[HN Gopher] Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Onli...
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Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
Author : Corvus
Score : 55 points
Date : 2023-11-29 16:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbc.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbc.ca)
| Corvus wrote:
| "The agreement would see Canadian news continue to be shared on
| Google's platforms in return for the company making annual
| payments to news companies in the range of $100 million, a source
| with knowledge of the negotiations told CBC News."
| KingLancelot wrote:
| Countries are now extorting American tech companies, that's
| what's really going on here.
| chongli wrote:
| Yeah it's a shakedown. I don't see them getting any money out
| of Facebook though. I actually think Facebook is a better
| experience for users without news.
| darrylb42 wrote:
| Facebook, all Meta properties no longer allow sharing
| anything considered news in Canada. If you put in a link to
| a news site it will be blocked. At one point they were
| event blocking news satire. People sharing news now will
| drop in an image instead of a link. Much less useful.
| chongli wrote:
| I think news sharing on Facebook mainly leads to outrage
| spirals and toxic engagement. That's why I say the
| platform is better off without it. I'm disappointed that
| people have been able to circumvent the block with
| screenshots though.
| pmontra wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is what you meant but just in case,
| from the article: "Meta [...] ended its talks with the
| government last summer and stopped distributing Canadian
| news on Facebook and Instagram".
| bensecure wrote:
| If you're doing business in a country, naturally you need to
| deal with the regulatory environment of that country. Its
| surprising to see such explicit american chauvinism when
| discussing this issue.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| I'm as much against american hegemony as the next
| frenchman, and I still consider this wave of "we'll make
| google pay for the traffic they send our way" regulations
| to be bullshit.
|
| It's carriage drivers making the automobile industry pay
| them a fine for the crime of making them obsolete.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| I'm just disappointed that it seems the only way our
| government can make money is by pulling it from American
| companies.
| bensecure wrote:
| > It's carriage drivers making the automobile industry
| pay them a fine for the crime of making them obsolete.
|
| That's utter nonsense. If google is sending traffic to a
| site, then naturally they consider that site valuable in
| some way. Nothing about google makes news "obsolete", and
| in fact google is basically just a website for finding
| news articles (and other content). The Canadian
| implementation of this law, unlike the Australian one for
| example, gives google the option of excluding these news
| sites from search results entirely if they consider them
| unnecessary. That google has chosen to negotiate a deal
| instead demonstrates that google recognizes the value
| these sites provide.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Fair, that's on me for reacting to the headline without
| reading the article, and "obsolete" is too strong a word.
|
| I was mostly thinking of the lobbying groups in europe
| which very much didn't want to allow the "exclude from
| search results" opt-out.
| xethos wrote:
| We have a userbase that, in general, prides itself on
| reading the article. Far too many here _still_ don 't
| make it past the headline. Do you think Google is
| actually sending traffic to articles posted by the news
| orgs, or are people more likely scanning headlines and
| confirming their biases? At most (on average) I'd expect
| clicking through and skimming the sub-headline
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Yeah, and some times that regulatory environment is a
| greasy extortionist demanding bribes.
| vivekd wrote:
| Canadian here, many Canadians oppose this law and have a
| negative view of the CTRC. Many did not agree with the
| level of control over online news content that the Canadian
| government sought with this bill.
| graeme wrote:
| I'm Canadian. It's obviously extortion. Unless you take the
| position that linking to someone on the internet _harms_
| them.
|
| In the regular world, people pay for links. Google had to
| ban the practice of paying for links because links are so
| valuable. And people still do it.
|
| It is nonsensical to argue that links are a cost. So, this
| law was an attempt at a shakedown.
|
| And it didn't work very well. Meta walked, and this deal
| with google exempts it from the law if it pays $100
| million. All existing deals with the media were cancelled
| too.
| morbicer wrote:
| Well it's a shitty way to operate but since these companies
| pay close to zero taxes I kinda support it
| ratsmack wrote:
| I'm no fan of Google, but if it was me making the decision I
| would have told them to pack sand. Google is providing them with
| a service, not the other way around.
| Ajay-p wrote:
| Agree completely. What's in it for Google? Will they really
| make that much more money providing news, versus just cutting
| Canada off?
| deskamess wrote:
| They should not have settled. Probably ran the numbers and
| for ad+search revenue and noticed it was worth it for $100m.
| If/Maybe you are making 300m then it's okay to give up that
| 100 to keep 200.
|
| And who gets to distribute the revenue?
| tharmas wrote:
| I'm not taking sides but the issue is Canadian content. Because
| both countries share the same language, but there is a huge
| mismatch in economic might, Canadian content finds it hard to
| compete with American content. Mexico doesn't have the same
| problem largely because of language.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Not sure why the miss match is a problem. If Canadian demand
| for Canadian media is too low to support it, why should that
| be the problem of Google.
| udev wrote:
| What is the service? Indexing and aggregating news? This is
| commodity now.
|
| Do you find this more valuable than the act of actually
| researching, writing, editing, and publishing the articles
| themselves?
| wvenable wrote:
| It's advertising. Google drives traffic to the articles.
|
| If Google stops linking to news articles, media companies
| would be the bigger losers than Google would be. Admittedly
| Google isn't Facebook -- it's value to users comes from
| indexing _everything_. This is probably why they accepted
| this deal.
|
| As a Canadian, I wish that they'd just gone ahead and blocked
| Canadian news.
| chongli wrote:
| There's no way Google would have agreed to pay $100 million
| if they didn't have good reason to believe they'd lose even
| more than that by not having news.
|
| It's purely a cost of doing business thing, which is why I
| think the calculation is different for Meta. On Facebook
| there's just so much content to fill the void that news
| isn't such a big loss.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| > If Google stops linking to news articles, media companies
| would be the bigger losers than Google would be.
|
| Only on the margin. If all countries in the world
| simultaneously imposed this law, and google stopped linking
| all news articles world wide, then Google would be the
| bigger loser than media companies.
|
| It's important to acknowledge the problem: Google extracts
| more monetary value from the news industry ecosystem than
| the the value it creates.
|
| I am not entirely sure if forcing Google to pay that
| difference is the correct solution, or whether helping evil
| media companies in this way is the right thing to do, but
| the problem exists.
| wvenable wrote:
| > If all countries in the world simultaneously imposed
| this law, and google stopped linking all news articles
| world wide, then Google would be the bigger loser than
| media companies.
