[HN Gopher] Bill C-18: Google to remove news links in Canada ove...
___________________________________________________________________
Bill C-18: Google to remove news links in Canada over online news
law
Author : matbilodeau
Score : 261 points
Date : 2023-06-29 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ctvnews.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ctvnews.ca)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Is there really anything new in this post from the news that came
| out last week?
| AlanYx wrote:
| Last week it was Facebook. Today it's Google too. And the
| impact is arguably more significant given that Google is
| delisting Canadian news from their core search engine (not just
| from news.google.com), which has 92% market share in Canada.
| whitewingjek wrote:
| The eff had an interesting article[1] about this issue (and
| others) as well as some alternative ways solve the issue, not
| that I agree with all of them.
|
| Ultimately, this is the wrong approach. The internet should be
| "open," and people or companies should be free to link to
| whatever they want without penalty.
|
| [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > The internet should be "open,"
|
| Which RFC is that?
| throw0101a wrote:
| "The Internet is for End Users":
|
| * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890
| tomlin wrote:
| Facebook, Instagram, etc. are not "open", so the argument
| doesn't work.
| nceqs3 wrote:
| While I agree with them, it's important to note that the EFF is
| very pro-big tech and is largely funded by them.
| halJordan wrote:
| People are so often surprised when the money in an industry
| funds an industry group. It's especially egregious in the
| defense industry when people turn it into conspiracy theories
| saying like "this think tank is a puppet because they got
| money from the people with money."
| jewelry wrote:
| exactly. like how else they'll get the money? do you the
| random people donate?
| SllX wrote:
| Obviously a bake sale and all the members of the think
| tank have to work gig economy jobs in-between research,
| writing and speeches just to keep the lights on in a
| dinky little conference room of the sub-sub-sub basement
| of the Pentagon they rent out.
|
| Perks of the job mainly consist of being able to
| sporadically say "Gentlemen. You can't fight in here.
| This is the War Room!" and having critics in the
| mainstream media that hate your guts and will--
| uncompensated!--drop your name on a frequent basis and
| imply you are much much much more important and
| influential than you actually are.
| worik wrote:
| > it's important to note that the EFF is very pro-big tech
| and is largely funded by them.
|
| I find that a puzzling comment. EFF has a strange way of
| showing its allegiance to "Big Tech".
|
| What do I not know? How does the EFF demonstrate its
| allegiance to them?
|
| I took the EFF's work on privacy as an impediment to "Big
| Tech"'s business model. How am I wrong?
| empressplay wrote:
| Like weather reporting, journalism (in the 'what happened' sense,
| not all of this 'analysis' crap) should be funded by the public.
| The independence of the journalism department must be enshrined
| in law, but further I imagine a system where anyone can apply to
| become a journalist assuming they meet minimum requirements. You
| submit your accounts, and if they pass quality checks (including
| rejecting editorial content and passing basic fact checking) they
| get published and you get paid. Multiple accounts of the same
| event may (and should) be posted, and so then the reader can
| build a picture from those varied sources. This is citizen
| journalism, funded by the government and lightly edited, its
| purity spelled out to the literal letter by law. It's the only
| way out.
| wintogreen74 wrote:
| >> Walker said he wrote a letter to Canadian Heritage Minister
| Pablo Rodriguez early Thursday morning to inform him and his team
| of the decision.
|
| The fact that this is being lead by the Minister of Heritage
| should tell you how little this has to do with actual business
| and technology justifications.
| j45 wrote:
| This will likely have a worse effect than intended of fewer
| people having access to Canadian ends and instead American news
| or worse the meme news networks that have out educated press
| conferences over the pandemic.
| paddw wrote:
| Many people who would otherwise be appalled at laws like this
| seem to want to rationalize this because its specifically
| targeting Google and Meta.
|
| Sometimes taking the simple view is correct: It's a bad thing to
| prevent sites from linking to one another. It's a bad thing to
| interfere with the ability to access information on the Internet
| for reasons of nationalist politics.
| basisword wrote:
| Governments are there to serve their citizens, not the
| interests of foreign multinational companies. If this is good
| for Canadian businesses and the citizens running them and
| working for them then good for them.
| p0pcult wrote:
| [dead]
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I've always considered linking perfectly fine, but what to me
| is shady when platforms start to summarize or preview content
| of the link to the point where that functions as a substitute
| for the site.
|
| There needs to be a distinction between reference to content
| and the content itself. When platforms start to profit from
| other people's work without their consent that shouldn't fly.
| Google search's primary purpose is to make links discoverable
| and I don't think anyone ever took offense to that. But in
| recent years companies have started to deliberately blur that
| line by showing more content upfront, essentially to turn
| themselves into a middleman and choke content producers. It's
| perfectly legitimate to not allow this.
| tyingq wrote:
| It's a little more nuanced than _" many
| people...rationalize...because it's specifically targeting
| Google"_.
|
| It wasn't that long ago that Google was forcing AMP onto the
| same publishers by making it a requirement to appear in the
| news carousel. That forced a lot of unwanted intrusion into
| content that wasn't Google's to mess with. Including a forced
| banner in the most valuable space, hijacking right/left swipes
| to navigate to competitor publisher sites, etc. They have a
| strong demonstrated history of doing the wrong thing in this
| space.
|
| Though, I agree, this law and the outcome aren't the solution.
| kittiepryde wrote:
| AMP made the internet on my phone work. Most sites seem to
| dedicate 50% or more of the screen space to advertisements
| and load very slowly -- AMP sites were just crazy more
| performant -- I'm not saying AMP was the right move to make,
| but, it was trying to solve a real problem (similar to this
| bill also likely being the wrong move)
| basisword wrote:
| AMP worked like shit for me. Any time I had weird
| behavioural issues with a site, I'd look to the address bar
| and spot AMP. Using an extensions to prevent AMP stealing
| my clicks has made my phones browser work much better.
| tyingq wrote:
| It did have some benefits for consumers (and some drawbacks
| also). That doesn't really change what they did to
| publishers with it though.
| tomlin wrote:
| On the other hand, less people arguing over news articles may
| be what the world needs.
| devsda wrote:
| I don't see how we can call this nationalistic politics. I'm
| sure if a (hypothetical) Canadian big-tech impacted news
| organizations similarly, they would also have been a target of
| this law.
|
| Many of the biggest tech have origins in US and any country
| trying to make a law regulating businesses and technology
| within its borders is bound to impact American companies one
| way or the other. We can take the easy route and call it just
| nationalism or we can try to understand the intention/reasons
| behind the law. We may not agree with their laws but it is
| their right.
| dleslie wrote:
| > I'm sure if a (hypothetical) Canadian big-tech impacted
| news organizations similarly, they would also have been a
| target of this law.
|
| Very unlikely, IMHO. The CRTC isn't in the habit of making
| decisions that harm large Canadian companies.
| cornholio wrote:
| Nobody denies its their right, but that doesn't mean it's not
| a very stupid action, motivated by dumb nationalism. You
| can't handwave circumstances away, as if the legislators
| don't know it is a cashgrab against foreign corporations and
| genuinely believe Google and Facebook are Canadian companies.
| gremlinunderway wrote:
| [flagged]
| jurassic wrote:
| I don't think it adds anything to the discussion to
| personify and sexualize these companies.
| tomComb wrote:
| It's not dumb nationalism, it's typical lobbying, sold as
| nationalism.
| largepeepee wrote:
| What's new?
|
| We have been using that same excuse to block out Japanese
| and Chinese goods in various eras.
|
| Just feels weird the Canadians are copying our playbook
| jrockway wrote:
| They're using this playbook because it worked. Look at
| China, they were once a big threat to American
| Exceptionalism or whatever and now... <checks notes>...
| oh. Nevermind.
| themitigating wrote:
| I appreciate most of your argument and I also agree that we
| can't just use nationalism to dismiss laws like this BUT
|
| "We may not agree with their laws but it is their right"
|
| This statement can be used to justify any law. We are also
| not debating whether it's their right but if it's a good law.
| grecy wrote:
| > _Many people who would otherwise be appalled at laws like
| this seem to want to rationalize this because its specifically
| targeting Google and Meta._
|
| That was exactly the sentiment in Australia when similar laws
| were passed there. Many, many people just said "Good, it's
| about time Google and Meta paid their fair share of taxes".
|
| But they completely misunderstood they are not taxes at all,
| it's the Australian government collecting money, by law, to
| give directly to Rupert Murdoch (by law)
| adjav wrote:
| Yeah, the biggest winner under the Canadian law will be the
| American hedge funds who own PostMedia, the company that owns
| the vast majority of Canadian newspapers. But that's good
| apparently, since at the least the money doesn't go to those
| icky tech nerds.
| pyrale wrote:
| > Many people who would otherwise be appalled at laws like this
| seem to want to rationalize this because its specifically
| targeting Google and Meta.
|
| It's not just a matter of the targeted companies being Google
| and Meta, even though these two especially deserve it.
|
| It's the simple realization that good journalism requires good
| money, and that the current balance between news organizations
| and internet brokers isn't up to the task. It is also true of
| other type of content creators, by the way: there is a
| structural imbalance between content creators and content
| brokers. This is even more true with Google's zero-click
| efforts.
|
| While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome
| first attempt.
| [deleted]
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Don't want people gazing on your property? Erect a fence.
| Nothing prevents media sites from implementing access
| controls to only allow paying customers.
| pyrale wrote:
| That's a classic case of prisoner's dilemma though.
|
| By acting at national level, news publishers (partially)
| avoid that dilemma.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| No one pays. Journalism is a public good that will not
| exist if the current status quo continues. It's in
| societies interest to ensure that doesn't happen but
| everyone wants to free ride
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Don't want people stepping on your property? Shoot them
| down, why bother calling the police!
