> Many people who would otherwise be appalled at laws like this seem to want to rationalize this because its specifically targeting Google and Meta.

It's not just a matter of the targeted companies being Google and Meta, even though these two especially deserve it.

It's the simple realization that good journalism requires good money, and that the current balance between news organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task. It is also true of other type of content creators, by the way: there is a structural imbalance between content creators and content brokers. This is even more true with Google's zero-click efforts.

While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt.

There's no imbalance in this particular situation: newspapers produce content, search engines/ social network surface and link to it.

What's happening here is that publishers and their owners somehow figured these pesky internet wiz kids owe them more money.

> There's no imbalance here: newspapers produce content, search engines/social networks surface and link to it.

As evidenced by the average RoI at Google compared to news organisations.

I expect you'll find that discontinuing their news linking service in Canada has very little effect on Google's profitability.

I agree that Canada should probably have targeted their ad service rather than which link they publish.

One is the world’s dominant gateway to the internet, the others are a handful of websites.

> As evidenced by the average RoI at Google compared to news organisations.

Not a good metric.

The ROI difference is because of both entities being in different industries, and other things unrelated to the power balance. We can similarly compare the ROI of a news organization and say a restaurant and lament that there is an imbalance of power.

The nefarious (and probably correct) take is that this is intentional by the Trudeau Liberals.

If you obliterate 30% of every news media's revenue you make them even more dependent on the Liberals funding them. This is on top of the existing "Support Canadian Journalism" fund that the Liberal government distributes in a completely "unbiased" way.

Put simply: Trudeau wants absolute control of Canadian media. Bill C-18 is the first of three to achieve this objective. This grants them more control by making them the major source of income for all media. The next one will be about funding Canadian content (which the Liberals will define and select). The last will be about censoring and de-platforming hate (which they will also define and select). When Trudeau is done - and he will finish because the NDP will support him no matter what - Canada's media landscape will look something like a blend between North Korea and China.

Care to provide verifiable details and a timeline for "look like North Korea and China"?

Because otherwise this smells like sensationalism to me. Hate is already defined in Canadian law wrt hate crimes, btw, and that predates the Trudeau-monster by decades.

With out a verifiable “roadmap to tyranny”, must we necessarily conclude that everything is fine?

"Everything is fine" is a position taken by nobody afaict. But if someone is going to make brash claims they better have more than just bluster otherwise they're actively worsening discourse IMO.

What claims can be made with current information in your opinion? Is the Trudeau regime , just another run of the mill Canadian government or possibly something more sinister (or at least more corrupt).

I don't claim to be super-knowledgeable on this topic but IMO the current government is marginally competent and so far I'd say they seem about as corrupt as the Liberals normally are, which is to say: unacceptably. I'm not sure they're any worse than previous iterations, but history will decide. The emergency measures act stuff seems like it was mishandled to me. I find the leadership to be heavy-handed with the virtue signalling, but they're playing to the crowd in the same way that the Conservatives play to the anti-woke crowd - I despise it on both sides. They're doing a whole pile of nothing about healthcare and the housing situation, and I think it'll cost them the next election.

In a world with better options I'd never vote Liberal, but since the Conservatives can't seem to come up with a coherent environmental plan to save their lives (and have abandoned what was originally their carbon tax plan because "The Liberals like it so it must be bad"), and the best leader they can come up with was encouraging people to buy crypto right before it crashed, they still seem like the better option. And I say this with a sour taste in my mouth.

What's your take?

My take on carbon tax is it is mostly an income redistribution scheme which moves wealth from the middle to lower classes while reducing the size of the middle class.

If it does have a material global impact on carbon emissions it will only be a result of somehow shaming other countries to reduce their own emissions. While I can’t find any estimate of how much the carbon tax will reduce emissions, our empty country only has 1.89% to work with. So the forest fires are not going to stop as a result of the tax alone.

I suspect what will happen is other countries will innovate their way out of the problem while Canadians embrace pointless atonement leaving the country weaker and poorer as a result.

Entirely plausible, Canada as a country coasts on our relative affluence and resource base far too much, I'd like to see us pushing money into R&D for technological solutions as well.

