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Meta said that to Australia too, but ultimately caved. We need to not let ourselves be frightened by the threats of corporations. They are meant to serve our society, not the other way around.
Sure. Except, if you read the article, this is about a fundamental discussion about paying to link to things. Should every post to Lemmy pay the website it links to?
There's nuance to be had. Lemmy.ca isn't Meta or Google. It's one or two guys running a server in a non-profit capacity. No one here is making profit, we're just folks sharing links related to our shared interests. That is not true for Meta or Google. Those guys are making money hand over fist. These are not the same situations and there is no reason we have to treat them the same legally.
there is no nuance. Bill C-18 want you to pay to link to something. It's a piece of legislation written by an industry that can't figure out how it can work and instead want to be subsidized.
Facebook and Google have the power to stop linking to them. Because that linking IS driving trafic it WILL have an effect.
Two guys running a server will be next. Don't you worry.
You're right. Nuance isn't even needed to see the problem here. Two corporations, mostly one when it comes to news, has cornered the web. For a huge chunk of the population, the web is Facebook or Instagram. For them the internet is Facebook. Linking inside Facebook doesn't work like it does on the open web, in many ways. One of which is that Facebook wants to link content but not have users actually follow those links. And so there's no point talking about linking as in the open web and any nuance around it. That's why the law differentiates this:
The Act will only apply to digital news intermediaries if there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between the operators of a digital news intermediary and the news outlets producing the news content a digital news intermediary makes available.
The rest of the web like the two guys running a server, can be dealt with via the existing copyright law in Canada which is fairly permissive.
We are talking about a bit of different things.
For Meta, or other big company that have data centres, when you received a link you "share" they can basically crawl entire page (cause the visual pop ups that ask you to subscribe or please turn off ad blocker won't work for bots.) They can have rotating instances so they are never under the 2 free articles per day limit. For lemmy as long as we don't pre-cache contents, we should be fine as pure links are driving traffic. But on facebook you can expand and read like almost entire articles or click the "read more, source" something like that.
Now back to protect these media company. It is sort of important to have a government funded, NPO run neutral media.(cause we still have a lot of older people that only read news paper and watch TVs.) The rest actually didn't matter that much. Everyone can have their own bias, but why normalize that bias through news media? Shouldn't be news just stay as news that reports facts(5W 1H) and leave those "opinions" to whatever other blogs or entirely different non-government funded companies?
So, why should the government protects/helps news agencies that their primary goal is profit and selling their eye ball time and whatever owner's political bias? Because it helps those that are currently in government?
Maybe. It depends on what's linked and how that affects the system. Linking isn't any different than downloading something which we know is ultimately copying information. There are nuances to copying in regards to copyright laws ethics, etc. And of course it wouldn't be Lemmy, the app, paying. Maybe not even Lemmy, the instance owner, or the poster since neither of them are profiting from that linking.
That you don't control other websites' functions or the ability to link is fundamental to the usefulness of the internet. Adding a web of microtransactions will result in a system controlled by a few with no inovation or open knowledge. If a site doesnt want to opely share data it should add security.
Facebook is not the open web.
Linking is very different from downloading or copying. A link is only a reference to the content, not the content itself. The news site retains full control over the content. If the news site wants to make more money from visitors, they can use ads or paywalls.
And of course it wouldn’t be Lemmy, the app, paying. Maybe not even Lemmy, the instance owner, or the poster since neither of them are profiting from that linking.
What if an instance is getting enough donations to be considered profitable? Drawing the line at profitability just punishes success and efficiency.
BTW a lot of posts in c/canada have snippets copied from the linked articles. How is this any different from FB and google showing links and snippets?
Linking is very different from downloading or copying
It depends on the contents of the link. Is it a bare URL? Is it a text "click here"? Is it the title of the linked page? Is it a snippet of the linked page? You can quickly see how linking can incorporate copying depending on how it's done. As you acknowledge further down:
BTW a lot of posts in c/canada have snippets copied from the linked articles. How is this any different from FB and google showing links and snippets?
On the point of profitable instances:
What if an instance is getting enough donations to be considered profitable? Drawing the line at profitability just punishes success and efficiency.
When such a successful instance begins having a "significant bargaining power imbalance" (with news businesses), then it isn't and they'll become subject to the law and will have to negotiate payments.
I gave the bill a quick read.
It depends on the contents of the link. Is it a bare URL? Is it a text “click here”? Is it the title of the linked page? Is it a snippet of the linked page? You can quickly see how linking can incorporate copying depending on how it’s done.
