TechDirt’s Mike Masnick gets it exactly right in covering Canada’s C-18 bill:
If you believe in the open web, if you believe that you should never have to pay to link to something, if you believe that no one should have to pay to provide you a benefit, then you should support Meta’s stance here. Yes, it’s self-serving for Meta. Of course it is. But, even if it’s by accident, or a side-effect, it’s helping to defend the open web, against a ridiculous attack from an astoundingly ignorant and foolish set of Canadian politicians.
And just generally points out the huge holes in Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez understanding from the Power & Politics Interview.
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.