I know what you're saying about our contribution to emissions, but I feel like the most basic principle of good faith when you're trying to get another party to do something like this is to deal with your own shit first, otherwise it's just hypocrisy. Every country in the world can look at their own contributions and say "well, most of it isn't our fault, so why should we fix it until somebody else does?". Rightly or wrongly, Canada likes to think of itself as a world leader, so let's put our big boy pants on and step up.

“Big boy pants” and “stepping up” are meaningless phrases intended to elicit and irrational emotional response. Let’s instead focus on the phrase “solve the problem” and work backward from there. The current carbon tax scheme does very little to concretely solve anything - entirely hinging on factors outside of our control such as the ability to influence China.

> There's no imbalance here: newspapers produce content, search engines/social networks surface and link to it.

The imbalance is that as platforms, newspapers cross-subsidize content. Interesting headlines attract readers to the newspaper, but once in hand readers are likely to continue reading the other, less unique articles. (See also why newspapers carry sports scores and comics). An investigative report is by itself a money-loser, but the overall effect on net readership is a win.

Aggregators break newspapers as platforms. Google et al provide extra discoverability for a single article, certainly, but then there's no lock-in to keep readers on the (now) website, reading more and seeing other ads. Headline-and-summary view might even result in zero-click satisfaction, denying the outlet even that first impression.

This might just be a change that the industry must adapt to, in the same way that television and radio news took over the news-breaking role. However, it is more than a trivial threat to the fundamental business model of a news outlet; it's not (just) superficial greed.

Personally I'd be happy to see the ad driving model die. It used to be that people bought newspapers or didn't read them. They still had some ads, granted, but far less intrusive than today's web ads with their colours and animations.

I'm huge into supporting good journalism, and think we need some sort of intervention here. But I've very very strongly opposed to this new law. If news sites want to charge for their content they should put it behind a pay gate.

I pay for news, but insultingly they STILL feed me ads. There is no tier that I can pay for that will eliminate the ads. I really don't have much sympathy for them given their refusal to somehow adapt to the times and offer service that users feel valuable enough to pay for.

It used to be that you could get a paper for a quarter out of a machine on the street. That quarter covered printing and delivery. the newspaper had a classified ads section (plus inline ads, plus ad inserts) which actually funded the people who make the newspaper.

Not to mention they often had a rich owner who ran them at a loss if need be to ensure they keep being friendly to him/her when needed.

Because what you paid is far less ( think 10x) than what it takes to run.

Traditional paper-based newspaper is ad-supported too.

> If news sites want to charge for their content they should put it behind a pay gate.

This is the 'trade journalism' model. Here, good journalism still exists, but the price is more than most people would afford. People buy trade journals when the news is important, with direct financial implications that justify the cost of admission.

General journalism, however, is something close to a public service. It's better in a vague, hand-wavy way to have an educated citizen body that's informed about current affairs, but few individual citizens derive much value from their own knowledge. (This is also why people tend to gravitate towards 'entertaining' news, by some definition. Come for the sports scores, stay for current events.)

In this model, the benefit of news is externalized. I benefit when other people are educated. This is a classic market failure, and it suggests that a reader-pays framework will underprovide news.

The can post a robots.txt file to say not to index.

How do they say "You can index the story in your search engine, but you cannot borrow the text or images of our content for use on your own news site or info panels"?

I think you can do this with

  <meta name="googlebot-news" content="nosnippet">

Why should one have to do this? The slippery slope of what is ok goes straight from this to copyright laundering via LLMs.

Why shouldn't they? This is basic fair use. Google is giving them an out they don't have to.

Fair Use isn't a thing in Canada.

Google and Meta (or Twitter or anyone else) don't 'borrow' them. Websites explicitly declare what image and snippet they want anyone to use to summarise a link in the metadata on the web page. it's a choice by newspapers to place that image and text below the link.

Don't want people gazing on your property? Erect a fence. Nothing prevents media sites from implementing access controls to only allow paying customers.

That's a classic case of prisoner's dilemma though.

By acting at national level, news publishers (partially) avoid that dilemma.

Don't want people stepping on your property? Shoot them down, why bother calling the police!

