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Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act

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Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act

#131

Post by soganess »

nradov wrote: post #108
tannhaeuser wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Link tax" is clearly chosen in bad faith, like in other cases where that wording had been used. What's really happening is that Google Search shows previews of large parts of articles such that visitors don't go to origin sites to generate page impressions/ad playouts. Which is especially problematic since Google/Alphabet is either an ad provider on the skipped news site or its competitor.

How many characters of preview would be reasonable? 50? 100?

Why would you even use number of characters?

A better criteria is: what fraction of people does it stop from visiting the source (because they got the information they were looking for from the summary). Yes, yes that system has it's own problems, but it is more holistic that string.length().

Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act

#132

Post by babypuncher »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #82
randomdata wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open Graph, which all the major news organization in Canada use, was created by Meta/Facebook to ensure that the news organizations have editorial control over what is "grabbed". If the news organizations want them to have less information, all they have to do is give less information.

Canadian journalists could have done this without the government by adapting tactics similar to unions. A union strikes not because they want to withhold work from their company, but because even though both the company and the union members want to work, the strike shifts the power balance. Similarly, Canadian journalists could have gotten together to withhold links from Google & Meta until they got a better deal. T…

I feel like that could backfire since "scabbing" would be really easy, especially for less scrupulous news organizations more strongly tied to corporate or political interests than actual news reporting.

Basically while Reuters or AP are "on strike", Drudge Report, Jacobin, or Fox News would step in and become the de facto news sources across all of social media.

Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act

#133

Post by laweijfmvo »

gspencley wrote: post #98

As a Canadian this is disappointing to me. I disagree with the law. Actually, disagree is too soft. I think it is absolutely ridiculous. By Google agreeing to pay even one penny, it removes a large incentive for our politicans and regulations to realize that this was ill-conceived and to come to their senses and repeal.

How does the Canadian law compare to the Australian one? As I understand it, the Australian law had a lot of influence from people like Rupert Murdoch, specifically targeted "big tech" companies like Meta and Google, and didn't benefit small[er]/independent news organizations.

Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act

#134

Post by randomdata »

Y_Y wrote: post #129
randomdata wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simplest option is to treat it as a rejection. Users aren't going to be dreaming up (choosing a recent article at random) URIs like /politics/federal/chiefs-of-ontario-says-trudeau-s-carbon-price-is-discriminatory-and-demand-a-review/article_9c995f63-1e26-56c6-9048-79781a9b649c.html in order to get there without some referring party. Negotiations between Google/Meta and the news organization when defining the ser…

And if somebody sends you the link in an IM? Or if the browser fakes a referral from the news sites landing page?

Any IM service not operated by a major tech company that the news organization wouldn't also want to collect compensation from is going see such a small number of referrals, who cares? Same goes for the number of people who are going to take the time to hack around it. Who cares?

Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act

#135

Post by bryanlarsen »

babypuncher wrote: post #132
bryanlarsen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canadian journalists could have done this without the government by adapting tactics similar to unions. A union strikes not because they want to withhold work from their company, but because even though both the company and the union members want to work, the strike shifts the power balance. Similarly, Canadian journalists could have gotten together to withhold links from Google & Meta until they got a better deal. T…

I feel like that could backfire since "scabbing" would be really easy, especially for less scrupulous news organizations more strongly tied to corporate or political interests than actual news reporting. Basically while Reuters or AP are "on strike", Drudge Report, Jacobin, or Fox News would step in and become the de facto news sources across all of social media.

This is what I was getting at in the last sentence of my comment. The reason it's a government action rather than a collective action is that way it prevents defections, aka scabbing.

Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act

#136

Post by gspencley »

Nextgrid wrote: post #126
gspencley wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a popular myth about the way the law works in Canada. The myth may be based on how the Australian version works, I wouldn't know. But here in Canada, this is the relevant text of the bill: > digital news intermediary means an online communications platform, including a search engine or social media service, that is subject to the legislative authority of Parliament and that makes news content produced by news…

> makes news content [...] available That sounds like a simple link wouldn't count?

I suppose I could have included other "relevant" sections of the bill. But there's a reason I linked to the full text.

> "Making available of news content (2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if

(a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or

(b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content."

So not only is there no qualifier saying that content needs to be reproduced, but (b) specifically says that "facilitating" access BY ANY MEANS counts as "making available."

Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act

#138

Post by cesarb »

randomdata wrote: post #116
acdha wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when they set a referrer policy no-referrer? I’m sure Google and Meta would say that’s to protect user privacy. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...

The simplest option is to treat it as a rejection. Users aren't going to be dreaming up (choosing a recent article at random) URIs like /politics/federal/chiefs-of-ontario-says-trudeau-s-carbon-price-is-discriminatory-and-demand-a-review/article_9c995f63-1e26-56c6-9048-79781a9b649c.html in order to get there without some referring party. Negotiations between Google/Meta and the news organization when defining the ser…

> Users aren't going to be dreaming up (choosing a recent article at random) URIs like in order to get there without some referring party.

What about bookmarks? I don't think clicking on a bookmark on your browser is going to send any Referer header.

Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act

#139

Post by FirmwareBurner »

vivekd wrote: post #128
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Respect to Meta for having the courage to stand up to the media lobby in Canada I'm not sure what's going on in Canada for Meta to be seen as the "good guy". Feels like rooting for Hitler to defeat Stalin.

There's a huge portion of people here that really hate our government. I'm one of them. This whole law was a result of legacy media lobbying for that law, a lot of smaller Canadian media outlets and small content creators opposed it. Everything is like that here, the government is ruled by special interests. Even this law, the government abused parliamentary process and the COVID situation to avoid having this law de…

>Everything is like that here, the government is ruled by special interests. [...] Everything is like that here, the government is ruled by special interests.

Don't wanna sound like a conspiracy nut but it's like that basically everywhere. The rich need to get richer, the poor need to tighten the belt.

Democracy needs constant supervision (who watches the watchmen?) and checks and bounds with accountability, otherwise, leaders left unaccountable and democracy left unchecked slowly devolves into a kleptocracy.

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