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome
| first attempt.
|
| I normally agree with release early, collect data and
| iterate. I'm not sure the law, with a bill of this impact,
| dependent on a bunch of politicians with obvious bias, who
| just went on summer vacation for 3 months, falls into this
| category.
| musha68k wrote:
| Just tax big companies more liberally, in general and
| everywhere. No need to target so specifically, e.g. there is
| so much value in all the data that citizens all around the
| world are providing, almost for free... maintenance costs for
| supporting usage are low in comparison, check yearly investor
| reports for profits.
|
| Then we'd not only have enough financial resources to
| subsidize a free and healthy press but also for other worthy
| endeavours like better health care, open source software,
| science, etc.
|
| _All without hampering with basic pillars of the web._
| lkhtbn wrote:
| We need proper paid subscriptions again, but we have the
| chicken/egg problem that people only pay for extremely high
| quality sources, but there are none.
|
| CBC has received $1.2 billion annually from the federal
| government (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasti
| ng_Corporat...) and is very ... government friendly ... in
| matters like the trucker protests.
|
| I remember more independent press around 2000-2010, where
| there was true opposition in the media. I see nothing like
| that now.
| graeme wrote:
| >While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome
| first attempt.
|
| The problem is media companies have been pushing this exact
| blueprint for d years. decades. It is a terrible, terrible
| template.
|
| If countries want to tax big tech and give the money to media
| organizations, they should be honest about it. Laws like this
| distort reality.
|
| >the current balance between news organizations and internet
| brokers isn't up to the task.
|
| This doesn't make sense. Newspapers _want_ links to their
| stories. I 've even seen media organization paying "internet
| brokers" to advertise stories.
|
| The law has the economics of the internet backwards. To
| receive a link is to benefit, everyone knows this except the
| government.
| basisword wrote:
| >> If countries want to tax big tech and give the money to
| media organizations, they should be honest about it. Laws
| like this distort reality.
|
| The idea that big tech would pay the appropriate amount of
| tax to the appropriate country is laughable.
| pyrale wrote:
| > This doesn't make sense. Newspapers want links to their
| stories.
|
| Newspapers want monetization. There are three ways linking
| to stories equal monetization:
|
| * Newspapers get enough ad money through these link. This
| mostly doesn't work.
|
| * Newspapers cut their costs and deliver shitty clickbait.
|
| * Newspapers get funded by "philantropy". This ranges from
| newspapers independently funded by trust funds to
| newspapers being bought by magnates.
|
| Overall, we can see that linking is far from enough for
| most newspapers to publish independent, quality work.
|
| > To receive a link is to benefit, everyone knows this
| except the government.
|
| This appears to no longer be true. Groups benefiting from
| internet are mostly eyeball brokers, not content
| distributors.
| sroussey wrote:
| Newspapers lost monetization when they lost their
| classifieds business.
| bandrami wrote:
| 4: Links bring in readers who then decide to support the
| journalism.
|
| I personally believe reader support is the only viable
| option going forward.
| duringmath wrote:
| There's no imbalance here: newspapers produce content, search
| engines/social networks surface and link to it.
|
| What's happening here is that publishers and their owners
| somehow figured these pesky internet wiz kids owe them more
| money.
| tenpies wrote:
| The nefarious (and probably correct) take is that this is
| intentional by the Trudeau Liberals.
|
| If you obliterate 30% of every news media's revenue you
| make them even more dependent on the Liberals funding them.
| This is on top of the existing "Support Canadian
| Journalism" fund that the Liberal government distributes in
| a completely "unbiased" way.
|
| Put simply: Trudeau wants absolute control of Canadian
| media. Bill C-18 is the first of three to achieve this
| objective. This grants them more control by making them the
| major source of income for all media. The next one will be
| about funding Canadian content (which the Liberals will
| define and select). The last will be about censoring and
| de-platforming hate (which they will also define and
| select). When Trudeau is done - and he will finish because
| the NDP will support him no matter what - Canada's media
| landscape will look something like a blend between North
| Korea and China.
| pyrale wrote:
| > There's no imbalance here: newspapers produce content,
| search engines/social networks surface and link to it.
|
| As evidenced by the average RoI at Google compared to news
| organisations.
| amf12 wrote:
| > As evidenced by the average RoI at Google compared to
| news organisations.
|
| Not a good metric.
|
| The ROI difference is because of both entities being in
| different industries, and other things unrelated to the
| power balance. We can similarly compare the ROI of a news
| organization and say a restaurant and lament that there
| is an imbalance of power.
| tempestn wrote:
| I expect you'll find that discontinuing their news
| linking service in Canada has very little effect on
| Google's profitability.
| pyrale wrote:
| I agree that Canada should probably have targeted their
| ad service rather than which link they publish.
| throwuwu wrote:
| One is the world's dominant gateway to the internet, the
| others are a handful of websites.
| Majromax wrote:
| > There's no imbalance here: newspapers produce content,
| search engines/social networks surface and link to it.
|
| The imbalance is that _as platforms_ , newspapers cross-
| subsidize content. Interesting headlines attract readers to
| the newspaper, but once in hand readers are likely to
| continue reading the other, less unique articles. (See also
| why newspapers carry sports scores and comics). An
| investigative report is by itself a money-loser, but the
| overall effect on net readership is a win.
|
| Aggregators break newspapers as platforms. Google et al
| provide extra discoverability for a single article,
| certainly, but then there's no lock-in to keep readers on
| the (now) website, reading more and seeing other ads.
| Headline-and-summary view might even result in zero-click
| satisfaction, denying the outlet even that first
| impression.
|
| This might just be a change that the industry must adapt
| to, in the same way that television and radio news took
| over the news-breaking role. However, it is more than a
| trivial threat to the fundamental business model of a news
| outlet; it's not (just) superficial greed.
| tensor wrote:
| Personally I'd be happy to see the ad driven model die.
| It used to be that people bought newspapers or didn't
| read them. They still had some ads, granted, but far less
| intrusive than today's web ads with their colours and
| animations.
|
| I'm huge into supporting good journalism, and think we
| need some sort of intervention here. But I'm very very
| strongly opposed to this new law. If news sites want to
| charge for their content they should put it behind a pay
| gate.
|
| I pay for news, but insultingly they STILL feed me ads.
| There is no tier that I can pay for that will eliminate
| the ads. I really don't have much sympathy for them given
| their refusal to somehow adapt to the times and offer
| service that users feel valuable enough to pay for.
| sroussey wrote:
| The can post a robots.txt file to say not to index.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| How do they say "You can index the story in your search
| engine, but you cannot borrow the text or images of our
| content for use on your own news site or info panels"?
| veddan wrote:
| I think you can do this with <meta
| name="googlebot-news" content="nosnippet">
| AYBABTME wrote:
| > there is a structural imbalance between content creators
| and content brokers
|
| As seen in Twitch.tv vs Kick.com where streamers are dropping
| Twitch and migrating en-masse to Kick. Abusing the content
| creators can backfire. However Google is in a different
| situation; they have a virtual monopoly on content discovery
| and not existing on Google basically means not existing at
| all. How do you fix that? Is Google an internet-utility?
| Should it be regulated as such?
| Brybry wrote:
| Twitch.tv vs Kick.com is a bit more complicated, right?
|
| Twitch claims it loses money on big streamers[1] and Kick
| is almost certainly being subsidized by online gambling
| company Stake[2][3].
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/djfluffkins/status/1479362350566109184
|
| [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-
| games/2022/12/06/trainw...
|
| [3] https://www.bonus.com/news/stake-com-founders-own-kick/
| cma wrote:
| I suspect Hollywood accounting going on here: paying
| inflated egress to AWS, their own property with one of if
| not the highest margins on egress in the business.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's not a utility. Search might be, and the state is
| welcome to start its own search engine and run it as a
| utility, paying zero innovation wages as utilities do.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| > It's the simple realization that good journalism requires
| good money, and that the current balance between news
| organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task. It
| is also true of other type of content creators, by the way:
| there is a structural imbalance between content creators and
| content brokers. This is even more true with Google's zero-
| click efforts.
|
| Let's go 100%. Will journalists then pay people who they
| report on?
| LegitShady wrote:
| I disagree that its welcome. I think its just a shakedown.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > It's a bad thing to prevent sites from linking to one
| another. It's a bad thing to interfere with the ability to
| access information on the Internet for reasons of nationalist
| politics.
|
| Would this prevent embedding links into your posts? I thought
| it's about platforms displaying enough information discouraging
| the person to visit the news site. I get that they want people
| to stay on their platforms 24/7 but I also get the other side
| wanting a slice of the advertising cake.
| monetus wrote:
| When they said uncapped financial liability, I took that to
| also mean any meta user's post or search engine result that
| displayed the content could expose them financially - If I
| were a malicious actor, I would flood meta with posts from
| bots, and the equivalent to google results like posting too
| much of the article in the website's header.
| tomComb wrote:
| No, the issue in this case is linking.
| johnnyApplePRNG wrote:
| This is only going to kill Canadian news outlets more than
| they're already dead.
|
| If you're not on Google, you don't exist to 99% of the world.
|
| I expect their readership to fall at least 50% overnight.
| sberens wrote:
| Can someone ELI5 the argument for the bill?
|
| My impression is it's something like "news websites provide
| content that creates engagement which drives ad revenue, and the
| news websites want a piece of that revenue."
|
| Is my understanding correct? Also, I can see how it applies for
| Facebook, how does it apply to Google?
| bragr wrote:
| That's basically the issue. And Google because Google News.
| tradewinds wrote:
| Not to argue in favour of the bill, but I think the idea is
| Google's whole business model relies on others for content, so
| a slice of that revenue should go to the content creators (even
| though the content creators gain from Google, and can generate
| their own ad revenues).
|
| The Liberal party is also trying to protect Canadian content
| (again, not to defend or advocate for this policy), and I'm
| sure this is part of it, even though it may ironically backfire
| and end up hurting Canadian news outlets.
| [deleted]
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Where are the adverts on google news? I haven't seen a single
| advert there in 10 years, and I just looked very carefully in
| case I somehow missed them, but no, there are none.
| tradewinds wrote:
| Even within the search results, there will be ads. If you
| search "what happened in Canada today", Google will link
| some news and there will likely be a sponsored link or some
| form of income-generating item for Google. Then there's the
| data you're generating as you use Google to navigate to the
| content you want, which can also be sold. Google connects
| you to content, every dollar they make is dependent on a
| non-Google creator, with the exception of maybe some
| Maps/Earth use-cases.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| I just tried, and didnt see any ads on news searches on
| canada news, or other news searches. Do you see any?
| tradewinds wrote:
| I do on YouTube before videos from CBC News. I actually
| don't on Google search results, but the search data you
| generate in the process of connecting with news sites can
| be used for a multitude of profitable uses-cases,
| including selling targeted ads elsewhere on the internet.
| philistine wrote:
| The fact you think YOU need to see ads next to search
| related to news DIRECTLY means you don't really
| understand Google's modus operandi.
|
| They make money by building a profile from your usage.
| And then selling that profile to advertisers. They make
| money by having news, because they can build a profile
| based on what you click and sell ads to those same
| websites you visit.
| iFire wrote:
| This is the standard Canadian policy for decades in TV.