No one pays. Journalism is a public good that will not exist if the current status quo continues. It’s in societies interest to ensure that doesn’t happen but everyone wants to free ride

If no-one pays, then society as a whole clearly disagrees that it is a public good. Or, at least, that it is a public good worth the expense.

There are plenty of news websites with paywalls, it's common amongst conservative media. It's primarily the left wing media that thinks the government should tax tech firms instead of newspapers being required to charge customers.

…what? I’m not familiar with Canadian papers, but at least with American news sources most of the national newspapers have paywalls regardless of ideology (NYT, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal), while television news (CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC) and right-wing sources tend to be ad supported (Breitbart, New York Post), and more left-wing sources usually tend to be some form of donation funded (Jacobin, Mother Jones). If this were passed in the US, the big winners would be right-wing sources and the television news networks.

i'm all for tearing down the structures of capitalism, but passing laws that say "these two companies have lots of money, so they should give some of it to these other companies that we decided should have money" is just an absolute garbage way to do anything. this is not a welcome first attempt. it's not even an attempt to solve anything.

it's just a way to funnel some money into the pockets of the absurdly wealthy three people who run the news media in canada. what the canadian news industry needs is not for the rogers family to get a bunch more cash.

>> While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt.

I normally agree with release early, collect data and iterate. I'm not sure the law, with a bill of this impact, dependent on a bunch of politicians with obvious bias, who just went on summer vacation for 3 months, falls into this category.

Just tax big companies more liberally, in general and everywhere. No need to target so specifically, e.g. there is so much value in all the data that citizens all around the world are providing, almost for free… maintenance costs for supporting usage are low in comparison, check yearly investor reports for profits.

Then we’d not only have enough financial resources to subsidize a free and healthy press but also for other worthy endeavours like better health care, open source software, science, etc.

All without hampering with basic pillars of the web.

>While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt.

The problem is media companies have been pushing this exact blueprint for d years. decades. It is a terrible, terrible template.

If countries want to tax big tech and give the money to media organizations, they should be honest about it. Laws like this distort reality.

>the current balance between news organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task.

This doesn't make sense. Newspapers want links to their stories. I've even seen media organization paying "internet brokers" to advertise stories.

The law has the economics of the internet backwards. To receive a link is to benefit, everyone knows this except the government.

> This doesn't make sense. Newspapers want links to their stories.

Newspapers want monetization. There are three ways linking to stories equal monetization:

* Newspapers get enough ad money through these link. This mostly doesn't work.

* Newspapers cut their costs and deliver shitty clickbait.

* Newspapers get funded by "philantropy". This ranges from newspapers independently funded by trust funds to newspapers being bought by magnates.

Overall, we can see that linking is far from enough for most newspapers to publish independent, quality work.

> To receive a link is to benefit, everyone knows this except the government.

This appears to no longer be true. Groups benefiting from internet are mostly eyeball brokers, not content distributors.

Newspapers lost monetization when they lost their classifieds business.

4: Links bring in readers who then decide to support the journalism.

I personally believe reader support is the only viable option going forward.

I whole heartedly agree - I think subcription is an immense boon to services like these... that being said, if Google parses most of your article into their news tab and then only serves up an amp'ified version of your site it can be quite difficult to actually present users with an option to subscribe. I'm a Canadian and I don't like C-18, but I also think that search/aggregation companies have far too loose a leash right now and are curating an environment where they'll take home all the revenue.

Well, first of all, Amp is opt-in. And second, indexing is opt-out. So the publishers are already in full control of how Google uses their content.

Or you know the fourth option - charge people money for access. Crazy I know.

I don't think there has ever been a successful media organization that relied on subscription revenue, except for very specialized areas (business press, science, hobby).

In general, the costs of running a journalistic organization (one which discovers news for itself, not just repackaging news from other media) far outweigh what people are willing to pay for this. Remember that newspapers, even in the times before radio was widespread, were always dirt cheap.

Not to mention, there is a problem of competition. Facts can't be copyrighted, so nothing can stop me from buying a subscription to NYT and reporting everything they write, in my own words, charging much less if I want to. Sure, I don't have their reputation, but if their subscription were high enough to cover their costs alone, plenty of people would chose to trust me.