I consider snippets copying, not linking, but let's agree to disagree on the terminology, because the bill covers anything from URLs to snippets anyway.
significant bargaining power imbalance
This is what the bill actually says, so we're small fish and get a free ride.
Exactly.
I actually agree with this law stopping Facebook or Google basically showing the entire article so you never leave facebooks site and facebook makes all the revenue while offloading the costs to serve and create the content to the news organisation. Seems ridiculous and parasitic. I agree just a link is overreach but something had to be done and maybe it can just be scaled back a bit. Making someone else incur the cost to create something you then sell and they have no way to stop you is just morally wrong.
Those snippets you see are provided by the news organizations. If they think showing those snippets is costing them clicks then they have the power to change the snippets. Those snippets are provided to convince people to click through.
In some cases Google does things like their AMP links which truly do steal clicks and ad revenue, or they'll parse through a link to provide an answer to your search part way through, or if they show more than the provided snippet. Those are the kinds of things that might be legitimate to target.
Yeah for sure thats what I mean. Anything the news organisations cant control themselves is a no no for me.
It would actually be pretty interesting if we could put them in control of that but in an automated standard way.
Just like there's the snippets, there could be a thing built into the article that details the cost of doing more than showing the snippets with all the needed details.
Then the bots could parse through the content and big tech could throw their AI at it to decide their own cost benefit analysis and either they show the free content and the site takes its chance at a click through or the consuming site pays the fee to show the extra content and potentially save their user the click for whatever reason.
The news sites could even alter the costs in real time depending on how much traffic they think it would drive or be worth as news unfolds.
Sure. Then it should also apply to independent media. Which the Canadian bill does not. The Canadian government is picking and chooseing who news media is.
I would be happy for the law to be modified and improved. The first draft isnt always the best. Just a step forward thats all.
This is past the third reading though, it's far from a first draft .
The law of unintended consequences applies. If they take out links to established media, then what will fill the gap? In the case of some of my family, thinly veiled far-right 'blogs' substitute as news at the best of times. If media orgs that have some basis in reality are removed... What's left?
Y'know, I'm not nearly as against this concept as this suggests. News is... clearly unprofitable in the modern era, and the quality of the average news outlet has fallen drastically in the past few decades. So I'm down for some drastic attempts to recapture that value and reward good reporting.
Obviously this isn't perfect, it might even be full-out stupid, but I don't think perfect exists here, and it's worth trying something here.
Wouldn't Facebook having to pay news agencies for clicks to their articles result in the problem of low quality clickbait style articles/headlines worse? I get the point you're trying to make, but I think the way the government is going about things is a bit silly and doesn't seem apt to make things better. To me it seems like the government fell prey to the lobbying efforts of Bell/Rogers/Telus trying to squeeze more $$$.
Yeah, true. If the definition of "news" here is really as poor as "posted by a "News" site", then you're likely right that that would incentivize much of the same behaviour.
Even still though... even companies like Buzzfeed will occasionally fund "hard hitting journalism". Handing them money blindly like that, though obviously inefficient, may still serve to make more "real journalism" financially viable. And I think there's still people out there with a passion to do that, provided they could survive doing that.
Agreed in general though, even as a first pass at the idea, this is an awkward and subpar stab at it, with some obvious issues.
Isn't Vice going out of business and Buzzfeed dying? Both of them got into the clickbaiting culture war topics and both seemed to fail because of it. I still think real journalism is the way to go but it seems to be falling apart and I don't think this will fix it.
This feels more like a lobbying/corruption filled bill more than anything. The intention doesn't seem to be really to fix things, but more just to make the big corps more money.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what corps stand to make a lot of money here? This sounds like it'll cost the social media networks a fair bit of money, and the benefactors are Canadian news networks, none of which are worth a fortune, as far as I'm aware. Seems to me that Meta would've been lobbying against this a lot harder than any news sites could've afforded to lobby for it. Heck, even news sites seem shaky on it, at least based on the CBC reporter quoted in the article.
Happy to be corrected, I'm just finding it hard to figure out who the "big corps" are that would stand to benefit from this.
Well a lot of the media across Canada is owned by Bell, Rogers, or Shaw. With their current CRTC "connections" and lobbying I'd say they have a lot of power to get their way on these deals. I wouldn't be surprised hearing the CBC not as in favour since they don't need to rely on these sorts of funding sources that these other corporations may be hoping to secure.
Ah, that _is _interesting. Thanks for the heads up, I had no idea!
Yes what is a big company in these times? Google is a trillion dollar company I mean that is absolutely insane. People don't really grasp the vast difference between million and billion and now we have trillion dollar companies.