|
| https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/cancon/mandate.htm
| jewelry wrote:
| a piece of meal is normally the case of adsense. the problem i
| guess is either flat fee (which would break the bank in
| Google's local account) or big overhead fee (e-invoicing,
| regulatory auditing, etc)
| neverrroot wrote:
| How long till they will beg to be re-linked?
| DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote:
| Not only will they beg, they'll offer money to be linked...
| like all advertisers.
| msla wrote:
| Beg, nothing. They'll mandate Google link to them _and_ pay the
| tax.
| graeme wrote:
| You generally can't force someone to do business with another
| company. You can tax a company and give that company to
| another organization. But you can't force google to run
| google news in a given jurisdiction.
| chroma wrote:
| That may be mostly true in the US, but many other parts of
| the world are more authoritarian.
|
| For example, Australia passed a law forcing Google to
| negotiate with news publishers regarding payment.[1]
|
| When France passed a law requiring that Google pay news
| sites for linking to them, Google tried to stop linking to
| those sites. In response, France sued Google for half a
| billion dollars for antitrust violations.
|
| 1. https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/25/after-facebooks-news-
| flex-...
| asfarley wrote:
| Deeply shameful, as a Canadian. I did not ask for this.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Canadian media asked for it.
| palijer wrote:
| Yeah, it doesn't look like they asked every single individual
| Canadian what they wanted. But here are the details for what
| was driving this.
|
| https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/fair-re...
| LegitShady wrote:
| You have it backwards. Thats the way they justify what they
| already had planned. That didn't drive this, that's the post-
| decision excuse. "We consulted with stakeholders and press
| decided they really wanted that money"
| ix-ix wrote:
| Meh, as a Canadian, this might not be perfect, but I am
| happy whenever the government attempts to revitalize
| Canadian heritage and remove American influences.
| philistine wrote:
| Not you specifically, but the majority of Canadians are in
| favour of the principle.
|
| https://mediapolicy.ca/2022/11/09/nanos-survey-shows-public-...
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| I'm guessing if/when this takes effect, the publishers will have
| to buy ads on Google and FB to attract readers that would
| previously find the content in the said platforms? Seems like a
| win for the two companies.
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| Also it seems like a business opportunity to start a newspaper
| outside Canada that does journalism for Canada. Then you'd
| appear in search results for free, while your Canadian
| counterparts would have to pay for ads to show up on the first
| page.
| motohagiography wrote:
| A side effect of this implies that if the internet platforms drop
| all Canadian media as a result of this law, it demonetizes all
| Canadian media, and then the only Canadian media that survives is
| what is directly subsidized by the government at its discretion.
|
| I see why this "works" now. The effect is censorship and
| silencing of disfavoured outlets with the pretense of
| deniability. This country is a lost cause.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Possible non-sequitur:
|
| ... "if the internet platforms drop all Canadian media as a
| result of this law, it demonetizes all Canadian media, and then
| the only Canadian media that survives is what is directly
| subsidized by the government at its discretion."
|
| Does Canadian media have no other revenue stream other than the
| Internet?
| motohagiography wrote:
| Yes, let them eat radio spots.
| chongli wrote:
| They still own cable and satellite TV. They make a lot of
| their money from live sports, one of the only reasons to
| still subscribe to cable.
| rafaelturk wrote:
| Undeniable truth remains: This is such a bad regulation
| tomlin wrote:
| Undeniable?
| cratermoon wrote:
| Loss of news in Canada via Google won't really happen. Google and
| the news outlets will negotiate new agreements in line with the
| law. Same with Facebook. It's in all parties interest to find an
| acceptable compromise. Unless Google or Facebook decide to get
| out of one side of online ad business entirely.
| matbilodeau wrote:
| Suggested workaround https://tt-rss.org/
|
| Most news outlets have rss feeds
|
| https://www.thestar.com/about/rssfeeds.html
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/rss/
| glonq wrote:
| Now that I'm weaning myself off of reddit, my favorite "toilet
| reading" is news.google.com
|
| But since I'm in Canada, I suppose I'll go back to RSS or maybe
| AP news.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| RSS is IMO the best way to follow multiple websites, not only
| news.
| opportune wrote:
| I was curious how link taxes panned out in other places they were
| tried and found this: https://www.techdirt.com/2021/06/21/as-
| predicted-smaller-med...
|
| I honestly figured it would not even help the big sites - users
| would have to start deliberately going to those sites directly
| without first arriving there through an aggregator/search.
| Apparently that's incorrect for major news organizations though
| still true for smaller ones (which I guess have not enough brand
| awareness for users to directly go to the site). I guess as it
| long as link taxes appear beneficial for major news organizations
| that can afford to lobby for them, we can sadly expect this to
| happen in more and more countries.
|
| IANAL but I understand that most Anglosphere countries outside
| the US have very different interpretations/not as strong
| guarantees of freedom of expression as in the US and some other
| Western countries. In countries with stronger protections I can't
| imagine a link tax having legs. Given that a link itself is not
| IP/content (I think), what would be the legal basis for
| displaying it on a website requiring compensation to the linked
| site? Though I suppose there is some precedent for requiring link
| removal from eg Google through DMCA, it seems different because
| in that case it's driving traffic to "stolen" content.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Didn't they try this in Australia and it failed?
| rafaelturk wrote:
| Startup idea: Canadian news, but based on US based website.
| pyrale wrote:
| It would be a pretty decent idea, if there wasn't a significant
| risk to get nuked by regulation in a couple years.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Just need the US and EU to follow suit now and the giants can get
| back to paying for what they use!
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| What are they using?
| [deleted]
| thorncorona wrote:
| Probably cocaine. By the looks of it.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And in Australia it was pushed by Rupert Murdoch.
|
| But fair is fair. If publishers want to force social media to
| pay for news content. Social Media has every right to refuse to
| pay and refuse to redistribute.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Social Media has every right to refuse to pay and refuse to
| redistribute.
|
| Unfortunately Brazil is trying to take _that_ right away,
| too. Hopefully they fail at doing so.
| jupp0r wrote:
| What leverage do they have? Companies can always pull out
| of the country entirely.
| tradewinds wrote:
| Well, the leverage is that some profit is better than no
| profit, in theory.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| If FB and Google both leave Brazil, it will put pressure
| on the lawmakers to rescind the law.
| tradewinds wrote:
| Yep true, it's a game of chicken really. This is probably
| what will happen in Canada anyway
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Assuming that you don't then become locked into mandatory
| "agreements" (and I use the term loosely given the
| inability to refuse) with rates that keep going up.
| Leaving aside that sometimes the principle outweighs the
| profits; a link tax, or any other restriction on linking,
| is an abhorrent constraint on the Internet.
| human wrote:
| As a Canadian, I feel like this is terrible news. From a web
| publisher point of view, I do agree that Google is going to far
| sometimes by embeding the content directly in the SERP. They take
| it so far that most of the time you don't even need to click on
| the article to get the summary.
| swader999 wrote:
| As a Canadian, I don't really care about this. The informed
| citizen model is already broken by censorship, cancel culture,
| corporate influence, paywalls, monopolies and a soon to be flood
| of AI content. Burn it all down imo and let something else take
| its place. I only use google news now to see what
| agenda/narrative is being pushed at the moment or maybe to check
| the weather.
| gwright wrote:
| > Burn it all down imo and let something else take its place.
|
| Probably hyperbole, but catastrophic failure of our
| economy/institutions/society isn't something I would choose to
| experience.
|
| This nihilistic attitude is dangerous, IMHO. In the extreme, it
| is a self-fulfilling approach with severe consequences.
|
| Seems like we should be able to do better than that as a
| society.
| swader999 wrote:
| It really has nothing to do with my attitude. Reality is the
| majority of the electorate doesn't know/believe/care that
| this is an issue.
| morkalork wrote:
| Media in Canada is in pretty dire straits right now. It looks
| like one of the last left-ish leaning papers (Toronto Star) is
| about to be gobbled up by post media. A huge swath of broadcast
| news media is owned by just one company, Bell which predictably
| leads to stories like "Top Bell Media executive urged CTV to
| avoid 'negative spin' on coverage of parent company". Plus the
| current batch of conservative leaders (PP, Danielle Smith,
| Ford..) all have an axe to grind with what they portray as
| leftist and woke media. Particularly the CBC, they'd love to see
| that dismantled. Then there's all the wonderful personalities
| involved like Conrad Black.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > all have an axe to grind with is portrayed as the leftist
| woke media
|
| Are you calling the media woke, or are you saying that
| Conservative leaders are calling the media woke?
| morkalork wrote:
| Sorry if not clear. I mean how it is being portrayed by
| conservative leaders, not a label I give it myself.
| noughtme wrote:
| I would like to see the CBC dismantled. The CBC no longer
| fulfills its mandate of serving the general public.
|
| Your comment, "Top Bell Media executive urged CTV to avoid
| 'negative spin' on coverage of parent company" equally applies
| to CBC and the current government or leading political party.
| somehowlinux wrote:
| This doesn't mean it should be dismantled it means additional
| laws should be put in place to make this type of thing
| illegal for the politicians to do.
|
| The CBC is the only chance left for some sort of even keeled
| news in Canada.
|
| Otherwise maybe some YouTube personalities might make a
| showing - I'm sure the farmer into the middle of Alberta will
| watch that.
| ncr100 wrote:
| So, would this law make the Star even cheaper, for acquisition,
| as it reduces the reach of the Star?
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Important to note that the CBC is state-funded and even the
| previous leader of the ultra left-wing party, Tom Mulcair, has
| recently accused the CBC of having a heavy left-wing bias.
| morkalork wrote:
| Right, who could forget PP asking Elon Musk to get the CBC
| flagged as state media in the same class as Xinhua and Russia
| Today.
| evandale wrote:
| Great job missing Tom Muclair who was the one mentioned in
| the comment.
| belval wrote:
| I don't know about heavy but CBC is definitely left-leaning.
| I feel like that should be curbed with some watchdog for
| media impartiality (not sure how it could be implemented?)
| instead of doing away with it entirely. The reality is (at
| least in Quebec), we don't have much to replace it.
|
| This is also a new development in journalism at CBC, older
| journalists tend to value reporting over opinion pieces,
| whereas younger journalists feel like it's their "duty" to
| push their opinion onto the readership which is an extremely
| toxic ideology.
| jxdxbx wrote:
| The argument is always that these companies are using and
| benefiting from news for free. Now, they aren't. It's weird to
| create a new kind of property right and then complain that
| companies are choosing to simply stop doing the thing that
| triggers the new right.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| I was at Facebook working on ranking when a similar thing
| happened with Australia.
|
| Showing news is a net negative for Facebook and probably not very
| positive for Google. Facebook's short and long term metrics were
| better without news. Facebook and Google are basically doing
| charity when they link to local news sites. These laws make
| absolutely no sense when you think about that.
| cubefox wrote:
| Well, the users of Facebook/Google would like to link to those
| sites, and Facebook/Google would like to keep those users...
