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.
Meta said that to Australia too, but ultimately caved. We need to not let ourselves be frightened by the threats of corporations. They are meant to serve our society, not the other way around.
Sure. Except, if you read the article, this is about a fundamental discussion about paying to link to things. Should every post to Lemmy pay the website it links to?
There’s nuance to be had. Lemmy.ca isn’t Meta or Google. It’s one or two guys running a server in a non-profit capacity. No one here is making profit, we’re just folks sharing links related to our shared interests. That is not true for Meta or Google. Those guys are making money hand over fist. These are not the same situations and there is no reason we have to treat them the same legally.
there is no nuance. Bill C-18 want you to pay to link to something. It’s a piece of legislation written by an industry that can’t figure out how it can work and instead want to be subsidized.
Facebook and Google have the power to stop linking to them. Because that linking IS driving trafic it WILL have an effect.
Two guys running a server will be next. Don’t you worry.
Doesn’t that “first they came for etc etc” totally apply then? This will definitely lead to news sites targeting smaller social medias then federated social media.
Maybe. It depends on what’s linked and how that affects the system. Linking isn’t any different than downloading something which we know is ultimately copying information. There are nuances to copying in regards to copyright laws ethics, etc. And of course it wouldn’t be Lemmy, the app, paying. Maybe not even Lemmy, the instance owner, or the poster since neither of them are profiting from that linking.
Linking is very different from downloading or copying. A link is only a reference to the content, not the content itself. The news site retains full control over the content. If the news site wants to make more money from visitors, they can use ads or paywalls.
And of course it wouldn’t be Lemmy, the app, paying. Maybe not even Lemmy, the instance owner, or the poster since neither of them are profiting from that linking.
What if an instance is getting enough donations to be considered profitable? Drawing the line at profitability just punishes success and efficiency.
BTW a lot of posts in c/canada have snippets copied from the linked articles. How is this any different from FB and google showing links and snippets?
That you don’t control other websites’ functions or the ability to link is fundamental to the usefulness of the internet. Adding a web of microtransactions will result in a system controlled by a few with no inovation or open knowledge. If a site doesnt want to opely share data it should add security.
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.
I believe in democracy over corporations.
I believe in journalism over social media.
Honestly, look at the state of social media today. The libertarian ideal internet has clearly been a complete failure. The libertarian ideals in the technology field has just been an abdication of responsibility. And some horrible corporations and foreign adversaries have filled in that vacuum.
The old school internet libertarians refuse to accept the reality of this failure. So now we’ve reached the point where massive corporations are using the oligopoly power over information distribution to strong arm democratic countries to avoid having to pay taxes. And out of habit and denial the libertarians take the side of Mark fucking Zuckerberg.
All to desperately cling on to an ideology that’s so obviously been a failure. Painfully obvious.
When your ideology demands you defend a massive corporation trying to strong arm a democracy to avoid paying taxes, maybe you should consider the possibility that your ideology might be flawed?
I don’t think they should.
Most independent media is just worthless opinion columns, political activism made to look like news, and on some occasions just straight up disinformation.
Sure some of it may be ok, but if you try to write legislation that comes out as “all left leaning independent media gets money, all the right wing independent media can go pound sand” it’s just the government trying to use legislation to promote their party. That’s a really bad precedent.
So as much as I’d like to see the good independent journalism funded by this, it doesn’t seem feasible to do that without also funding disinformation.
My opinion on the corporate media that is the only one funded by this is the same as what you’ve just said. Just in a rich get richer approach to media in Canada. That’s (one of) the big issues I have with this bill.
For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if
(a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or
(b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.
21 An operator must participate in the bargaining process with the eligible news business or group of eligible news businesses that initiated it.
39 An arbitration panel must dismiss any offer that, in its opinion,
(b) is not in the public interest because the offer would be highly likely to result in serious detriment to the provision of news content to persons in Canada; or
© is inconsistent with the purposes of enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contributing to its sustainability.
