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

ctvnews.ca

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

#211

Post by ahahahahah »

Permit wrote: post #166

My understanding is that Australia created a similar law and both FB/Google came to the bargaining table. Does anyone know what’s different this time? Is the law different? Is Canada a less valuable market?

If you were meta and wanted to go to that bargaining table, would you want to have a good understanding of the value that these links are providing you and your users? Would you maybe try to get that understanding by running a small test in the wild where you disabled these links for some users?

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

#212

Post by jonny_eh »

Permit wrote: post #166

My understanding is that Australia created a similar law and both FB/Google came to the bargaining table. Does anyone know what’s different this time? Is the law different? Is Canada a less valuable market?

How can you negotiate once the law was on the books? I assume that negotiations were attempting before the law was passed.

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

#213

Post by chongli »

LegitShady wrote: post #164
skeeter2020 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> because lots of people just read headlines and maybe they can do that without clicking. I agree; I'd argue you don't have much of a valuable service if all users need is a headline. Print media needs to give up the traditional shallow breadth fueled by advertising and go niche, and go deep. Cable TV should learn this lesson as well.

I think traditional media needs to go deep and needs to go local. If I open up the local paper and see associated press articles that’s not the right content for them. I can see that anywhere, probably before the newspaper is delivered. It needs to be local journalism about things that matter. Actual local issues, hard journalism about local politics and city hall and whatnot. That’s what’s missing from the big sites…

Like the way a starving person's body consumes their own muscles, the local newspapers in Canada have laid off all their journalists. As a kid, I used to deliver the local newspaper to make a bit of money. I remember those Saturdays when the paper was like an inch thick and weighed a ton.

Nowadays, it looks more like a newsletter than a newspaper. My late roommate subscribed to the local paper up until the end of his life. At that point, he was really only interested in the crosswords and sudokus.

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

#214

Post by nonameiguess »

carlosjobim wrote: post #15
whywhywhydude wrote: post #9

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.

When I search for something I want the best results for the query, and sometimes those are behind a paywall.

At a certain point, if you want a subscription service, why wouldn't you just do something like suscribe to Bloomberg News, then get all your news by going directly to their site rather than going through a search engine or aggregator. If you're looking at an aggregator, inherently you want to see many possible sources, including ones you may only read once a year. Nobody is going to subscribe to hundreds of separate sources individually just to read them once in a blue moon.

Ironically, the predatory and terrible academic journal industry is probably the only thing out there right now that comes close to getting this right. Rather than expecting anyone to subscribe to each journal individually, they give a bulk subscription to an entire publishing service that then grants access to many journals.

If someone out there offered a $20 a month service that granted access to Bloomberg, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, WaPost, Financial Times, all in one, I'd gladly buy that. But there is no way in hell I'm subscribing to all of those separately. Even if the aggregate price was cheaper, I wouldn't want to do that.

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

#216

Post by bastawhiz »

gameman144 wrote: post #180

My read on this is that news organizations are upset that Google/Facebook are taking profits by providing cached content that makes people not want to actually click their links. If this is the primary concern, though, then wouldn't it make more sense to draft a law regulating content caching, rather than the pay-per-click approach? It seems like a law that said "Sites that serve any content which wasn't part of a 'y…

> It seems like a law that said "Sites that serve any content which wasn't part of a 'you can cache me' section need to pay for that content" would address the concerns of both parties here.

Because you can't have your cake and eat it too. If Google can't cache the whole article, they can't provide search for the article. That's why publishers are serving the full, unpaywalled article to Google: how do you index an article you can't cache? The publishers—today—can simply serve the paywalled versions to Google.

The publishers want Google to keep a copy of their data to offer search services to Google's customers, but then want Google to pay for the privilege.

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

#217

Post by cheriot »

michaelmior wrote: post #145
amadeuspagel wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't happen automatically, it's something websites have to set up: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/c...

I'm skeptical that such explicit summaries are the only thing social networks display. Even if that is currently the case, it would be relatively trivial for a company the size of Meta to generate and show their own summary.

This is the way it's always worked. News orgs are asking social media companies to display the summary and image

https://css-tricks.com/essential-meta-tags-social-media/

They're not generating anything

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

#219

Post by cheriot »

daxfohl wrote: post #118
amusingimpala75 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I understand correctly, those companies are now going to be forced into paying for products that they cannot just stop using?

If they want to operate in the country. Is google going to leave whole countries just because of being required to use and compensate local news? Essentially it's a tariff.

Who decides what the tariff is?

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

#220

Post by SllX »

daxfohl wrote: post #118
amusingimpala75 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I understand correctly, those companies are now going to be forced into paying for products that they cannot just stop using?

If they want to operate in the country. Is google going to leave whole countries just because of being required to use and compensate local news? Essentially it's a tariff.

Honestly? Why not. Not every country in the world is going to pass a law this silly and for those that do, do you really want to be in a business environment where the National government puts you in a position of dictating what services you must also offer in order to continue doing business at all in the country? Like what if Google just decides for whatever reason at some point in the future they don’t want to continue to offer Google News anywhere. That would be their prerogative. Whether they spun it off, sold it or just shut it down are all valid business choices they can make.

At least it’s easier in Canada where Google can go “okay, we’ll just remove you from our index that we included you in without charge that if you wanted to, you could have removed yourself from at any time.”

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