|
| Large media sites would perhaps benefit from that but in
| general I don't think that's the case. I get almost all
| my news from link aggregate sites like Hackernews and
| Reddit. If I didn't get news links from those sites, I'd
| end up consuming less news. Especially local news.
|
| > It's important to acknowledge the problem: Google
| extracts more monetary value from the news industry
| ecosystem than the the value it creates.
|
| I don't think that's the problem. The problem is that
| news just isn't that valuable anymore. The only reason it
| was as profitable at all was local monopolies on
| distribution. Craigslist did more to kill media
| profitability than Google could ever do. Now you just
| have a thousand media companies all writing an article on
| the same current event and trying to capture a few eye
| balls mostly from being linked to elsewhere.
| ulrashida wrote:
| _Some_ news isn 't valuable anymore. In the world we're
| going towards, wouldn't it be fair to expect that
| reliable/verified news will increase in value? Similarly,
| what is the true value of local news that would otherwise
| go unreported?
|
| It's important to consider what someone would pay for
| news directly alongside the value that a healthy media
| ecosystem plays in a healthy society. It's not called the
| fourth estate because someone thought it would be fun.
| wvenable wrote:
| Whether I agree or disagree this doesn't have anything to
| do with governments legislating that Google pay the
| largest media companies some money for linking. I
| absolutely see value in a healthy media system but
| massive companies owned by billionaires paying each other
| would not fit that definition for me.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| > Now you just have a thousand media companies
|
| Those 1000 --media-- news companies have been created in
| part by Google. Google created a game, where the website
| with the best SEO would bubble up to the top of their
| news results - not the website with the best editorial
| standards. This was Google 'commoditifying its
| complement'. In the absence of Google (but even in the
| presence of social media like HN or Facebook), there
| would be far fewer news websites that would be
| rewriting/summarizing the work of the actual journalistic
| newspapers. And in such a scenario the fewer news
| companies would actually make enough to continue to do
| serious journalism.
|
| This is a lot more apparent if you look at other
| languages, which are not indexed as much by Google. There
| the status of news companies is a lot better.
| pupppet wrote:
| I don't see it as so one-sided. What is Google without anything
| to index?
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| We just need a piece of action...let's be honest here, a bit of
| your $$$ to grant you...to persuade the public to grant you
| access.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| This is just shameful
| barbazoo wrote:
| why?
| clwg wrote:
| "The new regulations will allow Google to negotiate with a single
| group that would represent all media, allowing the company to
| limit its arbitration risk." - I'm sure this will be a large and
| diverse group representing the growing diversity of media in
| Canada, either that or it will be Rogers, Bell and Postmedia
| doing what they usually do, which is really nothing of value.
| k0stas wrote:
| I always thought the intention was to get the same deal as
| Australia: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-56163550.
| It's not a surprise that Canada's media industry wanted the same
| deal and the government was willing to go to bat for it.
|
| The BBC article from 2021 linked above even says "The law is seen
| as a test case for similar regulation around the world."
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| FAANG company pays the Danegeld to yet another country's
| entrenched media interests, episode 4562.
| none_to_remain wrote:
| So what the Canadian government and journalists are telling me is
| that they'd like any outlet that doesn't loudly opt out to be
| considered government shills.
| lilsoso wrote:
| (lol i have to edit this mistake I've seen before)
| coumbaya wrote:
| That 38 million times 1 million $ is more than 100 million $ ?
| lilsoso wrote:
| thanks, egregious error I made in haste =)
| 6510 wrote:
| I think the only thing that matters is getting the news to
| readers one way or the other. The biggest problem here is that
| most news outlets publish underfunded garbage if not click bait.
|
| An even weirder perspective: What if they didn't kill reader?
| maxglute wrote:
| 14m daily fb users in canada, $6 per head. I don't know if that's
| too much or too little.
| vivekd wrote:
| This looks like a capitulation for the Canadian government to
| save face. The goal was to provide continuous money for Canadian
| media (based on clicks not a 100 mill lump sum to an organization
| representing all media) and more importantly to give legacy media
| clicks - privilege their content over other content.
|
| Google and facebook refused, and I think this is Canada's
| government and their media lobbyists bowing to a watered down
| money payment to save face after not getting what they actually
| sought for
| o11c wrote:
| So apparently it is plausible to require, then.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Always was. Never believe the talking points and attempts at
| shaping the narrative. It's "impossible" until it's done.
| SllX wrote:
| It was never a matter of "could" only "should".
|
| It's still a bad law, and Google shouldn't have capitulated.
| graeme wrote:
| Meta is still out. No news media in Canada can share their
| articles there anymore. And Google has been exempted from the
| law - that's how the govt and google reached an agreement. The
| law called for google to bargain individually with each
| publisher, but instead google negotiated a $100 million payment
| with the government in order to have them not apply the law.
| brushfoot wrote:
| Even if you agree that Google should have to prop up Canadian
| news organizations--which I don't, but for the sake of argument--
| predicating that support specifically on hyperlinks seems like a
| terrible precedent to set. Any site of any size should be free to
| link wherever it wants, freely.
| whythre wrote:
| Yes. Adding more walls to the increasingly walled gardens of
| the internet is terrible.
| randomdata wrote:
| Especially when the news organization is free to deny the
| request referred by a linking party who has not offered the
| expected compensation. It is not clear why a new law is needed
| here when existing contract law already sufficiently covers the
| issue.
| wubrr wrote:
| How would news organizations deny the request referred by a
| linking party? Are you talking about a technical denial - as
| in reject the HTTP request? I guess technically they can base
| something like this on HTTP referer header, but you can have
| links without referer info as well.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Referrer is exactly how you would do it.
|
| The idiocy here is that most of these publishers are likely
| customers of Google's ad networks anyways, and the clicks
| through to the articles are yielding ad revenue to them,
| and they likely are getting analytics and tracking that
| identifies exactly where the inbound traffic is coming
| from.
|
| It feels like a shakedown by people who are in other parts
| of the business totally disconnected from the web content /
| publishing arms, who likely know better?
| wubrr wrote:
| Referrer is basically optional though, you can specify a
| link to have no referrer : `<a href="example.com"
| rel="noreferrer">link</a>` , among other ways.
|
| It's true that the links only increase the
| revenue/traffic to their website though, so they should
| really be supporting the referrers rather than blocking
| them.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> you can specify a link to have no referrer : ` <a
| href="example.com" rel="noreferrer">link</a>` , among
| other ways._
|
| But you wouldn't do that if you want the link to resolve.