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Yes the users want that content, but generally not as much as
| they want other content that Facebook could show instead
| esperent wrote:
| * * *
| cosmojg wrote:
| Forget about Google and Meta, they'll be fine, but those poor
| local news sites are screwed.
| bratao wrote:
| Brazil is currently considering a similar law that would require
| social networks to compensate content creators for each
| republication [1]. However, unlike the situation in Canada, the
| Brazilian lawmakers have taken into account this scenario. The
| law mandates that social networks cannot cease publishing the
| content and must negotiate compensation in "fair terms."
| Personally, I find this approach to be quite perplexing.
|
| [1] Source:
| https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/politica/2023/04/50899...
| morkalork wrote:
| I demand royalties for my shit posts!
| mrtksn wrote:
| Sounds like you can print money out of thin air by creating
| social media accounts who post your "news". It may force the
| social media companies for proper policing the against fake
| accounts.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Only fake accounts that post news links.
| caycep wrote:
| Would it have been better for these bills (CA/Brazil) to
| mandate revenue sharing, i.e. no flat fee per link from google,
| but a percentage of revenue from ads served associated w/ the
| link?
| philipkglass wrote:
| That would be fair enough but also wouldn't give the
| publishers what they want, because Google doesn't show ads in
| their News app or in Google News on the web:
|
| https://news.google.com
|
| I just opened it on a browser with no ad blocker and scrolled
| to the bottom. There are no ads in there. It's all news.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The law mandates that social networks cannot cease publishing
| the content
|
| So, how does Brazil stop them from withdrawing from Brazil
| entirely?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Money. They will remain here as long as there's still profit
| to be made. Would be awesome if they had enough balls to tell
| the brazilian government to go to hell but they just aren't
| gonna do that as long as they're making money.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The obvious way to beat that game is to stop carrying Brazilian
| news _before_ the legislation is passed.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| > "fair terms"
|
| The scare quotes are actually warranted here. I'd love to see
| how you can come to fair terms when the other side know that
| you cannot walk away.
| amusingimpala75 wrote:
| So if I understand correctly, those companies are now going to
| be forced into paying for products that they cannot just stop
| using?
| daxfohl wrote:
| If they want to operate in the country. Is google going to
| leave whole countries just because of being required to use
| and compensate local news? Essentially it's a tariff.
| cheriot wrote:
| Who decides what the tariff is?
| Kamq wrote:
| The de facto government.
| SllX wrote:
| Honestly? Why not. Not every country in the world is going
| to pass a law this silly and for those that do, do you
| really want to be in a business environment where the
| National government puts you in a position of dictating
| what services you must _also_ offer in order to continue
| doing business at all in the country? Like what if Google
| just decides for whatever reason at some point in the
| future they don't want to continue to offer Google News
| anywhere. That would be their prerogative. Whether they
| spun it off, sold it or just shut it down are all valid
| business choices they can make.
|
| At least it's easier in Canada where Google can go "okay,
| we'll just remove you from _our_ index that we included you
| in without charge that if you wanted to, you could have
| removed yourself from at any time."
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Or fighting a legal battle (which they will hopefully fight
| and win), or leaving the jurisdiction and then saying "good
| luck with that, let's find out how much of your companies'
| revenue we were driving".
| intrasight wrote:
| If they just showed the title and the link - like they used
| to - they it would drive revenue. But because they show a
| synopsis of the news, people very often don't click the
| link.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Google News does just show the title.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| This doesn't happen automatically, it's something
| websites have to set up:
| https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-
| websites/c...
| michaelmior wrote:
| I'm skeptical that such explicit summaries are the only
| thing social networks display. Even if that is currently
| the case, it would be relatively trivial for a company
| the size of Meta to generate and show their own summary.
| cheriot wrote:
| This is the way it's always worked. News orgs are asking
| social media companies to display the summary and image
|
| https://css-tricks.com/essential-meta-tags-social-media/
|
| They're not generating anything
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > good luck with that, let's find out how much of your
| companies' revenue we were driving
|
| I really wish these big techs would do that to Brazil. They
| made enemies of the current administration when they
| opposed their censorship laws.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Someone might correct me, but I believe that's what France
| did.
| viktorcode wrote:
| I think you are right. I vaguely remember French publishers
| losing revenue after Google News stopped referencing them.
| verdverm wrote:
| I recall Google eventually doing a deal with the French
| publishers. You can find many articles like the following
| coming out around the same time
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/report-
| google-wi...
| [deleted]
| TekMol wrote:
| News outlets usually provide RSS feeds.
|
| Don't they allow to show the contents of those feeds on websites?
|
| And isn't showing the content of the RSS feed "fair use" anyhow?
|
| When I look at the content of the Toronto Star for example:
|
| https://www.thestar.com/content/thestar/feed.RSSManagerServl...
|
| My gut feeling is that showing those short snippets with a link
| to the articles should be fair use. Am I wrong?
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _And isn 't showing the content of the RSS feed "fair use"
| anyhow?_
|
| Fair use and copyright are 'artificial' legal constructs, so if
| they were defined in an 'arbitrary' way to begin with, they can
| be redefined to add or remove provisions. These online
| publishing laws could tweak those provisions.
|
| Also: when an RSS/Atom feed is published, it is still
| copyrighted, and the terms and conditions would/could perhaps
| be defined what "fair use" is by copyright holder (maybe?).
| TekMol wrote:
| Sure, laws are human constructs.
|
| But what is the situation in Canada now? Did they really put
| a law into place which says "When you link to a page with a
| short excerpt to show what the link is about, this is now a
| copyright violation"?
|
| Wouldn't that also make search engines illegal?
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| > Wouldn't that also make search engines illegal?
|
| Seems like yes. From the article:
|
| "The tech giant plans to remove news links from its search
| engine, Google News and Google Discover for only Canadian
| publishers and readers."
| robryan wrote:
| Seems like this will be much worse for the media
| companies. It isn't like most people who clicked on news
| while casually scrolling their feed are suddenly going to
| start going to all these news sites direct.
| mrweasel wrote:
| My understanding was that the complaints was against using
| larger excerpts. I haven't used neither Googles nor Metas
| offerings, but the objection that I read in a different article
| was about users reading the news on Facebook, rather than
| letting the users click through to the newspapers.
|
| If Google and Meta just generate free traffic for the news
| site, then I'm not really sure why they're complaining. If
| their write is straight up reproduced without permission then I
| understand.
| TekMol wrote:
| When I visit https://news.google.com I only see very short
| excerpts like "Supreme Court Rejects Affirmative Action at
| U.S. Colleges".
| varenc wrote:
| My interpretation is that Google/Meta do only reproduce
| short excerpts, however short excerpts is all many people
| ever read. If those excerpts satisfy people's interests,
| then they never end up visiting the actual new sites.
|
| Even on HN it's not uncommon to see people commenting on
| articles they've only read the title of.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > they never end up visiting the actual news sites.
|
| I don't understand anyone who just visits a general news
| site and reads arbitrary articles. I understand with
| physical newspapers, because they deliver it to your
| house in the morning and there was no alternative but to
| subscribe to multiple papers. I have to think that only
| senior citizens do it now. I only pay for outlets because
| I want them to be healthy and to continue publishing, and
| I don't personally care about some major city's
| establishment paper, and don't care whether it shuts
| down.
| cma wrote:
| Will news stories that are just rewrites of other news
| stories pay the original now?
| Permit wrote:
| My understanding is that Australia created a similar law and both
| FB/Google came to the bargaining table.
|
| Does anyone know what's different this time? Is the law
| different? Is Canada a less valuable market?
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Presumably Meta has learned that media linking is not worth
| negotiating with hostile governments.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That's not exactly what happened. Facebook stopped serving
| Australian news stories and the Australian news industry
| immediately surrendered to Meta's terms.
| ahahahahah wrote:
| If you were meta and wanted to go to that bargaining table,
| would you want to have a good understanding of the value that
| these links are providing you and your users? Would you maybe
| try to get that understanding by running a small test in the
| wild where you disabled these links for some users?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| How can you negotiate once the law was on the books? I assume
| that negotiations were attempting before the law was passed.
| monsieurgaufre wrote:
| Disclaimer: Am Canadian.
|
| The way i see it, it's a clear case of "we tried nothing and
| we're out of ideas" on BOTH sides. The canadian medias are boring
| and are mostly opinions and a few Reuters/AFP articles. On the
| other hand, GOOG and Meta are not even acknowledging that they're
| trying to bully nations around while providing a slowly worse
| service as time goes by and profiteering from work they acquire
| for free. I do understand that people weren't forced to use this
| service in the past and can (with some level of difficulties)
| remove their content.
|
| It's not as clear an issue some would like it to be. I know that
| I will remove myself of both these services in the future as they
| are hostile (and really, i should move to my own domain for lots
| of reasons).
| jupp0r wrote:
| I don't see the problem. News outlets can now negotiate
| individually with Google if they still want the free traffic.
| Google will be paying $0 to them. Other outlets who don't want
| the free traffic from Google can choose to not receive it, as
| they can right now via robots.txt.
| monsieurgaufre wrote:
| Traffic is generated by the content which is not free (most
| of the time) to produce. Google without content is what
| except an empty library?
|
| I'm not sure why people here are defending GOOG so much.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Google is stopping to show results for news outlets, so
| everything is fine, right? What else do you criticize them
| for?
| tredre3 wrote:
| As you say, Google without content is an empty library. But
| it works in the other direction too. News websites without
| Google/Social Media are ghost towns. Few people go to them
| directly.
| Arnavion wrote:
| News websites worked fine before Google. People did go to
| them directly.
| tradewinds wrote:
| News outlets have to compete within Google's search
| results. Google is, at least currently, the de facto
| search engine and their competition over providing _all_
| results is minimal. So Google is benefitting from the
| overall relationship far more than the outlets are. Not
| saying Google owes them, but there is a clear difference
| in competition between the two sides.
| rektide wrote:
| It depends on whether you consider a headline and part of a
| sentance the content or not, I I guess.
|
| It sure doesn't seem to me like creating a link & giving
| people an extremely concise blurb that hopefully entices
| them to follow it is the content. As an individual I expect
| to be able to cite things in the world and to tell people
| how they can read it too. Legislating that basic right away
| feels like _madness_.
