Poilievre pledged to repeal Bill C-18 (the "link tax") and is leading in the polls, so there's that.
Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
81–90 of 213 posts
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google/Meta do more than link, though. They also grab a hero image and an excerpt. Likely fair use, but definitely getting into the grey area. I don't know how the Canadian law is worded, but it would be much more acceptable to me if Google/Meta could get out of paying if they only linked and didn't excerpt images or text.
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. They'd both be worse off during the duration of the strike, but negotiations could get a better long term deal. And in this metaphor, Meta is doing a pre-emptive lockout.
The biggest difference is that the government is helping journalists combat the defector problem.
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#83Even if you agree that Google should have to prop up Canadian news organizations—which I don't, but for the sake of argument—predicating that support specifically on hyperlinks seems like a terrible precedent to set. Any site of any size should be free to link wherever it wants, freely.
Is it based on hyperlinks? I ctrl-f'd on the c-18 bill and there was no reference to "link". I would imagine the law is more about using the blurbs from the news outlet, not the link itself.
The relevant part of the text is:
> (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.
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#84[deleted]
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#85Who qualifies as a news organization under this law? Can any random declare themselves a "journalist"? Or do the benefits accrue only to Trusted Sources approved by Your Friend, The Government?
> Trusted Sources approved by Your Friend, The Government
This. From the C-18 bill:
Requires the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (the “Commission”) to maintain a list of digital news intermediaries in respect of which the enactment applies.
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#86I'm glad Canada stayed relatively firm on this. The prior art in Australia made this a no brainer.
Is this a good thing though? Paying to link to a website?
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#87Even if you agree that Google should have to prop up Canadian news organizations—which I don't, but for the sake of argument—predicating that support specifically on hyperlinks seems like a terrible precedent to set. Any site of any size should be free to link wherever it wants, freely.
It is amazing the web-illiterate/ignorant way this is being reported in Canada, too. Lots of mention of Google "posting" or "publishing" content, when all it's doing is linking to the publisher's own site.
I'm no fan of Google these days, but I wish they had played hard ball on this. This is a total joke.
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#88Earlier 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…
[deleted]
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#89Even if you agree that Google should have to prop up Canadian news organizations—which I don't, but for the sake of argument—predicating that support specifically on hyperlinks seems like a terrible precedent to set. Any site of any size should be free to link wherever it wants, freely.
"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.
Re: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially when the news organization is free to deny the request referred by a linking party who has not offered the expected compensation. It is not clear why a new law is needed here when existing contract law already sufficiently covers the issue.
How would news organizations deny the request referred by a linking party? Are you talking about a technical denial - as in reject the HTTP request? I guess technically they can base something like this on HTTP referer header, but you can have links without referer info as well.
Referrer is exactly how you would do it.
The idiocy here is that most of these publishers are likely customers of Google's ad networks anyways, and the clicks through to the articles are yielding ad revenue to them, and they likely are getting analytics and tracking that identifies exactly where the inbound traffic is coming from.
It feels like a shakedown by people who are in other parts of the business totally disconnected from the web content / publishing arms, who likely know better?