My personal website shows up in Google searches, should I be legally allowed to charge them for every time they display a link?
This was an greedy move pushed by Canada’s billionaire media corporations and enacted by woefully ignorant politicians. Even if the plan DID work how exactly would it have played out? Bell Media would sick its pack of lawyers on Google and hammer out some per-1k clicks agreement. Small Canadian media outlets would submit an online form, the form would require an inhuman understanding of the law and access to analytics that they probably don’t even record, but there would be a nice easy “Bare minimum payment to comply” box near the bottom that would see them receive a couple bucks a year.
Canada is one one the most technologically backwards countries on the planet, we pay THE highest rates for data, all of our service providers are owned by one of three monstrous companies and most of the time you only have a single option where you live anyway. If there is going to be any disruption to digital access it needs to be internal, slap Bell, Rogers and Cogeco for fucks sake.
While I agree it was a greedy and ignorant move, the difference is that your website is being advertised for free every time it shows up on Google searches, while news articles are stolen wholesale without anything more than a link to the original that nobody is going to bother checking because they got the entire value of product that people care about.
It’s the difference between a movie trailer being shared on streaming services vs the movie itself being uploaded everywhere. One’s advertising, the other’s piracy.