| throwawaycad11 wrote:
| Canadian here as well.
|
| Your assumption that traffic is generated by content
| (alone) is incorrect. Google is certainly profiting, but
| the news publisher will struggle to find readers without
| Google. It's a symbiotic relationship, but Google is doing
| the REAL work. If you don't believe that, build your own
| website and try to get people to read your content. Believe
| me, content doesn't matter as much as reach.
|
| If you want to support Canadian news outlets, then go to
| their websites directly. Let's see them stand on their own
| without Google, and see who provides the most value.
|
| This law will kill Canadian news outlets. No one pays for
| their content when there's a global ecosystem of stuff to
| subscribe to. That's capitalism. Good riddance.
| monsieurgaufre wrote:
| I already go directly to the websites. Have always done
| that.
|
| I subscribe for a specialized publication that offers
| free articles because i find the publication useful.
|
| I might be dumb but i can't understand how content
| matters less than reach. Without content, reach is
| useless. (and without reach, content is mostly useless as
| well..)
|
| My take is that both are things of the past and using
| legal ways to fight for relevancy, each for different
| reasons. I don't have a horse in this race.
| wand3r wrote:
| Speaking for myself, on the merits, Google's position makes
| more sense. On an emotional level, I dislike media news
| companies companies more than I dislike Google...which is a
| lot.
| monsieurgaufre wrote:
| We share a similar dislike for media news companies.. and
| Google. Like i said, i find the media companies boring
| and they abdicated a while ago being the "fourth" power.
| I might also not understand all the consequences of the
| bill as well.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Canadian citizens are completely free to type a url into a bar
| and visit a newspaper
| bluenose69 wrote:
| I actually forgot about google-news. It used to be my landing
| page, long ago. Now my landing page is an actual (online)
| newspaper. I like the fact that it is well-organized, with
| curated content by professional reporters. I pay a little for
| this, but find it to be good value.
|
| I won't miss google news. And I never saw any real value in
| facebook.
|
| So, my response to this, as a Canadian, is "who cares, eh?"
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| I mean I'd assume you care. Either they are going to jack the
| price way up for you or the quality will plummet. They don't
| have a plan to just go without all the revenue they get from
| Google.
| ortusdux wrote:
| They went to great lengths to no mention Meta.
|
| _Bill C-18 changes the rules for linking by requiring two
| companies, including Google, to pay Canadian news publishers
| simply for linking to their sites._
| quitit wrote:
| Although I disagree with this kind of law:
|
| Was it just linking? Or was it providing a useful summary that
| essentially renders no need to click the provided link? + the
| link
|
| Otherwise I can see why Google and Meta got the law, while
| Reddit, Apple news and others don't.
| tomComb wrote:
| It's just linking
| adjav wrote:
| Reddit and Apple News _will_ have the law applied to them as
| well, since the law doesn 't include a list of sites
| affected, just the criteria under which affected sites fall.
| quitit wrote:
| So when google said 2 companies it was also as disingenuous
| as when they said "only linking"
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I doubt that's _just_ "don't mention a competitor" (though that
| was likely a factor too). Saying "two" is an important point to
| emphasize: if this was a national law written to target just
| two companies, saying so makes the sentiment clear. And on top
| of that, I have the impression that Meta/Facebook has much
| lower public approval than Google.
| kwar13 wrote:
| Canada is a tight oligopoly and they don't like when you can read
| anything other than they want you too.
| whywhywhydude wrote:
| Going a step further, I think google should stop crawling
| websites that are paywalled. When I search for something, I want
| to see results that I can click on. Not some snippets from NYT,
| WSJ, Bloomberg and others which are heavily paywalled.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| When I search for something I want the best results for the
| query, and sometimes those are behind a paywall.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| At a certain point, if you want a subscription service, why
| wouldn't you just do something like suscribe to Bloomberg
| News, then get all your news by going directly to their site
| rather than going through a search engine or aggregator. If
| you're looking at an aggregator, inherently you want to see
| many possible sources, including ones you may only read once
| a year. Nobody is going to subscribe to hundreds of separate
| sources individually just to read them once in a blue moon.
|
| Ironically, the predatory and terrible academic journal
| industry is probably the only thing out there right now that
| comes close to getting this right. Rather than expecting
| anyone to subscribe to each journal individually, they give a
| bulk subscription to an entire publishing service that then
| grants access to many journals.
|
| If someone out there offered a $20 a month service that
| granted access to Bloomberg, NY Times, Wall Street Journal,
| Economist, WaPost, Financial Times, all in one, I'd gladly
| buy that. But there is no way in hell I'm subscribing to all
| of those separately. Even if the aggregate price was cheaper,
| I wouldn't want to do that.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| 1. There is much paywalled information online that is not
| in the form of a subscription, but instead one-time fees.
|
| 2. Just because you paid at the paywall, doesn't mean you
| have to subscribe for life. You can pay to get the
| information you need and then instantly cancel any
| subscription.
|
| > If someone out there offered a $20 a month service that
| granted access to Bloomberg, NY Times, Wall Street Journal,
| Economist, WaPost, Financial Times, all in one, I'd gladly
| buy that.
|
| PressReader is pretty much this, although the price is $30
| and not $20.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| If I'm not willing to pay for a paywall then the "best"
| content is not behind a paywall, because I won't read it.
|
| My definition of "best" includes my ability to actually read
| the content under my terms.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If I ask you what is the best restaurant in town, will you
| answer that it's your mommas house because there you always
| eat for free?
|
| Cost has nothing to do with determining the quality of a
| search result, and search engines shouldn't discriminate
| against paywalled content. But I think it's a good idea to
| let users like you check a box to hide paywalled results.
| chongli wrote:
| There are millions of websites out there that are free
| for anyone to read, including this one! Restaurants that
| serve free meals are not the norm, so this analogy
| doesn't make a lot of sense. If every website was
| paywalled and required a subscription, like cable TV
| channels, then you might have a point.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| People use search engines professionally and not only for
| entertainment. There is an icebergs worth of important
| and valuable information online behind paywalls, not only
| articles or news. Information workers use a search engine
| to find the information they need, pay the cost if it's
| paywalled, and then cancel any subscription after getting
| what they needed.
|
| Long gone are the days of "surfing the web", when most of
| us spent our time online just randomly browsing around.
| chongli wrote:
| I don't see why there couldn't also be a professional
| search engine. Academics have Google Scholar which is an
| amazing resource for them. A search engine that brought
| up high quality resources for professionals would seem to
| be pretty useful. It could potentially even have a single
| subscription to unlock all of the sites in a network,
| rather than individual paywalls at every site.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Checkbox, unchecked by default:
|
| [ ] I want to see results from sites I'd have to pay to
| access
| kccqzy wrote:
| The obvious problem to this armchair expert "solution" is
| that Google doesn't know what I am already paying. I pay
| NYT for a subscription, but Google doesn't know that. For
| obvious privacy reasons users don't want to tell Google
| what sites they already have subscriptions with. And I
| don't even log in to Google to do a search so there's no
| place to store that information even if I actively wanted
| to provide that to Google.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I wasn't presenting it as a perfect solution. I was
| observing that many people _don 't_ want to see paywalled
| results, some may want to see _all_ of them because they
| may choose to pay, some may want to see them because they
| plan to use a paywall bypass, and some as you pointed out
| may want to see the subset they already pay for but not
| others. As a first pass, a binary approach seems better
| than nothing, and is simpler to provide than a more
| complex user-subscription-specific solution.
| pipo234 wrote:
| I'd pay a little if we could get rid of the pop ups and
| cookie banners, advertisements and click bait content. But
| after 30 years we're still missing the infrastructure for
| micro payments.
|
| For news sites and netflix we now have subscriptions shielded
| by paywals, which really is incompatible with hyperlinked
| sites or search engines. Even if you subscribed to 1000
| services, the experience would probably be horrible. The
| internet was designed to be free, but evidently that's not a
| good business model if you want to make a living.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > But after 30 years we're still missing the infrastructure
| for micro payments.
|
| Sad but true. The closest we have to a solution right now
| is PressReader, which is just too expensive in my opinion
| at $30 per month.
| matbilodeau wrote:
| At least the "archive" workaround still works
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's piracy, though. I'm sure plenty of paywalled outlets
| would be happy to see it gone.
| jupp0r wrote:
| It's not piracy, they explicitly allow this.
| renewiltord wrote:
| You can easily write this as a Chrome extension if you so
| desire.
| chroma wrote:
| Google isn't circumventing paywalls. Most paywalled sites
| whitelist search engines so that their content gets crawled and
| more people visit them.
| kccqzy wrote:
| The open web has deteriorated to such an extent that either
| information is paywalled or free but has commercial motivations
| behind it (affiliate links, sponsorships). It turns out there's
| little free, non-commercial, high quality content on the web.
| chongli wrote:
| _It turns out there 's little free, non-commercial, high
| quality content on the web._
|
| I disagree. I think there's a lot of it out there, in the
| form of blogs and small forums. It's just really hard to
| find, like mining for gold in the Super Pit [1]. You need to
| sift through mountains of rubble to find tiny amounts of
| gold.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Pit_gold_mine
| pipo234 wrote:
| True. There is some great content (blogs, OS software, books,
| p2p networks, public libraries, academia, government), but by
| and large that wasn't created with monetary incentives.
|
| Could there be a way to sustainably make enough money from
| visitors without making it all suck?
| kccqzy wrote:
| I think there really needs to be a micro-transaction
| mechanism on the web, but unfortunately it was needed ten
| years ago and there still isn't one.
| golem14 wrote:
| Yes but the crypto folks didn't do that, they were busy
| chasing nfts.
| chroma wrote:
| There have been a lot of ridiculous things in
| cryptocurrency land, but what's wrong with Basic
| Attention Token? It has been around for six years and
| seems to solve the problem of paying content creators via
| microtransactions. The only wrinkle is that finance laws
| force everyone to verify their identity with a
| government-issued ID before transacting BAT.[1] This is a
| problem for all microtransactions, not just
| cryptocurrency.
|
| 1. https://support.brave.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/360032158891-Wha...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > turns out there's little free, non-commercial, high quality
| content on the web.
|
| Well, sure. Who pays for it?
| kccqzy wrote:
| No one. That's why I commented to make the point that
| Google should not refuse to crawl commercial content.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Between legacy news organizations complaining about links and the
| censorship of news coming from blacklisted areas of the world,
| what will social media and news aggregators be left with?