I believe in democracy over corporations.
I believe in journalism over social media.
Honestly, look at the state of social media today. The libertarian ideal internet has clearly been a complete failure. The libertarian ideals in the technology field has just been an abdication of responsibility. And some horrible corporations and foreign adversaries have filled in that vacuum.
The old school internet libertarians refuse to accept the reality of this failure. So now we've reached the point where massive corporations are using the oligopoly power over information distribution to strong arm democratic countries to avoid having to pay taxes. And out of habit and denial the libertarians take the side of Mark fucking Zuckerberg.
All to desperately cling on to an ideology that's so obviously been a failure. Painfully obvious.
When your ideology demands you defend a massive corporation trying to strong arm a democracy to avoid paying taxes, maybe you should consider the possibility that your ideology might be flawed?
Do you agree that indepedent Canadian media should also get paid?
I don't think they should.
Most independent media is just worthless opinion columns, political activism made to look like news, and on some occasions just straight up disinformation.
Sure some of it may be ok, but if you try to write legislation that comes out as "all left leaning independent media gets money, all the right wing independent media can go pound sand" it's just the government trying to use legislation to promote their party. That's a really bad precedent.
So as much as I'd like to see the good independent journalism funded by this, it doesn't seem feasible to do that without also funding disinformation.
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 content.
21 An operator must participate in the bargaining process with the eligible news business or group of eligible news businesses that initiated it.
39 An arbitration panel must dismiss any offer that, in its opinion,
(b) is not in the public interest because the offer would be highly likely to result in serious detriment to the provision of news content to persons in Canada; or
(c) is inconsistent with the purposes of enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contributing to its sustainability.
Sounds a lot like the named companies aren't even allowed to say "no I don't want to display links at that cost anymore.". And it includes indexing for searching, even if you only included the headline with no preview link, or allowed people to like/upvoat posts with links to news sites in them.
So you have to negotiate if named, and the news sites reject your offer, you go to arbitration, and of the arbiter doesn't like your offer (and by the text "I don't want to show news anymore" MUST be rejected) then it goes to whatever the news corps offer was.
If it just said "hey, we decided your previews generate too much value and violate copyrights, you need to pay royalties or else show the bare links" well, that would be dumb but fair. But being forced to transact seems bad.
Sounds a lot like the named companies aren’t even allowed to say “no I don’t want to display links at that cost anymore.”
Are you saying news sites should be able to prevent linking to their site altogether? Seems like that would be giving too much power to the News sites, and then there would be complications if a user on the social media site were to link to their site somehow. What would the penalty be if a social media site linked to a news site that prohibited them from doing so?
Also doesn't seem like something a news site would want to do.
No the opposite. Those sites (G/FB) will be forced to negotiate with the news sites over how much money they now owe them, and the tech companies can't say "no I'm out I don't want to pay X" as that seems to violate the rules passed to the arbiters saying they must reject an offer if it means Canadians get less news.
So meta pulling links is gonna get contested, and they will be forced to hand over a bag of cash to pay for all the linking they have done.
If they don't want to pay, they don't post news. Which is exactly what facebook is doing right now.
Same deal as for me and you really. If a news site charges a subscription I either pay the subscription and can see the news. Or I don't pay it and don't get the news.
Even if it's ad supported, most news sites require me to disable the ad blocker to see the article. I can decide to disable the ad blocker and see the article (and they get paid that way), or I close the tab and not see it (they don't get paid, but I don't get the article).
Why do you think a massive corporation shouldn't have to pay for the things me and you have to pay for?
For all the open web absolutists among us, consider this.
Our democracy depends on the survival of our news media. That should be an uncontestable point. The open web in Canada depends on our democracy. Should it fail, the open web fails with it. If that isn't obvious, think what undemocratic countries do to the web and why.
This law specifically targets corporations that have an outsized market power against news orgs. It exempts everyone who doesn't.
If this law helps protect the viability of our news organizations, then it helps protect democracy in Canada and therefore the open web.
Yes, usually linking to canadian news on google and facebook provides a summary of the article as well - so many users are satisfied with reading that and dont click.
So facebook and google get the ad revenue, canadian news outlets rhat produce those headlines get nothing.
That's right. 👍
If you believe in the open web, if you believe that you should never have to pay to link to something
I also believe that I am not a faceless megacorporation. Why should I worry about regulations that specifically only apply to faceless megacorporations?
Because it’s supporting Canadian mega corporations. Read OpenMedia https://action.openmedia.org/page/121153/petition/1?
Guilbeault spewed the same garbage when he was in that seat. Like bullet points from the industry that bought them out.