Note: This article is by the National Post, which is owned by PostMedia, who were one of the main backers of bill C18. Just something to keep in mind.
For those of us not from Canada[1].
Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
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Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#42> Facebook has decided to be unreasonable, irresponsible, and started blocking news. Are they acting unreasonably though? There is a product, and the government rules it has a price. Isn't Facebook allowed to go, sorry, I don't like that price?
Full disclosure, that's not the National Post saying this. That's a quote from Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez.
The way you are quoting the remark, some might assume this is the National Post saying this when it's really NP quoting someone else. This isn't to imply you are misrepresenting anything.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#43The TLDR of this issue: Canadian govt: When someone posts a link to a news article on Facebook, that is like stealing from that news publisher. Facebook: Your logic makes no sense, but okay, we will stop doing that. Govt: No, we don't want you to stop posting the links, we want you to pay a fee every time someone posts a link. Facebook: No thank you. Govt: You're bullying us and behaving irresponsibly! We won't stand…
Isn't the issue that Facebook/Google don't just share the link, they share the content behind the link as well?
Yes. These advertising companies extract the excess wealth created by the labour of the news-reporting media without compensation. The people of Canada decided that this is unfair and not in their best interest. The advertising companies decided it is not in their best interest to pay the cost of leverage that resource for their wealth-extraction strategies and are going to discontinue it.
Everyone wins.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you analyze news as something more like “a right to information” - “integral to the function of democracy”, I don't get it - in this analysis would my local coffee shop have to buy and provide free newspapers to me? I'm all for access to free press being a fundamental right. Where you lose me is the part where a private corporation is supposed to subsidize the production of news for me.
Meta is not your local coffee shop.
It might be worthwhile to point out which bits of an analogy you take objection with when trying to refute an analogy. Meta is not my local coffee shop, but for the sake of the argument it might be fine to interchange them. If it's not fine to compare them as such, pointing out what aspects you think break the comparison is helpful, since it lets others in the discussion try to come up with a better argument/analogy and elevate the discussion overall.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#45Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income?
I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story.
Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something?
There's a similar issues with some news sites basically copying or rephrasing the content of a newspaper story. I've seen news stories by third-parties, where the story lists their source as "The New York Times"
It's tough to figure out a way to compensate the people who create the news, and the people who disseminate the news.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#46Why was the government of Canada advertising on Facebook and Instagram anyway?
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#47The TLDR of this issue: Canadian govt: When someone posts a link to a news article on Facebook, that is like stealing from that news publisher. Facebook: Your logic makes no sense, but okay, we will stop doing that. Govt: No, we don't want you to stop posting the links, we want you to pay a fee every time someone posts a link. Facebook: No thank you. Govt: You're bullying us and behaving irresponsibly! We won't stand…
Isn't the issue that Facebook/Google don't just share the link, they share the content behind the link as well?
The text of the bill includes "indexing" and "ranking" as equivalent to displaying. So even making them searchable (with just links) would cost FB/G.
Also, the thumbnail/blurb is usually in the html head tag for use like this. You can literally set it to "click through to learn more" instead of a summary and FB would respect that.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you analyze news as a product, it’s entirely reasonable for Facebook to refuse a price they don’t think is worth it. If you analyze news as something more like “a right to information” - “integral to the function of democracy”, as it was taught to me in school - then it does start to look unreasonable. The Canadian government is simply equivocating between these two analyses as it suits them (one could ask, if acc…
Even if you think newspapers are vital to democracy, that doesn't oblige other businesses to sell newspapers. These newspapers own their own distribution mechanisms (websites) that are unaffected by the decision of one third party website to part ways with them. Okay, but facebook is really ubiquitous so that makes it different... How is this any different from... the one grocery store in town removing their newspape…
It is, however, an interesting hypothetical to ask: if journalism itself is entirely unprofitable, such that all the newspaper companies eventually shut down, and private journalism stops being done — then what should we, as a public, do to retain our duty to be informed? Can there be such a thing as "non-partisan state-sponsored media"?
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#49Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story. Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something? There…
> And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income?
Don’t those news sources have ads too ? How are they making income from local views?
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The government needs to get out messages to its citizens. If ads on facebook is more cost effective than sending out mailers or whatever, why shouldn't they spend money on facebook ads?
Because our government doesn't understand technology and generally gets fleeced anytime they encounter it. Remember the Phenix pay system? It was an IBM project that was supposed to save us 70 million a year, instead they paid IBM an additional 2+ BILLION to try and fix the broken crap they'd delivered. Never even worked, they're currently taking bids to replace it already. 80% of public servants had pay issues, many…
> Remember the Phenix pay system? It was an IBM project that was supposed to save us 70 million a year, instead they paid IBM an additional 2+ BILLION to try and fix the broken crap they'd delivered. Never even worked, they're currently taking bids to replace it already.
Do you really believe that this was a result of bad in-the-moment decision-making at all levels, instead of a result of being trapped by previously-negotiated long-term vendor exclusivity agreements?
(In my experience, governments are generally good at cutting their losses — they're far more rational re: the sunk-cost fallacy than individual people are. So it would be surprising to me if this were true.)