| If you don't want it to work, why would you go to all of
| the trouble of creating the link in the first place?
| acdha wrote:
| What happens when they set a referrer policy no-referrer? I'm
| sure Google and Meta would say that's to protect user
| privacy.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
| randomdata wrote:
| The simplest option is to treat it as a rejection. Users
| aren't going to be dreaming up (choosing a recent article
| at random) URIs like /politics/federal/chiefs-of-ontario-
| says-trudeau-s-carbon-price-is-discriminatory-and-demand-a-
| review/article_9c995f63-1e26-56c6-9048-79781a9b649c.html in
| order to get there without some referring party.
|
| Negotiations between Google/Meta and the news organization
| when defining the service contract can explore alternative
| options (access token, for example) should it be an
| imperative, for some reason, that the referrer still be
| inaccessible. People are allowed to talk to each other.
| Y_Y wrote:
| And if somebody sends you the link in an IM? Or if the
| browser fakes a referral from the news sites landing
| page?
| randomdata wrote:
| Any IM service not operated by a major tech company that
| the news organization wouldn't also want to collect
| compensation from is going see such a small number of
| referrals, who cares? Same goes for the number of people
| who are going to take the time to hack around it. Who
| cares?
| cesarb wrote:
| > Users aren't going to be dreaming up (choosing a recent
| article at random) URIs like <long url> in order to get
| there without some referring party.
|
| What about bookmarks? I don't think clicking on a
| bookmark on your browser is going to send any Referer
| header.
| randomdata wrote:
| If that case is beyond "who cares?", which I suspect is
| not, once the user is granted access to the news the
| first time then they can be given subsequent access
| regardless of referrer.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Google/Meta do more than link, though. They also grab a hero
| image and an excerpt. Likely fair use, but definitely getting
| into the grey area. I don't know how the Canadian law is
| worded, but it would be much more acceptable to me if
| Google/Meta could get out of paying if they only linked and
| didn't excerpt images or text.
| randomdata wrote:
| Open Graph, which all the major news organization in Canada
| use, was created by Meta/Facebook to ensure that the news
| organizations have editorial control over what is "grabbed".
| If the news organizations want them to have less information,
| all they have to do is give less information.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Canadian journalists could have done this without the
| government by adapting tactics similar to unions.
|
| A union strikes not because they want to withhold work from
| their company, but because even though both the company and
| the union members want to work, the strike shifts the power
| balance.
|
| Similarly, Canadian journalists could have gotten together
| to withhold links from Google & Meta until they got a
| better deal. They'd both be worse off during the duration
| of the strike, but negotiations could get a better long
| term deal. And in this metaphor, Meta is doing a pre-
| emptive lockout.
|
| The biggest difference is that the government is helping
| journalists combat the defector problem.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| It comes down to culture and what kind of onus society
| expects to put onto worker to create and police de facto
| legislation, which is prefered in some places to allowing
| the state to enact the same de jure.
|
| They could have done this but now they don't have to.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I feel like that could backfire since "scabbing" would be
| really easy, especially for less scrupulous news
| organizations more strongly tied to corporate or
| political interests than actual news reporting.
|
| Basically while Reuters or AP are "on strike", Drudge
| Report, Jacobin, or Fox News would step in and become the
| de facto news sources across all of social media.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| This is what I was getting at in the last sentence of my
| comment. The reason it's a government action rather than
| a collective action is that way it prevents defections,
| aka scabbing.
| ipaddr wrote:
| But smaller news outlets are not part of this cartel.
| wharvle wrote:
| Devil's advocate: "You can choose what to give us and we'll
| display it... but if what you give us isn't good enough,
| who knows what might happen to your links' prominence on
| our site?" isn't _quite_ some fully-voluntary thing when
| Google's the one saying that.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| "You can choose between prominence and opaqueness" seems
| like an okay deal in a vacuum.
|
| I suppose the issue is more that there's too much
| competition for news, rather than google making the
| competition unfair.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It is about the link itself, not the image. Meta refused to
| negotiate, because it doesnt control what links people post.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Bullshit. Facebook as a matter of policy manipulates
| people's feeds - the chances of something appearing, in
| what order, etc.
|
| People have found that certain sites, topics, and words
| will trigger an outright shadowban on that post - your
| friends _never_ see it.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| not sure which part you are calling bullshit. Facebook
| certainly controls the how much a post is circulated, but
| it doesnt control which links people put in their posts,
| or how often they post.
|
| The idea that facebook should have to pay a fee each time
| a user decides to share a link to news is stupid.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| The acceptable way you're hoping for is exactly how it's
| worded. The headline here is fearmongering.
| echelon wrote:
| None of this is going to matter. In ~5 years everyone will be
| using AI summarizes and sharing this stuff with no chain of
| origination.
|
| With the rise of rage and clickbait, that might be a really
| good thing to disincentivize many of the bad ways that media
| is produced and presented.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Is it based on hyperlinks? I ctrl-f'd on the c-18 bill and
| there was no reference to "link". I would imagine the law is
| more about using the blurbs from the news outlet, not the link
| itself.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Nope, it is the link itself.
| jsnell wrote:
| The relevant part of the text is:
|
| > (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.
| drawkward wrote:
| >Any site of any size should be free to link wherever it wants,
| freely.
|
| Maybe that was true in the days before big tech, venture
| capital and advertising monetized the internet, but the
| internet has been vastly changed by those three groups, and not
| always for the better. They certainly do make a bunch of money
| though!
| ouEight12 wrote:
| So.. we should break a fundamental aspect of an 'open and
| free' internet by introducing a link tax, just because the
| horse and buggy people haven't taken the last 25 years to
| figure out how to sell automobiles by now?
| drawkward wrote:
| The free and open internet died long before this link tax.
| jsnell wrote:
| It's not at all clear what these payments are predicated on,
| the deal structure is obviously very different from what the
| bill originally required. All that's being annouced is that
| Google is paying $70M/year for something, but it might not be
| for links.
|
| That's what happened in Australia's law from a couple of years
| ago. The law was ratified, but doesn't actually apply to any
| company, so what the law said was totally irrelevant.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It is amazing the web-illiterate/ignorant way this is being
| reported in Canada, too. Lots of mention of Google "posting" or
| "publishing" content, when all it's doing is linking to the
| publisher's own site.
|
| I'm no fan of Google these days, but I wish they had played
| hard ball on this. This is a total joke.
