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Canadian government suspends advertising on Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram
(nationalpost.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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To the folks getting worked up about link taxing and proposing the solution of news paywalling themselves,
I'll speak for the like-minded side since I know I'm not alone in this. We were advocating against link taxes when we had this debate a decade ago when news threatened the survival of the emerging platforms. Back then the platforms weren't oligo/monopolies and the market power balance was very different. Today Meta has a monopoly on social media and Google does on search. Those are the two most common activities taken online. And with that the market power is firmly within the hands of the platforms. More importantly they have also monopolized the online advertising business. News do not have the required market power to paywall themselves and survive, especially not in Canada. The platforms, through little fault of their own have managed to take the revenue streams and to a large extend the position as platforms from news media. It's how things shook out. Unfortunately this platform success is self-destructive and we think in need of correction. A financial correction that can ensure the viability of news, which will ensure that platforms can keep profiting from it without destroying it, along our democracy with it. If we end up overcorrecting and as a result the platforms face the risk of failing, we'll have another discussion over that.
Link taxes only serve to strengthen the monopolies. News companies are now going to be dependent on Facebook and google (the only ones who have to pay) and news companies and governments will want to keep the status quo as much as possible.
A general tax on large tech companies going to something like the Canadian media fund is a lot more reasonable.
We can not afford to tie the sustainability of such a vital resource to the success of two specific monopolistic foreign corporations.
News orgs are already dependent on Facebook and Google. This is just a patch to actually make this status quo sustainable. Patching things up instead of doing major reforms is the Canadian way, but it's better than doing nothing. π€·
The quickest way to make a permanent solution is to come up with a temporary solution.
A better than nothing temporary quick fix will become permanent and halt all progress or possibility of a better more permanent fix.
Yeah this is the problem with basing everything on ideology. Economic realities shift and suddenly someone's ideological stance on being against taxing links becomes support for oligopolistic billionaires avoiding paying taxes.
Ideally the Facebooks and the Googles of the world would just be broken up using anti-trust laws. But since they're US companies, the Government of Canada doesn't have the ability to do this. They have too much control over information and all that can be done about it within Canada is to tax them. Redistribute some of the money they make from their information control to others.
It's sad that they've managed to use their control over information to convince people that it's wrong for them to have to pay taxes.