The Online News Act passed last Thursday and would force platforms like Google and Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, to strike deals with Canadian media publishers for sharing, previewing and directing users to online Canadian news content.
If I recall correctly, this is the Online News Act that says that linking to a newspaper’s public web site should require paying that newspaper?
In what world does that make sense? Did the author of that bill and everyone who voted on it never use the internet? How is that enforcable in any way?
I mean, you won’t see me shedding any tears for the multinational hundred billion dollar internet based corporations lol
What about the Canadian news companies that now won’t get nearly as many visitors because many people see news through sites like google?
Or what about the Canadians who won’t see as much local news? Even if they go look for it specifically themselves, they can expect to see less of it on social media because other people won’t see as much (and thus won’t share as much).
I’m Canadian, so no need for hypotheticals. I can browse my news sites directly. No trouble for me.
Also, and this is a novel idea, maybe Google et al. should abide by the rules of the states in which they operate without forms of petty protest. This is a battle between a slew of capitalist conglomerates and the Canadian state. I’m virulently anti-capitalist, so I don’t particularly care about the profit incentives of any of these corporations or even of the private for profit news sites. The bill to be clear would ensure the news sites get paid, and that Google and Facebook do not profit off of the content their editors are writing. But Google and Facebook don’t like that, because they’re capitalists who control enough GDP to buy Canada. So they can screw off then, that’s fine. Like I said before, you won’t see my crying for them.
For news aggregation and summary, I totally agree with you. For just search indexing and referring, though, I think paying just for a link that is no more than 10 words is not justified. If I post a link in this comment from a Canadian news site, should I pay a fee, too? Because section 2 part b states that access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.
I’m late to the discussion, i’m no fan of giant companies and the billionaires that run them but this isn’t the place to fight them. If you’re summarising the article and depriving the website of clicks and ad revenue then you should definitely pay the news sites, but if you’re linking to them then you’re basically helping direct traffic there. Just like what happened in Spain Google is going to pull out of Canada, the news publishers are going to realise they’re seeing a huge drop in traffic, and a year or two later they’ll be asking Google to come back.
Maybe. Its a nonsense song and dance while Canadians are facing the worst cost of living and housing crisis in our nation’s history. We had the government outright prove that the nation’s largest grocery chains are fixing prices under the guide of inflation and literally nothing happened. Two weeks of groceries for me and my family cost us nearly 350$ when I was there yesterday. The same amount was around 150$ 2 years ago. Wages haven’t increased anywhere near that much. But you get used to liberal democracy doing whatever it can to distract from the crimes of capitalists. So they’re “taking a stand” against news aggregators. It doesn’t matter either way. The working class is one bad day away from homelessness. A dispute between local media capitalists and foreign mega corporations has no impact on anything whatsoever.
From what I understand, it’s not just linking to the article. It’s when the news is summarized on Google, to the point where you learn everything you need right from the search page rather than clicking the link to the article. So the company that hosts the article is losing as revenue because people are just reading the summary and not looking at the article itself.
It does include just linking.
(2) 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.
Indexing includes showing a basic result in search. Plus you can’t show a normal search results without pulling at least a portion of the news content. I can only assume the author and those that voted for this have literally never searched for a news article online before.
That’s just a horrible decision all around. It’s blatantly obvious that this will hurt the producers of the content far more than help. Why is it that the people making decisions about the internet always seem to have never used it?
Possible solution (for now): Use a different search engine. I recommend DuckDuckGo.
The best solution is to stop reading Canadian media. Those companies knew exactly what was going to happen, enough of them supported it, and they deserve to lose their readers.