| drawkward wrote:
| >when all it's doing is linking to the publisher's own site
|
| That's not true, however. It is also often including a
| summary and an image, which is certainly republishing or
| reposting the content. In no way is it "web-
| illiterate/ignorant" to refer to it as such, because _it is
| more than just a link_.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Google News is ridiculously spartan. It's very old school
| Google. A headline, a classification, and sometimes a
| thumbnail. No description or summary or text of any kind
|
| Facebook, yeah, that's something else. One thing that is
| legitimately bad about that is the way the content can be
| posted on whatever wall and then a pile of unmoderated
| public comments put on it, that the publisher has no
| control over.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| "Link tax" is clearly chosen in bad faith, like in other cases
| where that wording had been used. What's really happening is
| that Google Search shows previews of large parts of articles
| such that visitors don't go to origin sites to generate page
| impressions/ad playouts. Which is especially problematic since
| Google/Alphabet is either an ad provider on the skipped news
| site or its competitor.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I've seen multiple critiques that _this
| specific law_ is in fact a link tax, and doesn 't care if
| there are previews or not.
|
| Is that wrong?
|
| Sure, google _currently_ has previews, and a law _could_ be
| written to target previews, but I don 't think _this_ law
| targets previews.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| It _does_ target previews very explicitly, but it also has
| a much broader condition that I imagine is there to prevent
| Google and others from making previews something
| technically not provided by them but instead created by
| some payload they give the users of their website.
| nradov wrote:
| How many characters of preview would be reasonable? 50? 100?
| soganess wrote:
| Why would you even use number of characters?
|
| A better criteria is: what fraction of people does it stop
| from visiting the source (because they got the information
| they were looking for from the summary). Yes, yes that
| system has it's own problems, but it is more holistic that
| string.length().
| nradov wrote:
| Determining that fraction would require the search engine
| to run a series of A/B tests with varying preview
| lengths, and keep detailed records of test results. That
| seems like an unreasonable burden.
| CivBase wrote:
| How much am I allowed to quote from a book before I'm
| considered a pirate?
| nradov wrote:
| In the US we have fairly clear guidelines for fair use of
| copyrighted materials such as books. Rules in Canada may
| be different.
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html
| gspencley wrote:
| This is a popular myth about the way the law works in Canada.
| The myth may be based on how the Australian version works, I
| wouldn't know. But here in Canada, this is the relevant text
| of the bill:
|
| > digital news intermediary means an online communications
| platform, including a search engine or social media service,
| that is subject to the legislative authority of Parliament
| and that makes news content produced by news outlets
| available to persons in Canada
|
| "Making available" includes just links. In other words, there
| is no qualifier in the bill what-so-ever that requires that
| previews and snippets be extracted and provided. A single
| link with no text or any other content whatever qualifies as
| "making available."
|
| Here is the entire text of the bill: https://www.parl.ca/Docu
| mentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > makes news _content_ [...] available
|
| That sounds like a simple _link_ wouldn 't count?
| gspencley wrote:
| I suppose I could have included other "relevant" sections
| of the bill. But there's a reason I linked to the full
| text.
|
| > "Making available of news content (2) For the purposes
| of this Act, news content is made available if
|
| (a) the news content, or any portion of it, is
| reproduced; or
|
| (b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is
| facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation
| or ranking of news content."
|
| So not only is there no qualifier saying that content
| needs to be reproduced, but (b) specifically says that
| "facilitating" access BY ANY MEANS counts as "making
| available."
| kevingadd wrote:
| Indexes don't work without consuming the news content
| first in order to build the index, right? So it's
| reasonable to argue that a news search index is a derived
| work that draws some amount of value from the source news
| content. Without the news sites offering their news for
| free to google's spider, google's index would be useless.
| You could make a similar argument for aggregators since
| they usually display excerpts and thumbnails.
|
| Ranking seems harder to justify.
| Spivak wrote:
| This line of reasoning is dangerously close to saying
| that mapmakers need to pay license fees for your land to
| be shown on a map because "without the land your map
| wouldn't be very valuable."
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It does beg the cascading question too.
|
| What if I create a search product that directs you to a
| site, based on information gleaned from another site?
|
| Trivial example: a "Top 10 Topics in the News Today" list
| of Wikipedia links, based on scraping a news site's front
| page daily
|
| On the one hand, "It's free info and scraping should be
| allowed." On the other hand, if everyone did that, it'd
| highjack all of the news site's visitors, depriving it of
| revenue and destroying the very resource it's built on.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Sure, but the act only applies if you are as powerful as
| Google (Section 6: Application), and since they are the
| primary target the scope needs to be broad because Google
| can be counted on producing the most bad faith reading of
| any law to try to escape paying for the practice of
| scraping content from journalists in an effort to keep
| the traffic on their own pages.
| kevingadd wrote:
| The text of the bill says that links are "news content"? A
| pure hyperlink does not make content available, since if
| the target server goes down the link is useless. It just
| directs the user to the content.
|
| Unless somebody loses a court case over hyperlinks, it
| feels extremely disingenuous to claim this law is going
| after hyperlinks when Google's content was blatantly more
| than hyperlinks (they provide excerpts).
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| The definition of "making available" is actually very
| broad, presumably to head off at the gate whatever
| technical work-around Google was planning to use to
| bypass a the more narrow "the news content, or any
| portion of it, is reproduced".
|
| Like, I can see Google pivoting to providing custom links
| and a script that runs in the users browser that will
| dynamically produce the snippets on the pages without the
| content technically going trough their servers...
| gspencley wrote:
| A couple things of note:
|
| 1. Meta was the other "initial target." And so if we're
| in a mindset where we just dislike Google or "big
| powerful corporations that will stop at no end to ...
| whatever" then the application of the bill ALREADY hit a
| point where we can start to see how loosely the
| regulators will interpret Section 6. And according to the
| wording of that section, they just need to _consider_ the
| "size" of the entity,"strategic advantage", and
| "prominent market position" in order to determine if they
| decide that the digital news intermediary has "a
| significant bargaining power imbalance."
|
| 2. With respects to what you think Google might do in
| order to try and "work around the law" ... I'm not a
| lawyer, but from what I've heard from lawyers, courts
| tend to be _very_ intolerant towards people who try and
| apply a strict interpretation of the wording of a law in
| order to try and skirt around what it makes illegal.
| Common law, precedence and judicial interpretation really
| exists in large part to try and avoid that type of thing.