|
| Also, I have to believe that some of these outlets will go under
| without social media traffic. You can get Canadian wire service
| content from any US website that decides to publish it.
| [deleted]
| bdw5204 wrote:
| The solution to this problem is for Google, Facebook and other
| web sites that link to news to limit links to web sites that
| agree that the free traffic they're receiving from extremely
| popular web sites is sufficient compensation for linking to them.
| In other words, block links to any web site that feels entitled
| to be paid for being linked to.
|
| There are plenty of web sites that will be happy to take the free
| traffic and it isn't like it matters to Facebook's bottom line if
| their mostly elderly users are arguing over some article from Fox
| News (which supports the journalism cartel bill in the US) or
| some article from Breitbart (which opposes the journalism cartel
| bill). I imagine it won't take long for Murdoch to change his
| mind and stop trying to shake down tech companies for the
| privilege of sending his media outlets free traffic.
| jsnell wrote:
| They cannot do that. The law forbids discriminating against any
| Canadian news business. If they link to news sites that don't
| demand payment but won't link to ones that want to be paid,
| it'd be viewed as retaliation.
|
| The only options are to accept the rigged negotiation process
| and pay all news business vastly inflated rates, or to link to
| none of them.
| Zetice wrote:
| Maybe, or maybe the law will be scoped narrowly via the
| bench.
| andromeduck wrote:
| Isn't price discrimination the whole point of having a
| private sector?
| akira2501 wrote:
| > to limit links to web sites that agree that the free traffic
| they're receiving from extremely popular web sites is
| sufficient compensation for linking to them.
|
| The problem with this is there's no direct relationship between
| the two. So Google and Facebook can arbitrarily decide to
| "punish" a paper by demoting or flat out filtering their
| content.
|
| These platforms aren't doing this out of the goodness of their
| hearts. They put this content on their platform because it made
| their platform more popular and provided value for them, and
| now that they've monopolized user attention, they're directly
| weaponizing it.
|
| > There are plenty of web sites that will be happy to take the
| free traffic
|
| So.. it's a race to the bottom. News sources are no longer
| selected based upon quality or user demand, but on their
| willingness to be used by billion dollar tech giants. I'm sure
| the quality of the reporting will be identical.
| chongli wrote:
| The news sites in Canada are owned by billion dollar media
| and telecom companies. Nowhere near the scale of Google &
| Facebook, but among the largest companies in Canada. Speaking
| as a Canadian, this is very much a protectionist law trying
| to prop up an old media business the public no longer has
| much interest in.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Right.. so the post I'm replying to suggests that Google
| and Facebook should just drop these larger publishers and
| instead abuse smaller publishers who "would just be happy
| for the exposure."
|
| So.. your argument is, because you don't like some media
| companies and are willing to speak on behalf of all
| Canadians, the market really isn't worth protecting at all?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Most Canadian media is owned by asset-stripping American private
| equity firms, just like American newspapers. They just want to
| get paid, and have figured out a particular way that Canadian,
| Australian, German, and Californian legislators can be duped into
| it.
| objektif wrote:
| Yeah Google never ever does this. They do not want money they
| just work for kisses and they are not evil at all.
| tensor wrote:
| Every company tries to earn money, that's not a problem. The
| problem is when a company tries to legislate themselves to be
| owed money, or eliminate competition via various means, that
| it becomes a problem.
|
| Companies should earn my by building good competitive
| products.
| gwright wrote:
| One reason to advocate for a government with minimal power
| is to avoid the temptation to legislate preferential
| treatment. If the government has been granted more
| expansive powers, it is inevitable, and arguably rational,
| for those affected to try to steer regulations in a way
| that benefits them.
| gostsamo wrote:
| There is no vacuum in power. If it is not the government
| enforcing one mechanism, it will be another player
| leveraging another. The fantasy that if it wasn't for the
| government, everything would be sunshine and roses should
| be brought behind the barn and finished for good.
| jxf wrote:
| The issue isn't companies doing it as much as it is state-
| enforced regulatory capture that prefers specific companies
| over others.
| mugivarra69 wrote:
| more like they shmoozed them to do it vs being duped.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I don't see how this gets them paid, more like wiped from the
| internet entirely?
| munk-a wrote:
| A fair number of people search on google specifically to get
| news on recent events - Google currently captures a decent
| portion of those users and keeps them from ever actually
| visiting the original sources. Users _want_ that information
| though, so unless Google can tell me why the building two
| blocks down is currently throwing out a huge plume of smoke I
| 'll eventually land on the actual content creator to read the
| information.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Well, their fantasy wishlist is that Google and Meta are
| forced to index their junk, rank it at the top, feature it
| prominently, present it to any and all visitors, and pay for
| both the cost and the privilege.
| [deleted]
| version_five wrote:
| Globe and Mail is apparently owned by a Thompson (one of
| Canada's wealthiest families), and the CBC is run by the
| government. CTV is owned by Bell Media, part of Canada's
| telecom oligopoly. Global news is owned by Corus, a Canadian
| company. National Post is owned by Postmedia which is a
| publicly traded Canadian company, with majority ownership from
| an American PE firm. Is that what you mean?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Chatham owns dozens of Canadian newspapers via Postmedia, and
| dozens of U.S. newspapers via McClatchy. Their operating mode
| is the same in both countries: fire all the writers and
| editors.
|
| I thought that Blackstone owned Globe and Mail but it seems
| they sold it in 2021 so your info is the current info.
| NamTaf wrote:
| To be fair, a significant number of Australian legislators are
| practically owned by a particular AU/US media firm, so it's no
| great surprise that they can be duped/ordered into trying this.
| philjohn wrote:
| Duped would be a ... charitable ... label.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Google would be perfectly free to hire a human being to write
| headlines in their own words and then link to articles in the
| press discussing that story.
|
| "Man Bites Dog" More discussion: CBC, National Post, Toronto
| Star, CTV, etc.
|
| However, Google doesn't want to pay human beings, they want to
| "borrow' other people's content to make a profit.
|
| People seem to conflate "indexing your story on our search
| engine" with "borrowing your headline and photo for our own
| news site".
| warning26 wrote:
| Are you proposing that the entire concept of a non-human-
| curated search engine should be illegal? Seems kind of silly.
| munk-a wrote:
| It honestly doesn't seem outrageous to me. Just because
| this is the direction society has decided to go in doesn't
| make the alternative absurd. If you'll recall in the early
| age of the internet hand-curated link boards were actually
| extremely popular i.e. "I'm Billy and here's a bunch of
| really interesting information about sewage treatment" and
| then just a spam of links.
|
| I think there's a very reasonable argument to be made that
| Google should simply link to the information and not
| extract and re-present the information that would be much
| fairer in enabling websites to support themselves. If the
| content you're creating is stolen and reposted elsewhere
| you're losing that portion of revenue and Google's news
| strategy has driven click throughs to the actual articles
| way down which reduces ad revenue and discourages
| subscription.
|
| As a general rule, not being willing to entertain a state
| other than the way things currently are, is a bad habit to
| get into.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Did you miss the part where I said people are conflating
| indexing a story on a search engine with "borrowing" other
| people's content for your own news site?
|
| The first can be fixed with a simple robots.txt file.
|
| How do you tell Google they may index your story, but may
| not "borrow" your headline or photos for their own news
| site?
| jsnell wrote:
| That's not what the law says at all. You've just made it up.
| The actual definition for what's in scope is:
|
| > (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.
|
| See point b. Simply facilitating access, for example by
| linking or having the article in a search index, would be
| enough.
|
| (Also, really smooth move deleting your original toplevel
| comment and just moving it to a reply under the highest voted
| thread. Not even any pretense that you're replying to
| jeffbee, but just cynically trying to get the maximum
| visibility for your _entirely made up_ claim.)
| jefftk wrote:
| I don't think that would exempt them under the law? Have a
| look: https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/ro
| yal-a...
| GeekyBear wrote:
| There's a ton of international case law saying that a mere
| link is not illegal.
| jefftk wrote:
| We're talking about a new Canadian law. How would case
| law be relevant?
|
| (Laws can make previously legal things illegal.)
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Laws can also be challenged in court.
| phailhaus wrote:
| So these news orgs are getting free advertising, and they want to
| be paid on top?
| tradewinds wrote:
| It's not really advertising when the user is specifically
| searching for news content. That's like saying the halibut
| fisherman is getting free advertising when you go to a
| restaurant and ask to see the menu.
| [deleted]
| phailhaus wrote:
| That's not a good analogy because news sites don't sell their
| articles to Google, they get paid when users visit their
| sites. Google is promoting their websites and actively
| directing users to them, for free. Do I need to pay NYT when
| I recommend an article to my friends?
| tradewinds wrote:
| It's certainly not the greatest analogy - it's just meant
| to claim that you can't advertise something that someone's
| already looking for, including when you only know they're
| looking for it because they came to you asking for it.
| Google isn't doing any promotion, they're simply forwarding
| on the most accurate indexed page according to your query.
| Promotion and advertising would be generating demand that
| otherwise wouldn't exist, which is not the case in this
| scenario. You can argue Google is promoting _one page_ over
| another, but for every page that 's at the top, there's a
| page that's at the bottom, and so it's not generally
| promoting the collective news media in any way.
| isykt wrote:
| Facebook and Google cache their content and display it on their
| own websites, negating the reason for clicking through to the
| website where the ad dollars would be generated for the content
| creators.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| That isn't the case for google news. There is just the
| article title, and a link to the publisher's website. If you
| mean on google search: caching can easily be disabled by
| using noarchive.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| The law also include "indexing" and "ranking" under the
| definition of "makes available". So even crawling the sites
| requires an agreement now.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Nothing of value was lost, as peoples feelings about facts is not
| news.
|
| Maybe add a disclaimer to all Sinclair Broadcast Group content
| too.
|
| Thank you, I'll see myself out =)
| anderspitman wrote:
| The web may never be better than it was about 5 years ago, and
| that makes me very sad
| cypress66 wrote:
| Peak web was probably around 2010
| randcraw wrote:
| Make that 25 years ago, before the FAANGs came out.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Google came out in 1998, 25 years ago.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I'm not going back to using Alta Vista, no thanks.
| pavon wrote:
| I wouldn't consider 1998 a peak. There was a local maxima in
| 1993, before the September that never ended. Then the rest of
| the 90's were exciting because of the rapid growth, but the
| actual state of things at the time was pretty messy. I'd
| personally put the next peak around 2007. Broadband was
| widespread but smartphones were not. Google existed but
| hadn't yet purchased DoubleClick. IE6, while not quite dead,
| no longer had a stranglehold on web development. Independent
| blogs and forums and RSS were still big, and hadn't yet
| consolidated with social media.
