Canadian here. I think the law is stupid. It’s literally free advertising. I use Google News to see a bunch of local and national news sources in one spot. I only see the article headlines. If I want to see anything, I have to click and go to the full article. The news companies aren’t paying anything to get aggregated and they get free traffic to their site.
In regards to the quoting pieces of the article they’re linking to in search results, the brief snippets they provide often have barely any information at all or cut off before the information you want to see, so you have to click on the results anyway.
Our government is just inept when it comes to the internet.
They want what Australia has. Sure the law in Australia might not have worked exactly as written but the News outlets still got paid and have deals with Facebook. And that’s all that they wanted. I’m guessing they’ll take a harder stance on Canada to stop other countries from trying it.
The question of who gets to decide and what is and isn’t a “News outlet” is seriously problematic. I also think that journalists ought to maintain an adversarial posture towards government and now we’re creating a system in which “approved” journalists are dependent upon official recognition to receive legislated funding.