| Judges will look at things like the intent of the
| legislators, past court decisions and the intent of the
| accused in order to determine whether the accused is in
| violation.
|
| In other words, Section 4 "Purpose", would be considered:
|
| > Purpose 4 The purpose of this Act is to regulate
| digital news intermediaries with a view to enhancing
| fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and
| contributing to its sustainability, including the
| sustainability of news businesses in Canada, in both the
| non-profit and for-profits sectors, including independent
| local ones.
|
| As well as Google's intent. If the court were to gather
| that Google's intent was to try and work around the law,
| they go back to the Purpose, look at Google's actions and
| the EFFECT of their actions and will say "Sorry, you
| don't get to do shit like that to try and weasel your way
| out of the law. It still applies." And those types of
| actions can often be used as evidence of an intent to
| break the law, so any lawyer would likely advise their
| client to not even consider doing slimy shit like that.
| brushfoot wrote:
| The act targets more than content previews. Notice (b):
|
| > (2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made
| available if
|
| > (a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced;
| or
|
| > (b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is
| facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or
| ranking of news content.
| jsnell wrote:
| Except that the actual text of the law does not match your
| claim. It's about "facilitating access to news content by
| _any means_ " including an "index" or "aggregation". Not
| about reproducing large chunks of the original content.
|
| And it should be pretty obvious that this is the case. If
| your interpretation was correct, Meta would not have removed
| Canadian news sources entirely. They'd just have removed the
| previews (hell, the news companies could have removed the
| previews themselves; they already have the controls for
| that).
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >If your interpretation was correct, Meta would not have
| removed Canadian news sources entirely.
|
| Meta's actions prove absolutely nothing. I could similarly
| say that Google didn't remove any news, therefore the law
| has zero effect?
|
| Meta has, for months in advance of anything coming into
| force, embargoed Canadian news and replaced it with an
| appeal to the reader. That is political action, and it
| seems to have failed given that the government didn't
| blink. Now that Google has an agreement, it looks
| especially silly.
|
| If Meta continues their embargo of Canadian news,
| personally I consider that a good thing. The Canadian
| public accepting that Meta is not a good source or
| "homepage" for news is a wonderful outcome of all of this.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I welcome it for the opposite reason. The few powerful
| families that control the news cartel in Canada need less
| reach.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| You "welcome" media control going from a "few families"
| to a single person?
| CivBase wrote:
| Are news articles considered intellectual property, like
| books? If so, wouldn't it already be considered piracy for
| Google to copy and redistribute significant portions of the
| articles? If so - and if this law is not actually a "link
| tax" like you claim - then what is this law really
| preventing?
| acdha wrote:
| The law explicitly requires a power differential and $1B in
| revenue, so almost any other site won't be affected.
|
| I do wish there was more distinction between a link and content
| display. I think there's a very real concern that summaries
| lower click-through rates, which Google has been pushing for
| years and will be turbo-charged with LLMs summarizing content
| in the future. It would be interesting to see if there might be
| some future nuance around that.
| whythre wrote:
| Where does this end? Can't any country squat on links and require
| (not just google, but whoever) pay?
| onion2k wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Most of the time it's not worthwhile though because few
| companies will pay, and at some point breaking the web starts
| losing you votes so politicians will back down first. Except
| when it's Google..
| nolist_policy wrote:
| I wonder if this makes it harder for competition to enter the
| search engine market.
| ksherlock wrote:
| From the horse's mouth:
|
| ---
|
| This Act applies in respect of a digital news intermediary if,
| having regard to the following factors, there is a significant
| bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news
| businesses:
|
| (a) the size of the intermediary or the operator;
|
| (b) whether the market for the intermediary gives the operator
| a strategic advantage over news businesses; and
|
| (c) whether the intermediary occupies a prominent market
| position.
|
| ---
|
| So a new search engine most likely won't initially have the
| size and market position necessary for the law to apply.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Who qualifies as a news organization under this law? Can any
| random declare themselves a "journalist"? Or do the benefits
| accrue only to Trusted Sources approved by Your Friend, The
| Government?
| dghughes wrote:
| It's Bill C-18 here it is if you want to read it.
|
| https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...
| graeme wrote:
| The govt is actually not applying C-18 to google. That's the
| deal that was signed: google makes an annual payment, and the
| govt doesn't designate them as a news provider.
|
| So just like in Australia, the applies to nobody. The text of
| the law isn't very relevant, the whole thing is intended as
| an elaborate shakedown.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| If I understand correctly, Google agreed to pay proportional to
| the number of human journalists an organization employs. If so,
| that's an awesome detail in this age of AI journalism.
| ars wrote:
| Does the deal say anything about the jurnalist pay? Can a
| high-school make every single student a "full time
| journalist" and rake in the cash?
|
| Or some other sort of club instead of a school.
| jpollock wrote:
| This seems to be the definitions.
|
| There are some exclusions for foreign owned outlets.
|
| _news business_ means an individual or entity that operates a
| news outlet in Canada. (entreprise de nouvelles)
|
| _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)
|
| _news outlet_ means an undertaking or any distinct part of an
| undertaking whose primary purpose is to produce news content
| and includes an Indigenous news outlet or an official language
| minority community news outlet. (media d'information)
|
| Eligible news businesses -- designation 27 (1) At the request
| of a news business, the Commission must, by order, designate
| the business as eligible if it
|
| (a) is a qualified Canadian journalism organization as defined
| in subsection 248(1) of the Income Tax Act, or is licensed by
| the Commission under paragraph 9(1) (b) of the Broadcasting Act
| as a campus station, community station or native station as
| those terms are defined in regulations made under that Act or
| other categories of licensees established by the Commission
| with a similar community mandate;
|
| (b) produces news content of public interest that is primarily
| focused on matters of general interest and reports of current
| events, including coverage of democratic institutions and
| processes, and
|
| (i) regularly employs two or more journalists in Canada, which
| journalists may include journalists who own or are a partner in
| the news business and journalists who do not deal at arm's
| length with the business,
|
| (ii) operates in Canada, including having content edited and
| designed in Canada,
|
| (iii) produces news content that is not primarily focused on a
| particular topic such as industry-specific news, sports,
| recreation, arts, lifestyle or entertainment, and
|
| (iv) is either a member of a recognized journalistic
| association and follows the code of ethics of a recognized
| journalistic association or has its own code of ethics whose
| standards of professional conduct require adherence to the
| recognized processes and principles of the journalism
| profession, including fairness, independence and rigour in
| reporting news and handling sources; or
|
| (c) operates an Indigenous news outlet in Canada and produces
| news content that includes matters of general interest,
| including coverage of matters relating to the rights of
| Indigenous peoples, including the right of self-government and
| treaty rights.
