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Bill C-18: Google to remove news links in Canada over online news law

ctvnews.ca

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Re: Bill C-18: Google to remove news links in Canada over online news law

#81

Post by jupp0r »

monsieurgaufre wrote: post #53

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 d…

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.

Re: Bill C-18: Google to remove news links in Canada over online news law

#82

Post by metabagel »

pessimizer wrote: post #62
opportune wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> To me the inflection point was the 2016 US election (which also coincided with Brexit.) And with the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict.

Do you mean the Russian invasion of sovereign Ukraine territory?

Re: Bill C-18: Google to remove news links in Canada over online news law

#83

Post by pipo234 »

kccqzy wrote: post #27
whywhywhydude wrote: post #9

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.

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.

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?

Re: Bill C-18: Google to remove news links in Canada over online news law

#85

Post by jupp0r »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #30
scarface_74 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

What leverage do they have? Companies can always pull out of the country entirely.

Re: Bill C-18: Google to remove news links in Canada over online news law

#86

Post by AlexandrB »

pessimizer wrote: post #62
opportune wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> To me the inflection point was the 2016 US election (which also coincided with Brexit.) And with the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict.

Russian annexed Crimea in 2014. Or are we talking about "2016-ish"?

Re: Bill C-18: Google to remove news links in Canada over online news law

#88

Post by jupp0r »

pessimizer wrote: post #80
matbilodeau wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the "archive" workaround still works

It's piracy, though. I'm sure plenty of paywalled outlets would be happy to see it gone.

It's not piracy, they explicitly allow this.

Re: Bill C-18: Google to remove news links in Canada over online news law

#89

Post by opportune »

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.

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