Sounds a lot like the named companies aren’t even allowed to say “no I don’t want to display links at that cost anymore.”. And it includes indexing for searching, even if you only included the headline with no preview link, or allowed people to like/upvoat posts with links to news sites in them.
So you have to negotiate if named, and the news sites reject your offer, you go to arbitration, and of the arbiter doesn’t like your offer (and by the text “I don’t want to show news anymore” MUST be rejected) then it goes to whatever the news corps offer was.
If it just said “hey, we decided your previews generate too much value and violate copyrights, you need to pay royalties or else show the bare links” well, that would be dumb but fair. But being forced to transact seems bad.
Sounds a lot like the named companies aren’t even allowed to say “no I don’t want to display links at that cost anymore.”
Are you saying news sites should be able to prevent linking to their site altogether? Seems like that would be giving too much power to the News sites, and then there would be complications if a user on the social media site were to link to their site somehow. What would the penalty be if a social media site linked to a news site that prohibited them from doing so?
Also doesn’t seem like something a news site would want to do.
No the opposite. Those sites (G/FB) will be forced to negotiate with the news sites over how much money they now owe them, and the tech companies can’t say “no I’m out I don’t want to pay X” as that seems to violate the rules passed to the arbiters saying they must reject an offer if it means Canadians get less news.
So meta pulling links is gonna get contested, and they will be forced to hand over a bag of cash to pay for all the linking they have done.
They’re trying to bring Must Carry rules for cable TV to the internet.
I actually agree with this law stopping Facebook or Google basically showing the entire article so you never leave facebooks site and facebook makes all the revenue while offloading the costs to serve and create the content to the news organisation. Seems ridiculous and parasitic. I agree just a link is overreach but something had to be done and maybe it can just be scaled back a bit. Making someone else incur the cost to create something you then sell and they have no way to stop you is just morally wrong.
Those snippets you see are provided by the news organizations. If they think showing those snippets is costing them clicks then they have the power to change the snippets. Those snippets are provided to convince people to click through.
In some cases Google does things like their AMP links which truly do steal clicks and ad revenue, or they’ll parse through a link to provide an answer to your search part way through, or if they show more than the provided snippet. Those are the kinds of things that might be legitimate to target.
Yeah for sure thats what I mean. Anything the news organisations cant control themselves is a no no for me.
It would actually be pretty interesting if we could put them in control of that but in an automated standard way.
Just like there’s the snippets, there could be a thing built into the article that details the cost of doing more than showing the snippets with all the needed details.
Then the bots could parse through the content and big tech could throw their AI at it to decide their own cost benefit analysis and either they show the free content and the site takes its chance at a click through or the consuming site pays the fee to show the extra content and potentially save their user the click for whatever reason.
The news sites could even alter the costs in real time depending on how much traffic they think it would drive or be worth as news unfolds.
Sure. Then it should also apply to independent media. Which the Canadian bill does not. The Canadian government is picking and chooseing who news media is.
I would be happy for the law to be modified and improved. The first draft isnt always the best. Just a step forward thats all.
The law of unintended consequences applies. If they take out links to established media, then what will fill the gap? In the case of some of my family, thinly veiled far-right ‘blogs’ substitute as news at the best of times. If media orgs that have some basis in reality are removed… What’s left?
By that same reasoning, you shouldn’t be able to post an article to Lemmy either.
For all the open web absolutists among us, consider this.
Our democracy depends on the survival of our news media. That should be an uncontestable point. The open web in Canada depends on our democracy. Should it fail, the open web fails with it. If that isn’t obvious, think what undemocratic countries do to the web and why.
This law specifically targets corporations that have an outsized market power against news orgs. It exempts everyone who doesn’t.
If this law helps protect the viability of our news organizations, then it helps protect democracy in Canada and therefore the open web.
Yes, usually linking to canadian news on google and facebook provides a summary of the article as well - so many users are satisfied with reading that and dont click.
So facebook and google get the ad revenue, canadian news outlets rhat produce those headlines get nothing.
