be an uncontestable point. The open web in Canada depends on our democracy. Should it fail, the open web fails with it. If that isn't obvious, think what undemocratic countries do to the web and why.
This law specifically targets corporations that have an outsized market power against news orgs. It exempts everyone who doesn't.
If this law helps protect the viability of our news organizations, then it helps protect democracy in Canada and therefore the open web.
- Yes, usually linking to canadian news on google and facebook provides a summary of the article as well - so many users are satisfied with reading that and dont click.
  So facebook and google get the ad revenue, canadian news outlets rhat produce those headlines get nothing.
  
  That's right. 👍
If you believe in the open web, if you believe that you should never have to pay to link to something
I also believe that I am not a faceless megacorporation. Why should I worry about regulations that specifically only apply to faceless megacorporations?
- Because it’s supporting Canadian mega corporations. Read OpenMedia https://action.openmedia.org/page/121153/petition/1?
Guilbeault spewed the same garbage when he was in that seat. Like bullet points from the industry that bought them out.
You should not have to pay to link anything. That does not mean the content of the link has to be free. However I am not about to pay $10/month each to hundreds of sites. What would make sense to be able to buy views on any site and have a proxy system distributing payment to the sites when an article is read. This would reward good/economic news sources and bad/expensive sources would get little income from this scheme. Importantly, I get to decide how much I am will to pay per month. IHO C-18 is a bad bill imposing a less than ideal solution. The problem is not with Google or Meta, its that the news orgs have not been inovative enough to come up with a solution and have and are lobbying governments to implement bad laws.
This whole thing doesn't make sense to me. If the issue is the preview that facebook/google show next to the links then it should already be covered by copyright law. If they want to charge for links without preview then that's just plain wrong.
The way it targets corporations with more bargaining power than the news industry is also weird. Why does bargaining power matter? Is it because the news industry intends to extract payments from everyone later and they want to give the big tech companies no incentive to come to the smaller players' defense? Keep in mind that the biggest news orgs are big corporations themselves. Or is it written this way just to avoid naming facebook and google directly?

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