this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Good. This law is ridiculous and I'm glad it won't give the result they intended. Being able to link to things freely is a very basic part of the web, we really shouldn't mess with that. And Facebook is a ridiculous place to get news from so it may have ancillary benefits as well in terms of maybe slightly improving public discourse and encouraging people onto other platforms with more transparency around their content weighting and data use practices.
That's hopeful. The only thing I see coming from this is no actual news being linked and the woo to spread exponentially faster.
Oof. Ya.
Given what's going on with WhatsApp in India I think this will be the case.
How is it ridiculous to ask them to share some of the profit they make from Canadian work with Canada?
It's not, that's why I didn't say that.
You said the law is ridiculous
I did, because it tries to regulate merely linking to content, something I consider absurd. What I did not say is that it is "ridiculous to ask them to share some of the profit they make from Canadian work with Canada". So I responded as such. I'm not terribly interested in engaging with someone who puts words in my mouth. If you're curious for more of my thoughts on this topic, I intend to respond to the interesting comment by @[email protected] when I have time to be more thoughtful.
That's exactly what this law does, it makes them obligated to pay taxes to the government to compensate Canadian news agencies because they make profit off of them.
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_1.html
"Overview Many Canadians access news content through digital intermediaries. Bill C-18 would enact the Online News Act (the Act), which proposes a regime to regulate digital platforms that act as intermediaries in Canada’s news media ecosystem in order to enhance fairness in the Canadian digital news market. The Bill introduces a new bargaining framework intended to support news businesses to secure fair compensation when their news content is made available by dominant digital news intermediaries and generates economic gain."
So, again, how is it unfair to compensate the people whose work you profit from?
Does your employer pay you by paying taxes and then government distributes them to you? If there was a real business here, then an arrangement would be made between Facebook and these news organizations. Facebook wouldn't want to lose out on the profit so they'd pay news agencies for the content. But the truth this, the news agencies are profiting far more than Facebook is from this arrangement. They literally need the government to step in because there is no actual business here.
The news agencies can absolutely pull out of Facebook. They can opt out of summaries and photos. But they don't.
Eh...
Universal healthcare, roads, free education...
My employer pays taxes and I profit from it.
You think an arrangement could be made by individual news agencies where the freaking government couldn't? Meta would have just blocked them one by one instead of all at once.
News agencies don't profit because people don't click and they actually lose profit because these companies are responsible for people losing faith in traditional media by intentionally pushing disinformation because fear and hate increases engagement and they don't care about the consequences.
That's not what I mean and you know it. Your employer pays you directly for your services because it's a benefit to them. Which is basically how all commerce works.
No. I think the government has to force this business arrangement because it's completely backwards. Media companies benefit from linking (they'd literally have no traffic if they didn't) and they're trying to extract some value where none exists.
And stores won't profit if people don't buy stuff. And streaming services don't profit if nobody subscribes. That's life. If, as a media company, you've giving up all your value by providing summaries and images then that's your problem. If Tim Hortons can't sell any donuts because they give out a free Timbit and a shot of coffee, it is not for the government to fix that. They should just stop doing it.
So Meta would pay for the service media companies provide then, glad we agree, don't know why you're arguing then.
The government is forcing the arrangement, the companies decided to just pull out if they had to pay their fair share.
Media companies lost traffic because of social media but they bring traffic to social media. If they don't provide summaries or images then they won't get promoted. See what's happening? You're arguing in favor of letting US private companies control the financing and promotion of Canadian media.
You realise you're defending companies that together make trillions yet pay next to nothing in taxes in their own country (and pay nothing in Canada)?
Media companies should pay Meta for the service they provide. It's literally advertising. Media companies post this material themselves. But if media companies are providing a service that's worth paying for then they should simply withhold that service until Meta pays. That's how the free market works. Tim Hortons doesn't give out free donuts and then go to the government and force you to pay for them if you take one. No, you just buy the damn donut if it's worth buying.
If Meta benefited from this arrangement they'd pay. Is Lemmy also morally responsible to pay media companies because there is a link to this article with a summary?
Media companies lost traffic because the Internet invalidates their business model. Linking is the only thing they have left -- they should be thankful for it.
Just because someone is an asshole doesn't mean they're entitled to less justice. If something is wrong, it's wrong for everyone.
"Media companies post this material themselves."
Didn't know that when I share an article from Radio-Canada I'm acting in their name 🤔
"Is Lemmy also morally responsible to pay media companies because there is a link to this article with a summary? "
If it becomes profitable for the instance's owner then yes.
"Media companies lost traffic because the Internet invalidates their business model. "
It doesn't because without social media you would still need to check articles on their website instead of just scanning a summary and some pictures in 5 seconds. I'm old enough to have been on the internet before any social medias as we imagine them today and new corps didn't mind it back then because people actually had to go on their website to see news, they would read the journal online instead of reading it in paper form, that's all, now people read snippets on Facebook and don't check the source or the physical version.
You're arguing for the destruction of the web at this point. Freely linking to content is the backbone of the whole thing.