|
| Public list 29 (1) The Commission must maintain a list of
| eligible news businesses and publish that list on its website.
| An eligible news business is only included on the list if it
| gives its consent.
| olalonde wrote:
| > Trusted Sources approved by Your Friend, The Government
|
| This. From the C-18 bill:
|
| Requires the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications
| Commission (the "Commission") to maintain a list of digital
| news intermediaries in respect of which the enactment applies.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| It's not arbitrary. Any organization which meets fairly
| transparent requirements must be on the list.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| > is either a member of a recognized journalistic
| association and follows the code of ethics of a recognized
| journalistic association or has its own code of ethics
| whose standards of professional conduct require adherence
| to the recognized processes and principles of the
| journalism profession, including fairness, independence and
| rigour in reporting news and handling sources; or
|
| Doesn't sound transparent to me. What does "fairness" mean?
| "Independent" of whom? "Recognized" by whom?
| olalonde wrote:
| That's in theory. In practice, it's the same CRTC that
| shutdown a right-wing radio station in Quebec for saying
| "offensive and insulting remarks"[0] and that recently
| considered banning Fox News from Canada[1]. It's hard to
| believe that they are really objective and impartial.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHOI-
| FM#Dispute_with_the_CRTC
|
| [1] https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/crtc-delays-
| decision-...
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| Facebook thought that the Beaverton was a news org and blocked
| them. They threatened a defamation lawsuit in retaliation:
|
| https://www.thebeaverton.com/2023/08/read-our-letter-threate...
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| I'm glad Canada stayed relatively firm on this. The prior art in
| Australia made this a no brainer.
| luuurker wrote:
| Is this a good thing though? Paying to link to a website?
| graeme wrote:
| Meta left news in Canada and isn't set to return - no news
| media can post to Meta platforms. Now media outlets have lost a
| good chunk of their organic business model and are reduced to
| begging. The government implemented a large media tax subsidy
| as a result of how much C-18 cost the media so far.
|
| And all pre-existing Meta and Google deals have been cancelled.
| This $100 million is all there is.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> no news media can post to Meta platforms_
|
| The local CTV outlet still does (not sure about their wider
| brand, I only look for local news). They just can't link back
| to CTV's website anymore.
| NorwegianDude wrote:
| I think search engines should be opt-in, not opt-out. Just
| linking to something is fine, but search engines also takes
| content and uses it to earn money. One example is the cards on
| Google where they extract content and shows it alongside ads.
|
| Nothing else I can think of works like this. Generally if you
| take the work of others without being allowed and use it to make
| money you'll end up in trouble.
|
| Now, for most people the trade-off is worth it, but it should not
| be the default. It should be a quick opt-in using robots.txt.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| This is such a bizarre way of thinking that's utterly
| antithetical to how the internet works. If you publish
| something publicly on the internet, people can see it and link
| to it. If you don't want that, gate access behind a paywall or
| login, or don't publish it all. Publishing it publicly and then
| demanding conditions on how it is accessed is kind of
| nonsensical.
| coldpie wrote:
| Generally the problem is not the link itself, it's the
| headline and any included blurb/summary/image from the
| article. The problem being that users see & gain the content
| solely when viewed from the link aggregator, without ever
| actually visiting the originating website and participating
| in its monetization methods. A bare "http://..." URL probably
| would not have raised the same objections, but also no one
| would actually use a link aggregator that is just bare URLs.
|
| Both sides have a point here. I'm not sure where I end up on
| the issue myself.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> it 's the headline and any included blurb/summary/image
| from the article._
|
| Why would that be a problem? Open Graph was created by Meta
| exactly so that these news sites have editorial control
| over those details. And the Canadian news outlets have
| adopted Open Graph, so that is not an issue. If they don't
| like what is shown, they have full control to change it.
| The headline/blurb/image you see is what they have
| specified. That is what they _want_ you to see.
|
| The real problem is that reporting the news doesn't pay
| very well anymore and certain news players were on the hunt
| for a government subsidy to offset that reality.
| coldpie wrote:
| > If they don't like what is shown, they have full
| control to change it.
|
| Sure, and then some other news agency that does include
| more content in their metadata will be shared in the
| aggregator instead, because it will at least bring in a
| little revenue. It's a race to the bottom, and the
| outcome for the original reporter is the same: no payment
| for their work.
|
| > The real problem is that reporting the news doesn't pay
| very well anymore
|
| Well, yeah! That is the problem! Google is getting the
| money that used to go to the news agencies. This is one
| attempt at a fix.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> and the outcome for the original reporter is the same:
| no payment for their work._
|
| What provisions are in this bill to ensure that the money
| ends up in the reporters' hands, and not the media
| agencies' hands? Without that then you still have the
| exact same "race to the bottom" scenario - with the
| reporter seeing no payment for their work.
|
| What provisions are in this bill to ensure that the
| reporters are able to create their own brand to break
| free of the media agencies? If the intent is to see
| Google/Meta drive the traffic and also pay the reporters,
| the middleman agency serves no purpose.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > I think search engines should be opt-in, not opt-out
|
| If you put your site on the public internet, you are
| effectively opting in. In addition, robots.txt is trivially
| easy to configure if you really don't want your site to be
| crawled by specific parties' crawlers.
|
| The news corporations absolutely want their sites crawled, to
| the point that if Google unilaterally stopped crawling their
| sites they would _run_ to the courts to file lawsuits.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| According to this law, "just linking to something" is not fine.
| granzymes wrote:
| Respect to Meta for having the courage to stand up to the media
| lobby in Canada and turn off news in response to this law. I'm
| happy that Google wrung concessions out of the government, but it
| would've been better for the open internet had they stuck to
| their guns and removed news links as well.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Respect to Meta for having the courage to stand up to the
| media lobby in Canada_
|
| I'm not sure what's going on in Canada for Meta to be seen as
| the "good guy". Feels like rooting for Hitler to defeat Stalin.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Indeed, and the funny thing is that FB itself became a more
| pleasant place after people stopped being able to post rage-
| links to news articles anymore. Though I've since de-
| activated my account, so I can't say if that's still the
| case.
