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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

#301

Post by jefftk »

GeekyBear wrote: post #291
jeffbee wrote: post #238

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.

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 "borr…

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/royal-a...

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

#302

Post by philjohn »

NamTaf wrote: post #271
jeffbee wrote: post #238

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.

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.

Duped would be a ... charitable ... label.

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

#303

Post by scarface_74 »

tradewinds wrote: post #176
jupp0r wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, the leverage is that some profit is better than no profit, in theory.

If FB and Google both leave Brazil, it will put pressure on the lawmakers to rescind the law.

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

#304

Post by tradewinds »

scarface_74 wrote: post #303
tradewinds wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the leverage is that some profit is better than no profit, in theory.

If FB and Google both leave Brazil, it will put pressure on the lawmakers to rescind the law.

Yep true, it's a game of chicken really. This is probably what will happen in Canada anyway

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

#305

Post by cma »

Brybry wrote: post #244
AYBABTME wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.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/

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.

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

#306

Post by throw0101a »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #254
whitewingjek wrote: post #13

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

> The internet should be "open," Which RFC is that?

"The Internet is for End Users":

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890

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

#307

Post by cratermoon »

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.

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

#308

Post by munk-a »

warning26 wrote: post #294
GeekyBear wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "borr…

Are you proposing that the entire concept of a non-human-curated search engine should be illegal? Seems kind of silly.

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.

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

#309

Post by chroma »

graeme wrote: post #161
msla wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beg, nothing. They'll mandate Google link to them and pay the tax.

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.

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-...

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

#310

Post by mgraczyk »

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.

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