Lemmy was pretty harsh about this when it came out. I was a bit surprised to see the fediverse take the side of Facebook and Google.
I thought it had good intentions. Journalism isn’t free, is becoming a service of value to Google and Facebook but without costing them anything.
I dunno, thought it was a good move.
It was/is a good move.
Some people are complaining that “billionaire media conglomerates” are going to be getting some money, but not that the large corporations like Meta and Google are making money off of others work without compensation.
Mind-boggling.
It totally disregards how the internet and the web works. Meta and Alphabet aren’t copying whole articles and reposting them, they are linking to articles with a summary. You don’t charge some one extra because they drive traffic towards you.
Linking with a summary of what is at the other end of the link is how the web works. Charging a toll to link to your site is greedy and ignorant.
It seems very obvious to me that social media is a net negative to media organizations. People very rarely click through to articles, headlines are clearly the most valuable part of an article.
Ultimately the way things work now is not sustainable it leads to low quality news that can barely stay afloat. How do you propose you fix it?
So the law penalizes them for just linking, even if they removed the headlines and the summary they still have to pay. Why aren’t news organizations paying Meta & Google for sending traffic their way?
Meta and Google are making money off of others work without compensation.
Meta doesn’t seem to think they make very much off news at all, given they’ve been blocking it for months now here and have been cutting down on it globally across their products.
Remember all the memes about “I’ll pay you in exposure”, well that’s what the web giants want to do.
Honestly, the government doesn’t have to do anything more than pass the bill. There’s no need to put on pressure, as if they don’t want to pony up the cash, they can just go on without the goods.
I will say that it will make an interesting experiment in regards to news dissemination if various sites stop stealing all the articles and don’t replace it with anything at all.
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.