| vivekd wrote:
| There's a huge portion of people here that really hate our
| government. I'm one of them. This whole law was a result of
| legacy media lobbying for that law, a lot of smaller Canadian
| media outlets and small content creators opposed it.
| Everything is like that here, the government is ruled by
| special interests.
|
| Even this law, the government abused parliamentary process
| and the COVID situation to avoid having this law debated in
| parliament before it was passed. They don't care about
| democracy, they don't care about the rule of law, they don't
| care about anything, they just do what benefits them and
| their friends.
|
| I hate Canada's politically connected elite, and honestly
| prefer facebook
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Everything is like that here, the government is ruled by
| special interests. [...] Everything is like that here, the
| government is ruled by special interests._
|
| Don't wanna sound like a conspiracy nut but it's like that
| basically everywhere. The rich need to get richer, the poor
| need to tighten the belt.
|
| Democracy needs constant supervision (who watches the
| watchmen?) and checks and bounds with accountability,
| otherwise, leaders left unaccountable and democracy left
| unchecked slowly devolves into a kleptocracy.
| robocat wrote:
| > basically everywhere
|
| Does one counter-example disprove the rule?
|
| I'm likely just naive and my eyes are not sufficiently
| opened - but I don't see a lot of obviously corrupt
| activity here in New Zealand. Corruption seems fairly
| endemic in most other countries I have visited. It isn't
| just a size thing because the problem seems to be worse
| in smaller countries and larger countries. 5 million
| population might be necessary but it's clearly
| insufficient to prevent grossly obvious corruption (other
| ~5M pop country examples). I'm hoping not to discover
| that our new government is more corruption friendly: so
| far they are appearing a bit less moral than the previous
| one.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Sure, there's good examples out there of democratic
| governments with high transparency and low corruption
| like Finland and Denmark, but too few of us have the
| privilege of living there.
|
| Granted, there are worse places to be in the world right
| now than Canada (most of Africa, certain parts of SE
| Asia, Russia, Eastern Ukraine, etc), but why I think
| Canadians are so loud(not Canadian BTW) is that they
| witnessed a steep drop of their living standards and
| purchasing power withing a much shorter timespan than
| most developed countries (the same phenomenon is
| happening everywhere in the west) so you feel let down
| and hopeless when you know those from just a few decades
| ago had it so much better than you, and you're stuck in a
| cycle of relative poverty by comparison despite busting
| your ass off, while those in leadership positions are
| favoring those already financially well off instead of
| the struggling little guy.
|
| I know the feeling because a lot of Europe is in a
| similar boat right now, albeit less severe than Canada.
| wepple wrote:
| > Does one counter-example disprove the rule?
|
| No, NZ is an outlier. Regularly rated the least corrupt
| country on earth. "Basically everywhere" still holds.
|
| Also, whilst NZ may not have explicit corruption such as
| bribing police directly, the grandparent post suggesting
| that special interests affect govt is still true. Jacinda
| was supposed to be the one shining hope that many
| believed would bring in CGT and she admitted it would
| never happen. The wealthy property owners (including most
| MPs) wouldn't let that happen.
| monkeynotes wrote:
| I rarely support Meta, but in this case I do. I think it was a
| total dick move on the Canadian govt's side. Poorly understood
| their position, poorly understood the implications, poorly
| understood the problem space overall.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| The law literally only applies to Google and Meta, both of
| which make billions from the Canadian marketplace. Trying to
| cast this as some big open internet thing is not convincing.
|
| Holding Meta as the good guys is pretty tenuous as well. Long,
| _long_ before Meta had to do anything, like a crying, gnashing
| baby they blocked every source of news, across all of their
| properties, with a callout to Canadians declaring why. I _pray_
| that they stick with it, but I 'm going to tell you the reality
| that Meta is going to make a similar deal, probably within
| days.
|
| Because they make enormous sums on the Canadian market. And
| they have always pulled (or been pushed), aggregated and
| summarized news because it _makes them money_. The frequent
| claims on here that it 's some incidental thing, if not some
| grand benevolence, is rather detached from reality.
|
| And with every passing day more Canadians are just turning away
| from Meta properties because of their embargo. Again, I pray
| they actually stick with it and become irrelevant here (it is a
| toxic company that can be trusted with nothing), but they
| won't.
|
| To play off what the other guy said, it's a pretty bizarre
| position to hold Meta as the good guys. If they have a position
| on something, it's an extremely good indication that that
| position is not a good one.
| wvenable wrote:
| This is a very poor argument. Laws and actions are good or
| bad based on their own merits and and not because of which
| parties support it or not. This link tax is a bad law. It's
| bad for the Internet. And thus it is also bad for Meta.
|
| > And they have always pulled, aggregated and summarized news
| because it makes them money.
|
| Not even accurate as news companies actively provide this
| content in their meta data explicitly for Meta to use. If
| they didn't want their content summarized they could stop it
| any time.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| The "link" tax is a tax on mega American tech companies,
| and was written to target literally only two companies on
| the planet. It has nothing to do with the internet at
| large. Anyone who claims otherwise is either poorly
| informed, or a bad faith actor. The histrionics on this
| topic are not useful.
|
| >This is a very poor argument
|
| What do you even think the argument was? I said that Meta's
| position is an _indicator_. Don 't pretend I said anything
| more, or strawman a counterpoint based upon nothing.
|
| >Not even accurate
|
| What a picking at nits. While I was talking about both
| companies generally, Facebook basically became the "go to"
| back when they absolutely _did_ scrape news, similar to
| Google. Publishers started directly pushing their content
| there because they had basically no protections from it
| being pulled (you know -- "open internet" and all) and
| Canadians were conditioned to hit the "news" tab on
| Facebook as the homepage for news.
|
| Again, my greatest hope is that Meta sticks with it. No
| news on FB, Threads, Instagram or elsewhere. A total
| embargo. That'll show em!
| wvenable wrote:
| > The "link" tax is a tax on mega American tech
| companies, and was written to target literally only two
| companies on the planet.
|
| And you consider that a good thing? Laws that target
| companies by name? Your argument is that the ends justify
| the means. But in this case the ends is one set of large
| companies (some with large American ownership) lobbying
| the government to force other large companies to pay them
| for nothing. It's a gross abuse of power. Utterly
| unnecessary and entirely the Canadian way. This is the
| kind of thing that keeps the oligarchy alive in Canada.
