Canada

Not making an argument, just answering a question:

One way that news is different from other articles is that very often, consumers of the content only read the metadata. How many stories have you followed, but just by reading the headlines? And when you aggregate it, it becomes a new product. The metadata that they aggregate is clearly providing them a great deal of value. It's drawing people to their site in the first place. They're putting their own ads on other people's content, etc.

Is something like lemmy or Reddit any better?

In some countries, Facebook is used as a synonym for "the Internet" because large portions of the population access the web through Facebook.

There's also the interesting aspect that they can control what search results appear in what order, if it all.

Everyone thinks corporations pay Google to have their name at the top, but rarely do people think that corporations pay Google to keep their name at the bottom.

At this point I would support not backing down purely to set an example of our own.

Reminds me of the classic Onion headline

"Facebook to discuss plans to regulate government over fears it has become too powerful."

Isn't the EU preparing something similar?

Bill C-18 will come into force later this year. It requires regulatory provisions that will need to be formally published and consulted through The Canada Gazette etc.

This seems to be Meta & Google flexing and doing their worst to local media before the proposed regulations are published.

Here’s a CBC breakdown from last Friday.

Reacting to Google's announcement Thursday, Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez told CBC News conversations with the company are ongoing and the "clarity" it wants about the Online News Act will come as the government hammers out regulations.

Here’s the 44-1/C-18 information page for the Parliament of Canada.

That’s one of the points in the article - despite the dire comments from the two corporations, almost everyone expects it to settle down.

The government should be providing basic communication services. It's criminal that private companies like Twitter are the de facto alert and information system for life saving government services. That kind of infrastructure needs to be socialized. Likewise we should have channels for publishing journalism that are not controlled by private capital.

This is what I did on Friday. Took 20 minutes and set up a feedly account. It's just like I did with Reddit a few weeks ago. Set up a Lemmy account, and moved on with my life. We can easily adapt.

There is no way the general public would adopt RSS. The barrier to entry is just too high right now. Technology that delivers news needs to be idiot-proof and require basically 1-2 steps

Eg:

• click on the blue-green swirl
• type "Facebook"

Or:

• turn TV on
• change channel to news

Don't get me wrong, RSS is great, but it's also used exclusively by the computer-literate and it has been that way for basically 25 years.

It’s called negotiation. What Canada is doing is not that. They are demanding unbounded amounts of money.

In Australia they ended up negotiating a price that worked for both sides. No doubt a predictable among each year too.

Trying to charge people for links is incredibly bad.

Good thing the law isnt charging people but the richest and most powerful corporations on the planet!

News sites used to generate a lot of ad revenue. Now, Google and Facebook combine to receive 80% of all ad revenue. If you see an ad online, it's likely Google or Facebook got paid for it.

But why do they make so much ad money? Because they host links to what people want. They're making tens of billions simply by hosting links to the content of others, who aren't making money anymore because advertisers give their money to the link hosters and not the content creators. This "link tax" is a way to ensure the content creators get their fair share. Google and Facebook don't create content, they link to it. Why should they get all the money?