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.
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.