|
| > Again, my greatest hope is that Meta sticks with it. No
| news on FB, Threads, Instagram or elsewhere. A total
| embargo. That'll show em!
|
| In this we absolutely agree. I also wish Google didn't
| cave. Of course, they didn't really cave though, they
| just did a side deal so this law wouldn't apply to them.
| This whole thing is just stupid and wrong.
|
| > Facebook basically became the "go to" back when they
| absolutely did scrape news, similar to Google.
|
| If any of these companies violated copyright then by all
| means let the media companies sue them.
| monkeynotes wrote:
| What I find incredible about this overall controversy is how
| Canadian news outlets begged for this law, and now they are all
| butthurt that they have no traffic. I have no idea why they
| thought they had leverage.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| One side effect of this whole ordeal that I hate is the fact that
| fake news sites and conspiracy theory sites that masquerade as
| "news sites" are not blocked. The result is that platforms are
| filled with bad content that some people find hard to
| differentiate from the truth.
| TerrifiedMouse wrote:
| So disinformation sites will be effectively free from
| competition on Facebook Canada ... this will end well.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Really? I don't use Meta enough to notice, but I've seen
| several non-news websites complain that Meta is categorizing
| them as news websites so I imagine that most fake news sites
| are also being blocked.
| theLiminator wrote:
| I think this is horrible for the internet. Sets a terrible
| precedent.
| olalonde wrote:
| Poilievre pledged to repeal Bill C-18 (the "link tax") and is
| leading in the polls, so there's that.
| mh8h wrote:
| Well... now that Google is starting to pay, and I expect Meta
| to follow suit, I don't think he will have much to argue for
| repealing the law.
| gspencley wrote:
| As a Canadian this is disappointing to me. I disagree with the
| law. Actually, disagree is too soft. I think it is absolutely
| ridiculous. By Google agreeing to pay even one penny, it removes
| a large incentive for our politicans and regulations to realize
| that this was ill-conceived and to come to their senses and
| repeal.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| How does the Canadian law compare to the Australian one? As I
| understand it, the Australian law had a lot of influence from
| people like Rupert Murdoch, specifically targeted "big tech"
| companies like Meta and Google, and didn't benefit
| small[er]/independent news organizations.
| wintogreen74 wrote:
| The biggest difference on the surface is the AU law focuses
| on aggregators providing summaries that remove the need to
| visit the source, where the CA law targets just references,
| aka links.
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm not Canadian but have many friends and family there having
| worked and lived there in the past.
|
| I couldn't agree more. The current gov went way overboard with
| this, and by Google caving they have just guaranteed more of
| the same. There's no incentive from everyday people anymore for
| politicians to care about this.
|
| I'm usually pretty in-the-middle on issues, but in this case it
| seems ridiculous. Google is giving them a valuable service _for
| free_ by sending traffic their way. If it wouldn 't violate
| neutrality, they should pay _Google_ not the other way
| around[1]. A quick logic check helps reinforce this: If
| appearing in the search results were a bad thing for them, then
| why would these companies hire SEO experts to bolster their
| search rankings?
|
| [1]: Note this is regarding the "tax" for serving a link, not
| talking about a full preview or AI summary or something, on
| which I'm much more sympathetic to the site owners and think
| they have a legitimate case worthy of debate
| SECProto wrote:
| > As a Canadian this is disappointing to me. I disagree with
| the law.
|
| As a Canadian, this is exciting to me. I agree strongly with
| the goals of the law (while holding nitpicks about the actual
| wording). I think the fact that Google came to an agreement
| shows that they don't have a fundamental issue with the law
| either (or they could've just withdrawn from our market, like
| Meta). It's a win for independent media in Canada, and thereby,
| for all Canadians.
| sna1l wrote:
| Gotta love the regulatory capture that will come with this for
| that one single news collective. They'll extract a nice little
| rent for not really providing a ton of benefit
| lainga wrote:
| Somewhere, far away, the founders of the HBC are tearing up a
| little
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| This Is The Way with Canada. Always has been. Regulatory
| capture, privileged monopoly state that simply replaced its
| British colonial masters with local ones. From the Hudson's Bay
| Company to Bell/Rogers or Suncor or Postmedia today. Doug Ford
| in the pocket of housing developers, Daniel Smith & PP in the
| pocket of the O&G sector, Trudeau in the pocket of Bay St. The
| two major parties are just warring clans over which sector will
| get to dominate us at any particular moment.
|
| I think the US is f'd up, and I don't want to be a part of it.
| But I also don't want to be a part of the gross kleptocratic
| mediocracy that's been built here.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Sad for google to fold like this. Though very true to form.
| crazymoka wrote:
| So if I just put a link on my blog to a source news article I
| have to pay for the pleasure?
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Only if your blog is big enough to have bargaining power with
| news sites. Not that this makes the law just, but it is
| specifically targeted at large traffic sources.
| barelysapient wrote:
| A big win for Canadian media company shareholders.
| robocat wrote:
| I wonder what SEO that decision will lead to.
|
| $100 million a year can incentivise some awful outcomes.
| inlined wrote:
| Taken in the context of Google as a whole, this seems like pretty
| good evidence that Google does not consider itself to benefit
| from monopoly power like the DOJ claims. If Google did have a
| monopolistic advantage, they could refuse to pay the link tax.
| Clearly they're worried about losing market share to other search
| engines.
|
| [usual disclaimer: I work at Google but on nothing related to
| search or policy]
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| >If Google did have a monopolistic advantage, they could refuse
| to pay the link tax.
|
| Or maybe they think the engineering work to maintain a whole
| separate search page, and revenue loss from not including
| links, is less than the amount they stand to pay.
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree. I'm not sure I disagree either though.
| But it seems like it might be a false dichotomy.
|
| For example, with a current gov like Canada, I think they'd be
| more worried about government action than competitors, and
| that's plenty of an incentive to get them to pay the money.
| xeckr wrote:
| Next up: Canadian news agencies forcing their employees to click
| on their links a thousand times per day to prop up this new and
| lucrative revenue stream.
| latenightcoding wrote:
| This is terrible, it will only encourage the Canadian gov to
| regulate more tech related things. They absolutely suck at tech.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| I'm no fan of Google whatsoever but I really don't agree with
| this premise that just because they're successful and their
| competitors haven't figured out how to compete yet that Google
| should then be forced to be sugar daddy to legacy businesses. The
| solution is unleashing your tech industry not more nanny laws.
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