I wonder what SEO that decision will lead to.
$100 million a year can incentivise some awful outcomes.
Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
141–150 of 213 posts
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#142Earlier 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.
Except that the actual text of the law does not match your claim. It's about "facilitating access to news content by any means " including an "index" or "aggregation". Not about reproducing large chunks of the original content. And it should be pretty obvious that this is the case. If your interpretation was correct, Meta would not have removed Canadian news sources entirely. They'd just have removed the previews (he…
>If your interpretation was correct, Meta would not have removed Canadian news sources entirely.
Meta's actions prove absolutely nothing. I could similarly say that Google didn't remove any news, therefore the law has zero effect?
Meta has, for months in advance of anything coming into force, embargoed Canadian news and replaced it with an appeal to the reader. That is political action, and it seems to have failed given that the government didn't blink. Now that Google has an agreement, it looks especially silly.
If Meta continues their embargo of Canadian news, personally I consider that a good thing. The Canadian public accepting that Meta is not a good source or "homepage" for news is a wonderful outcome of all of this.
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#143As 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.
I'm not Canadian but have many friends and family there having worked and lived there in the past.
I couldn't agree more. The current gov went way overboard with this, and by Google caving they have just guaranteed more of the same. There's no incentive from everyday people anymore for politicians to care about this.
I'm usually pretty in-the-middle on issues, but in this case it seems ridiculous. Google is giving them a valuable service for free by sending traffic their way. If it wouldn't violate neutrality, they should pay Google not the other way around[1]. A quick logic check helps reinforce this: If appearing in the search results were a bad thing for them, then why would these companies hire SEO experts to bolster their search rankings?
[1]: Note this is regarding the "tax" for serving a link, not talking about a full preview or AI summary or something, on which I'm much more sympathetic to the site owners and think they have a legitimate case worthy of debate
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#144Taken in the context of Google as a whole, this seems like pretty good evidence that Google does not consider itself to benefit from monopoly power like the DOJ claims. If Google did have a monopolistic advantage, they could refuse to pay the link tax. Clearly they're worried about losing market share to other search engines.
[usual disclaimer: I work at Google but on nothing related to search or policy]
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#145Taken in the context of Google as a whole, this seems like pretty good evidence that Google does not consider itself to benefit from monopoly power like the DOJ claims. If Google did have a monopolistic advantage, they could refuse to pay the link tax. Clearly they're worried about losing market share to other search engines. [usual disclaimer: I work at Google but on nothing related to search or policy]
>If Google did have a monopolistic advantage, they could refuse to pay the link tax.
Or maybe they think the engineering work to maintain a whole separate search page, and revenue loss from not including links, is less than the amount they stand to pay.
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#146Taken in the context of Google as a whole, this seems like pretty good evidence that Google does not consider itself to benefit from monopoly power like the DOJ claims. If Google did have a monopolistic advantage, they could refuse to pay the link tax. Clearly they're worried about losing market share to other search engines. [usual disclaimer: I work at Google but on nothing related to search or policy]
I'm not sure I agree. I'm not sure I disagree either though. But it seems like it might be a false dichotomy.
For example, with a current gov like Canada, I think they'd be more worried about government action than competitors, and that's plenty of an incentive to get them to pay the money.
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#147Earlier 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…
> 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.
If that case is beyond "who cares?", which I suspect is not, once the user is granted access to the news the first time then they can be given subsequent access regardless of referrer.
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, otherwis…
> basically everywhere
Does one counter-example disprove the rule?
I'm likely just naive and my eyes are not sufficiently opened - but I don't see a lot of obviously corrupt activity here in New Zealand. Corruption seems fairly endemic in most other countries I have visited. It isn't just a size thing because the problem seems to be worse in smaller countries and larger countries. 5 million population might be necessary but it's clearly insufficient to prevent grossly obvious corruption (other ~5M pop country examples). I'm hoping not to discover that our new government is more corruption friendly: so far they are appearing a bit less moral than the previous one.
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#149Earlier 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.
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…
The text of the bill says that links are "news content"? A pure hyperlink does not make content available, since if the target server goes down the link is useless. It just directs the user to the content.
Unless somebody loses a court case over hyperlinks, it feels extremely disingenuous to claim this law is going after hyperlinks when Google's content was blatantly more than hyperlinks (they provide excerpts).
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 c…
Indexes don't work without consuming the news content first in order to build the index, right? So it's reasonable to argue that a news search index is a derived work that draws some amount of value from the source news content. Without the news sites offering their news for free to google's spider, google's index would be useless. You could make a similar argument for aggregators since they usually display excerpts and thumbnails.
Ranking seems harder to justify.