| jewelry wrote:
| still like the new internet to be honest.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| N'ah, I remember that era. Search engines were basically
| worthless. Google was the first one to get the formula right.
|
| Before Google, search engines were basically just doing
| keyword matching and so you'd have the issue that every
| search for a programming topic landed you on expertsexchange.
| Google was the first to start leveraging click-away signal,
| and they were able to successfully down-sample keyword-
| farmers like that one and their ilk.
| chongli wrote:
| Search engines were bad in the 90's, but the web was much
| smaller and community-driven. Most of the websites people
| visited were created by individuals and people linked to
| each other to form web rings.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I remember.
|
| It was the worst. Crawling a ring all day to find useful
| content was incredibly inconvenient.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| Totally disagree, LLMs are so much better than search engines
| ever were.
| [deleted]
| okdood64 wrote:
| LLMs are a complement to search, not a replacement.
| bboygravity wrote:
| That kind of proves the point: the internet is more than LLMs
| and search engines.
| glonq wrote:
| Yeah, it's also cryptocurrency and NFT's /s
| opportune wrote:
| To me the inflection point was the 2016 US election (which also
| coincided with Brexit).
|
| Independent of the elections I think social media websites had
| by this time "perfected" engagement-driven algorithmic feeds
| and online news had started getting good at optimizing their
| content for those purposes. And around this time, anecdotally,
| is when I think a lot of older people started taking the
| internet more seriously, as real-world services like
| Airbnb/Uber/Amazon prime (to be fair, started earlier) became
| popular and middle aged people started using social media more.
| This, in combination with the polarizing content of the
| elections, made the internet into the hostile and echo-chambery
| place it is today. And it also attracted a lot more Government
| attention leading to things like GDPR (good in theory, bad
| inasmuch as it led to the current cookie banner bullshit) and
| link taxes.
| ars wrote:
| I wonder how old you are to think anything changed in 2016.
|
| To me 2016 was just a continuation of what started before,
| there was no inflection then.
|
| The 2000's are when things started to change, not 2016. And
| Obama's first election was when the internet started to be
| taken seriously by politicians (2008). It's basically what
| gave him the win.
| Duwensatzaj wrote:
| Cell phones.
|
| The shift away from desktop and laptops to cell phones is a
| major factor as well.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > To me the inflection point was the 2016 US election (which
| also coincided with Brexit.)
|
| And with the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict.
| metabagel wrote:
| Do you mean the Russian invasion of sovereign Ukraine
| territory?
| pessimizer wrote:
| I mean what the hell I said.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Russian annexed Crimea in 2014. Or are we talking about
| "2016-ish"?
| pessimizer wrote:
| When do you think the 2016 election was held, and when
| did the participants in it campaign?
| opportune wrote:
| Yeah I wanted to mention Euromaidan and Russia increasing
| its general hostile activity on the internet (overstated in
| the wake of the 2016 election? Yes. Literally something
| that verifiably happened with eg various Facebook groups
| for divisive political issues run by Russians acting on
| behalf of their government? Also yes). I do think
| Euromaidan was partially the root cause as it woke Russia
| up to the possibility that the internet could be used to
| destabilize its various client states as in Euromaidan or
| its rivals like the US.
|
| But a lot of people will debate the actual overall
| influence of that vs it being a scapegoat used to
| delegitimize the right wing surge at the time; undeniably
| even if the right wing surge/political divisiveness trend
| was aided by Russian activity, it was still real people who
| engaged with it online and voted for the right wing causes.
| ruuda wrote:
| I think the cookiewalls are older than 5 years, no?
| gameman144 wrote:
| My read on this is that news organizations are upset that
| Google/Facebook are taking profits by providing cached content
| that makes people not want to actually click their links.
|
| If this is the primary concern, though, then wouldn't it make
| more sense to draft a law regulating content caching, rather than
| the pay-per-click approach? It seems like a law that said "Sites
| that serve any content which wasn't part of a 'you can cache me'
| section need to pay for that content" would address the concerns
| of both parties here.
|
| This would solve the alleged issue that news organizations are
| bringing up, while also making it totally clear what the
| consequences are. If you don't want Google to be able to use your
| content within search results that's totally fine, but you can't
| then _also_ be mad that they don 't _surface_ your content in
| search results.
|
| Seems like letting news site determine what content Google can
| cache for its results, and then letting Google determine ranking
| based _only_ on that data would be a completely reasonable
| compromise. As it stands now, though, Google is directly
| incentivized to just never surface these websites, which hurts
| everyone involved.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > It seems like a law that said "Sites that serve any content
| which wasn't part of a 'you can cache me' section need to pay
| for that content" would address the concerns of both parties
| here.
|
| Because you can't have your cake and eat it too. If Google
| can't cache the whole article, they can't provide search for
| the article. That's why publishers are serving the full,
| unpaywalled article to Google: how do you index an article you
| can't cache? The publishers--today--can simply serve the
| paywalled versions to Google.
|
| The publishers want Google to keep a copy of their data to
| offer search services to Google's customers, but then want
| Google to pay for the privilege.
| josefx wrote:
| > If Google can't cache the whole article, they can't provide
| search for the article.
|
| Google can index the articles independently of serving their
| entirety to visitors. Might as well claim that wikipedia
| can't have articles covering movies without acting as the
| worlds largest piracy site.
|
| > but then want Google to pay for the privilege.
|
| On the other hand Google wants all the articles for free, but
| doesn't have any motivation to share the users or ad
| impressions they attract.
| jsnell wrote:
| > On the other hand Google wants all the articles for free,
| but doesn't have any motivation to share the users or ad
| impressions they attract.
|
| AFAIK Google doesn't show ads on Google News, they don't
| show ads on news queries, and they send the users to the
| news site via the link. There is no revenue to share, and
| the users are being shared to the extent that is possible
| given they're humans who have free will and will decide
| themselves which articles to read and which not.
|
| > Google can index the articles independently of serving
| their entirety to visitors
|
| I don't know what you're referring to here. AMP? The news
| site has to do _extra work_ to enable AMP, and the entire
| point of AMP was always the cache. (But the revenue from
| the ads on the AMP page goes to the publication, not to
| Google). The search cache? The news site can opt out. The
| snippet? They can opt out. Images? I 'm pretty sure they
| actually have to opt in for that, by emitting specific meta
| tags. The title? That is mandatory, but for the simple
| reason that you have to give the searcher _something_ or
| they won 't click through.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| it seems like the canadian government wants to use its news as
| propaganda in small local regions without the rest of the world
| being able to figure it out via searching for it.
|
| this might also be a leeway for charging the same cost to social
| media sites. might this be an insidious form of censorship?
|
| given the canadian government's strong ties to its government-
| funded media, this sounds like it could be concerning.
| lordleft wrote:
| Surely news publications benefit more from Google/Facebook
| providing links to their content? It's a mutually beneficial
| relationship. I'm a bit puzzled as to why this was pushed, I'd
| love some context for this.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| Dutch newspapers are back to subscriptions. They're doing
| better than ever. If your product is good people will pay for
| it. And there will always be a class of people who need
| journalism. Politicians, government officials, bankers.
|
| In hindsight the whole internet bubble looks strange. Nobody
| cared about monetisation only users!
| LegitShady wrote:
| On one hand, yes, it drives traffic. On the other hand, no,
| because lots of people just read headlines and maybe they can
| do that without clicking.
|
| But realistically this the current Canadian government trying
| to shake down google and facebook for money to transfer to the
| ailing news industry in canada. The merits of the position for
| a link tax are pretty bad, and don't really matter to the issue
| at hand. The government already gives hundreds of millions in
| grants and tax incentives to make the current journalism
| landscape in canada possible, without even looking at CBC the
| national broadcaster.
|
| This is just a shake down job. They see google and facebook
| have a ton of money and the government thought they could
| threaten them into parting with some of it. The government
| doesn't care about the implications of a link tax on the web,
| or mutually beneficial relationships, or any of that. It's a
| shakedown.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > On one hand, yes, it drives traffic. On the other hand, no,
| because lots of people just read headlines and maybe they can
| do that without clicking.
|
| Then the solution is to modify your `robots.txt` file to
| prohibit these snippets.
|
| Of course, no-one actually does this because they're well
| aware that the headlines are what drives attention and
| clicks.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> because lots of people just read headlines and maybe they
| can do that without clicking.
|
| I agree; I'd argue you don't have much of a valuable service
| if all users need is a headline. Print media needs to give up
| the traditional shallow breadth fueled by advertising and go
| niche, and go deep. Cable TV should learn this lesson as
| well.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I think traditional media needs to go deep and needs to go
| local.
|
| If I open up the local paper and see associated press
| articles that's not the right content for them. I can see
| that anywhere, probably before the newspaper is delivered.
|
| It needs to be local journalism about things that matter.
| Actual local issues, hard journalism about local politics
| and city hall and whatnot. That's what's missing from the
| big sites and when it is there its sort of after the fact.
| They need to be investigating not just repeating press
| releases.
|
| I don't know about cable tv - its essentially a syndication
| not a local thing. I think the internet will kill it off.
| Now that the lines to the home aren't a moat around being a
| cable company every video website is the new cable company.
| They need to have content you can't get on the internet and
| I don't think that's going to happen. As old people die who
| couldn't adapt to internet tv, so cable will die.
| chongli wrote:
| Like the way a starving person's body consumes their own
| muscles, the local newspapers in Canada have laid off all
| their journalists. As a kid, I used to deliver the local
| newspaper to make a bit of money. I remember those
| Saturdays when the paper was like an inch thick and
| weighed a ton.
|
| Nowadays, it looks more like a newsletter than a
| newspaper. My late roommate subscribed to the local paper
| up until the end of his life. At that point, he was
| really only interested in the crosswords and sudokus.
