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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.
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.
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?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 u…
> 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 inter…
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...
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.
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.
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.
Then there surely is a source for that somewhere. Otherwise it's just as fair to assume it's not a mutually beneficial relationship.
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...
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.
Yeah Google never ever does this. They do not want money they just work for kisses and they are not evil at all.
Companies should earn my by building good competitive products.
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.
> 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 governmen…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
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.
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…
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.