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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

#501

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.

It might be technically simple but it’s probably legally complicated to write a summarizer that doesn’t violate copyright. Using data they are explicitly given permission to use by the definition of the field it’s in is quite different though.

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

#502
This bill was a pretty naked shakedown for money and it was obvious to everyone who read it. Even the intentional targeting of specific companies rather than trying to make a general policy raises lots of questions. If linking news is actually harmful and needs to be compensated it needs to be compensated when Apple, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter or such do it to. Everyone knows this wasn’t really because anyone believes linking is harmful to news media. If the news media wanted to they could set their robots.txt to prevent any scraping of the content but they don’t because they want the links. We even see from Google’s own blog that they were participating in the political process and were open to solutions that compensated Canadian News Media by for example creating a pool of money to distribute. But that both a link tax and uncapped liabilities were a non-starter and a potential existential threat to the business. It’s no surprise that Google and Meta delinked the news. I just hope the taxpayers don’t have to continue funding Trudeau’s idiocy until the next election. But there is no real hope of the NDP flipping on this so that hope is probably in vain.

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

#503
post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would a Canadian government force an American company to be more open?

The same exact way they are doing here - pass a law requiring the company to comply with certain standards if it wants to operate in Canada and lawfully provide services to Canadian customers. Standards that could, for example, include the requirement for all content on the platform to be indexable. Or even to mandate open protocols and federation.

The word used was "open", and you wouldn't be able to force a company to open itself to intellectual theft at the hands of a foreign government. You're reducing a complex legal/rights policy into "wats the problem just do it guys" mentality. You can't even get rights to index something niche, like the Ontario Opera archive catalogue without running into several unions and trade rights representatives. To think that everyone from Google to Netflix could just do this is hilarious.
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