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| Just Canadian politicians being Canadian politicians...that's
| really all the context you need.
| donmcronald wrote:
| Canadian media has always enjoyed some protectionism from the
| government. It's old, entrenched players wanting, and getting,
| something for nothing. The people that control our media and
| telecommunications in Canada could fit in a compact car. This
| doesn't have anything to do with the average person. It's all
| business and lobbying.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| > The people that control our media and telecommunications in
| Canada could fit in a compact car.
|
| Spot on. In Canada it's about the handful of the oligarchs
| who have control over almost everything. It has nothing to do
| with the average plebs
| dmix wrote:
| And now CBC won't be on Google, Twitter (over gov funding
| label), or Facebook(?)
|
| I won't be surprised if we (the taxpayers) end up having to
| support them even more. Who knows maybe they'll have to
| pass more tax subsidies for the other major players too.
| musha68k wrote:
| Look at the constant internet censorship pressures in the UK.
|
| The apple doesn't fall far from the tree unfortunately.
| glonq wrote:
| > Surely news publications benefit more from Google/Facebook
| providing links to their content?
|
| To paraphrase a great Canadian -- _Yes they probably do. And
| don 't call me Shirley._
| Alupis wrote:
| > Surely news publications benefit more from Google/Facebook
| providing links to their content?
|
| Probably depends.
|
| In some cases, Google scrapes the interesting bits and people
| never click through to the host site. In other cases, Google
| has provided a way for people to circumvent paywalls.
|
| Some of this was a strategy by news organizations - but it
| seems it might not work long term. I, for one, click through to
| far fewer Wikipedia articles now that Google includes the
| synopsis embedded in search results...
| duringmath wrote:
| Liberal politicians will pass any law seen as harmful to US
| tech companies consequences be damned.
|
| It's like California but on a national level, still not quite
| as insane thankfully.
| jug6ernaut wrote:
| Which state are these big US tech companies based in again? I
| may have missed it.
| pyrale wrote:
| They wanted to move to Texas, but unfortunately Texas hates
| electricity.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Delaware?
| jabits wrote:
| California gave birth to these companies, and has been, and
| remains one of our nations's primary economic engines,
| despite the shenanigans of a few attention-seeking public
| figures...
| duringmath wrote:
| I agree
| hotsauceror wrote:
| This same thing happened in Spain, several years ago. The
| government passed a law charging google for linking to Spanish
| media sites. Google said "gracias, pero no" and stopped linking
| to those sites. The publishers immediately got upset about the
| loss of traffic to their websites.
|
| Mike Masnick's schadenfreude alone could have powered a small
| nation for a week.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Surely news publications benefit more from Google /Facebook
| providing links to their content?_
|
| Actually, no.
|
| It might be a symbiotic relationship for a small-time blog, but
| for a major news organization, it isn't. The Toronto Star and
| Global TV don't need freepub from Google.
|
| One example among many: Most people see the headline - the
| headline written by a paid headline writer based on an article
| from a paid journalist on a staff of other professionals with
| families to feed - and then move on.
|
| Very often a headline is all someone needs or wants. That has
| value. Without anyone clicking through to the web site, Google
| is getting the value from the headline, and contributing
| nothing to the web site in return.
|
| It's like saying that when Google steals content from web sites
| and presents it as an answer card in search results that the
| web site somehow gets something out of it. That's completely
| false. The only one getting anything out of it is Google.
| petercooper wrote:
| A headline's job is to provide enough information to
| encourage someone to read more if the story is relevant to
| them. If someone doesn't want to read on, no value is lost.
|
| News sites _could_ get rid of their <title> and OpenGraph
| tags, and people could share the raw story URLs without any
| context. No-one would click through as they'd have no idea
| where the URL went, though, so news sites provide these
| titles willingly and have full control over how they write
| them or what level of detail they share.
|
| The idea that headlines like "Queen Elizabeth has died",
| "Madonna discharged from hospital", or "Interest rates go up"
| replace the need for the rest of the story for any
| substantial part of the target audience seems far fetched to
| me, and if the meat of the story is given away in the
| og:description.. they wrote it!
| dmayle wrote:
| This is the most ridiculous take on this that I've ever seen.
| Next you're going to say that newspaper stands need to pay a
| charge to the newspaper each time someone walks by their
| stall (or buys gum, for example). They have seen the
| headline, and then moved on.
|
| Very often a headline is all someone needs or wants. That has
| value. Without anyone buying that newspaper, the newspaper
| stand has got value from the headline, and contributed
| nothing to the newspaper publisher in return.
|
| The reality is that headlines are advertisements for
| articles. That's why there are headline writers in the first
| place. Make a better advertisement, get more sales.
|
| In the case of Google, publishing links with headlines means
| publishing free ads for that website. The website most
| certainly benefits from that relationship, if they didn't,
| they would just use robots.txt to block Google indexing their
| website, which someone has always been free to do.
|
| The real problem is that newspapers would just like to take a
| percentage of Google revenue, because they're a big company.
| JamisonM wrote:
| This newspaper stand argument is really, really bad. The
| headlines of the physical newspaper on the front page are
| for the purposes of advertising the newspaper.. and the
| newspaper stand sells the newspapers - that's a big
| contribution to the newspaper business!
| 6D794163636F756 wrote:
| Yeah, the definition of news content being "news content
| means content -- in any format, including an audio or
| audiovisual format -- that reports on, investigates or
| explains current issues or events of public interest and
| includes such content that an Indigenous news outlet makes
| available by means of Indigenous storytelling. (contenu de
| nouvelles)" seems overly broad but I doubt they intend for
| headlines to be included.
|
| I think the bill will lead to further litigation,
| specifically if a headline counts as reporting or
| explaining. I doubt a headline can investigate.
|
| It does also seem to put a limit on a platform's ability to
| negotiate which is worrying. After 3 rounds of negotiations
| an arbiter can come in and decide what is a fair price and
| companies are not allowed to treat different news
| organizations differently. This seems to have room to abuse
| for me.
| regnard wrote:
| I agree with this take-- and this is probably why Google
| and Meta were the only companies included. What about
| Reddit, Twitter, (and even HN)?
|
| The counterpoint here is that this bill is very
| protectionist in nature and aims to give something to the
| Canadian news & media industry.
| adjav wrote:
| Oh no, it's not just Google and Meta. That's how it's
| being presented, but it's actually whoever the CRTC wants
| to charge. They can and will change the list at any time,
| with no need for oversight.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _The real problem is that newspapers would just like to
| take a percentage of Google revenue, because they 're a big
| company._
|
| If that's the case, let Google do its own reporting and
| write its own headlines. It's not like it doesn't have the
| money. Problem solved.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Then Google would probably get antitrust complaints from
| including their own news but not competitors' news sites.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| That would be a great outcome for Google wouldn't it?
| Just cover national news using paid reporters and capture
| all of the ad revenue.
| pyrale wrote:
| > That would be a great outcome for Google wouldn't it?
| Just cover national news using paid reporters and capture
| all of the ad revenue.
|
| They already capture most of the ad revenue.
|
| And Google is notoriously bad when it comes to paying
| humans to investigate issues, as shown by their absent
| customer service.
| musha68k wrote:
| Do you remember actual newsstands?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Do you remember actual newsstands?_
|
| I do. I remember when the newspaper was 10C/.
|
| The guy working the stand didn't let you stand in front of
| it and read all the headlines in every page of every
| newspaper and magazine for free.
|
| "I'm only reading the headlines" would get you a slap
| upside the head.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Quite the contrary: the news stands would have the front
| page displayed quite prominently precisely so that you
| _could_ read the headlines of the main stories to attract
| the interest of passerbys: https://p.turbosquid.com/ts-
| thumb/0m/ePJxnz/tlmgVado/news_st...
|
| If outlets don't want the headlines scraped and
| displayed, then they're free to modify their `robots.txt`
| file accordingly. But they don't because they're well
| aware that this would reduce, not improve, their bottom
| line.
| [deleted]
| Marsymars wrote:
| Well then, maybe the law should be a headline tax rather than
| a link tax. As currently written, Google/Facebook would be
| free to continue providing headlines that don't link to the
| sources.
| danbtl wrote:
| You might be underestimating the amount of traffic Google
| sends to publishers through Google News. Anecdotally, I get
| Android notifications from CBC, Global, etc. through Google
| News daily and do sometimes click on them.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _You might be underestimating the amount of traffic Google
| sends to publishers through Google News._
|
| I have worked for two major newspaper companies. I might
| know a little bit about this.
| danbtl wrote:
| Could you share the percentage of traffic coming from
| Google News, roughly?
| tenpies wrote:
| Pablo Rodriguez, is that you?
|
| For those unfamiliar, Pablo Rodriguez is the _Minister of
| Canadian Heritage_ under whose auspices all these censorship
| and control schemes are being pushed forward.
|
| Ironically, Pablo Rodriguez is the son of an Argentine
| Peronista (the far-left populism that cripples Argentina to
| this day). The family fled the country when the war broke
| out. Pablo was old enough to see first hands what happens
| when there is no free independent press, and now he's eagerly
| fostering those same conditions onto Canada.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| How much would Google be hurt if it just stopped indexing
| news sites?
| pgrote wrote:
| >Very often a headline is all someone needs or wants. That
| has value. Without anyone clicking through to the web site,
| Google is getting the value from the headline, and
| contributing nothing to the web site in return.
|
| So the solution Google is proposing works out for everyone.
| Canadian news sites can ensure people go to their site for
| headlines and Google can no longer show information for those
| sites. The Canadian news sites should see increased revenue
| in terms of subscriptions and advertisements.
| jsnell wrote:
| > The Toronto Star and Global TV don't need freepub from
| Google.
|
| So have those publications opted out of search and Google
| News? If not, it's pretty clear that they're getting more
| benefit from those links than they're losing to people
| "reading the headline and getting all they needed from it".
|
| I assume these news organizations don't even bother writing
| the article, right? Because your story obviously applies
| equally well to their own site. Users will open the frontpage
| of the site, read the expertly crafted headline, and leave.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Then there surely is a source for that somewhere. Otherwise
| it's just as fair to assume it's not a mutually beneficial
| relationship.
| joegahona wrote:
| The source would be the organic-traffic and Facebook
| analytics for all those news publications. Whatever it is
| now, won't this take it to 0%?
|
| I feel like a similar thing was tried in Europe somewhere a
| few years ago and then quickly ditched, because all the
| publications saw their traffic crater.
|
| Looks like something similar was enacted in Australia, and
| Google/Facbook settled:
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/australia-says-law-
| making...
|
| And an update from Google's blog from 4 hours ago:
| https://blog.google/intl/en-ca/company-news/outreach-
| initiat...
| ingen0s wrote:
| Is Apple News affected by this?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Not a problem. Go to ChatGPT and ask it to tell you the top ten
| Canadian media outlets. You can also ask for the top ten left-
| leaning, right-leaning, and tech/sci/engineering outlets. Then go
| to Wikipedia to get the urls for each. Bookmark all the sites and
| write a little Python scraper to get all the headlines each day.
| Then, say goodbye to Alphabet and Meta.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Why not just use RSS/Atom?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| related: the official post from Google
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36523516
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