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

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

#101

Post by opportune »

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.

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.

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

#102

Post by duringmath »

jabits wrote: post #100
duringmath wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

I agree

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

#103

Post by pyrale »

scarface_74 wrote: post #61
reaperducer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

#104

Post by akira2501 »

bdw5204 wrote: post #32

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…

> 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.

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

#106

Post by shadowgovt »

randcraw wrote: post #37
anderspitman wrote: post #33

The web may never be better than it was about 5 years ago, and that makes me very sad

Make that 25 years ago, before the FAANGs came out.

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.

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

reaperducer wrote: post #50
musha68k wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember actual newsstands?

Do you remember actual newsstands? I do. I remember when the newspaper was 10¢. 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.

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by JoshTriplett »

ortusdux wrote: post #28

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.

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.

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

#109

Post by isykt »

phailhaus wrote: post #105

So these news orgs are getting free advertising, and they want to be paid on top?

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.

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

#110

Post by shadowgovt »

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.

> turns out there's little free, non-commercial, high quality content on the web.

Well, sure. Who pays for it?

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