You're basically saying that actual journalism itself has no value -- if a 2 line summary and single picture is the entire value to someone then why is anyone paying for this? An AI can make that for free. I could be a journalist if all the value is a summary and picture. You're making such a twisted argument with this whole idea that people just read the summary, never click the article, and somehow somebody needs to make money from the article that nobody reads. Media companies provide the summary and pictures to Facebook so that they'll click on the article in the first place.
The destruction of the web... As if the web was social medias 🙄 If the web can't survive the disappearance of Facebook and article summaries then I don't want to use it anymore.
Sure, I'm the one arguing for news corporations to be compensated for the content they provide but I believe journalism has no value 🙄
Go check how much time people spend on each item on their feed on Facebook and how much time they spend on average on a web page vs just on Facebook every day and tell me again how Facebook is bringing traffic to traditional media!
Social media is just as part of the web as anything. Trying to carve out some exception for Facebook because you don't like them is not a logical argument. What about Wikipedia? Reddit? Lemmy? Digg? Google?
Please provide the receipts, then.
If people have to pay for links, how is that going to provide more traffic to traditional media? Isn't that the whole point of links... to provide traffic.
Facebook thinks people will spend just as much time on Facebook without news links. This whole law is pointless. It's trying to create a market for "links" that doesn't exist. Again, if media companies don't want to provide summaries and images to Facebook they can do that. Instead, all the major news papers in Canada put tags specifically for Facebook to use with their content. They want those links. So makes it valuable to them, not the other way around.
If all you just want to take money from Facebook and give it Canadian media companies, why not just make a law that does that.
"people have to pay for links"
Now it's people that have to pay? What?
You know what's funny, you keep saying "It will be bad for media companies because it brings them clicks" but show me media companies complaining about the law then! Funny that, they don't!
La Presse's director even have an interview where he said "If they block our links then so be it, it's just sad that those who only inform themselves on social media will be losing on reliable information."
Man, that's the reaction of someone who fears he might lose money!
"If all you just want to take money from Facebook and give it Canadian media companies, why not just make a law that does that."
Let me present to you Bill C18!
Ok. So Facebook doesn't care and the media companies don't care. I guess we'll see who blinks first.
If we look at history then...
It will be Meta and Alphabet.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/australia-says-law-making-facebook-google-pay-news-has-worked-2022-12-02/
They'll come back with their tail between their leg and say they're ready to negotiate if the law can be modified a bit and in the end they'll pay for Canadian news just like they already do with Australian news.
If all that is needed to happen is that media companies withhold their content for Meta to capitulate then they could have done that. We don't need a law for that.
Looks much better to be able to say "We tried to negotiate, they didn't want to. The government tried to negotiate, they didn't want to. The government passed a law to force them to negotiate, they left the table and blocked us. We took all the reasonable steps and they are the ones who are unreasonable."
Anyway, what about smaller medias? You think Facebook would beg a local journal for a rural community to come back? As if.
You know that the Australian law doesn't even apply to smaller medias right? It's unsurprising that a law basically written by Rupert Murdoch would include requirements that media companies have to be a certain size in order to eligible.
So? Canada needs to negotiate the same deal is what you're saying?
The amount of traffic they drive to the news sites is payment enough.
It doesn't drive traffic to the news site though, people check the summary and move on to the next thing on their wall.
If it doesn't drive traffic then the news sites shouldn't at all be worried about sites not linking to them anymore.
Well I haven't seen any media complaining about it. You realise they're just reporting a fact in that article?
Maybe if people actually read the articles more they would know the difference between reporting and giving an opinion 🤔 I wonder what happened for people to just start reading summaries and titles and not understand what news are... Ooooooh...
It doesn't, though. Facebook is grabbing more and more of the content making it less and less necessary to actually go to the news site. As a result, Facebook gets to profit from ads instead of the news site.
This is a well-intentioned but horrible law. There are a couple of things they could do instead.
Ban large scale data collection on end users without the combination of oversight and properly informed consent that happens in medical research. That still allows for some of the things that are actually beneficial to individuals and society while stripping the power to use the data for such frivolous things as ads. Doing micro-targeted ads requires a level of surveillance and data processing that is beyond the means of any company that has anything else as it's core competency. That would put ads back a few decades to when an advertiser did not choose a customer via surveillance, but chose a market based on interest (context ads). This would put the original creators and publishers of content back in charge. This would have the added benefit of increasing privacy online.
They could ban any practice that interferes with the end-to-end principal of communications. This is the principal that says "the stuff I specifically request is the stuff that is most visible." Right now, Facebook et al are poisoning feeds with "pay to promote" crap so extensively that I'm likely to see something from a bunch of right wing nut jobs at the top of my feed instead of the Marxist outlet I've actually subscribed to. Worse, I might never see the people and organizations that I explicitly follow unless those people and organizations pay up. That could have the side effect of pouring water on the dumpster fire that passes for discourse, because fringe movements would have to actually gain traction through the quality of their ideas and arguments instead of by just throwing money around.
We're they linking or showing full content within Facebook?
To my understanding the bill is about payment for links.