> except for very specialized areas [...] science

For that specific example, science publications don't create any content, nor do they have paid staff curating collected content. That kind of helps their bottom line.

These organizations are closer in their model to Google than they are to news organizations (ie they gatekeep a specific type of resource that content producers need).

From what little I know from business press, in my business area they also get a significant share of their content for free, although it is much less predatory than science publications.

> Remember that newspapers, even in the times before radio was widespread, were always dirt cheap.

Not anymore - I used to buy the New York Post to read in a bar from time to time, and it was 25 cents (and arguably overpriced then). It’s how 1-1.50USD depending on day, if you can even find a copy.

>> If countries want to tax big tech and give the money to media organizations, they should be honest about it. Laws like this distort reality.

The idea that big tech would pay the appropriate amount of tax to the appropriate country is laughable.

Well yeah, but if your local mom and pop diner has to pay, why not google too? That's what the governments are for, aren't they? If google doesn't want to pay taxes in (eg.) canada, they can stop doing stuff that earns them money there.

So, if big companies and small companies are being treated differently, the governments are not doing their jobs and have to be replaced by someone who will do it.

Where does the word appropriate come in to play?

> there is a structural imbalance between content creators and content brokers

As seen in Twitch.tv vs Kick.com where streamers are dropping Twitch and migrating en-masse to Kick. Abusing the content creators can backfire. However Google is in a different situation; they have a virtual monopoly on content discovery and not existing on Google basically means not existing at all. How do you fix that? Is Google an internet-utility? Should it be regulated as such?

It's not a utility. Search might be, and the state is welcome to start its own search engine and run it as a utility, paying zero innovation wages as utilities do.

Google the search engine is critical internet infrastructure, and innovation into it is stagnant from a user's perspective.

It is not internet infrastructure at all. It's a consumer tool, potentially about to be replaced by AI.

Another thing about utilities: water or electricity are fungible goods, easily measured. Search is rather trickier to decide what a good outcome is, and the thought of paying for politicians and administrators to debate search rank orders for eternity seems a terrible use of money.

Finally, things like water supply have been around for tens of thousands of years. Thinking search hasn't done so much in the last 10 maybe be a little short term! Thinking it will be around in the long term at all, and thus worth converting may also be a little short term.

The average consumer's experience of the Internet would be drastically altered if Google didn't exist. From the functional standpoint of a user, Google is internet infrastructure. Whether it's a utility or not is a different question, but I argue that it is definitely internet infrastructure since people's life and usage of the web would very disrupted without Google. It may end up replaced, like the phone was. That's not relevant as to whether people use and rely on it like infrastructure.

Twitch.tv vs Kick.com is a bit more complicated, right?

Twitch claims it loses money on big streamers[1] and Kick is almost certainly being subsidized by online gambling company Stake[2][3].

[1] https://twitter.com/djfluffkins/status/1479362350566109184

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/12/06/trainw...

[3] https://www.bonus.com/news/stake-com-founders-own-kick/

I suspect Hollywood accounting going on here: paying inflated egress to AWS, their own property.

I disagree that its welcome. I think its just a shakedown.

> It's the simple realization that good journalism requires good money, and that the current balance between news organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task. It is also true of other type of content creators, by the way: there is a structural imbalance between content creators and content brokers. This is even more true with Google's zero-click efforts.

Let's go 100%. Will journalists then pay people who they report on?

We need proper paid subscriptions again, but we have the chicken/egg problem that people only pay for extremely high quality sources, but there are none.

CBC has received $1.2 billion annually from the federal government (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporat...) and is very ... government friendly ... in matters like the trucker protests.

I remember more independent press around 2000-2010, where there was true opposition in the media. I see nothing like that now.

Slogans like "good journalism requires good money" don't really bring any reasonable argument to the table, let's be frank. Neither good journalism nor good money is defined for everyone, and the correlation between the two is not really established. One may say media corporations used to have an unwarranted political influence, and excessive revenues during the TV era, and now things are settling to a level which is more normal than the past which media people would like to bring back.

If there were any quality journalism to be found and to be needed by people, posting headlines wouldn’t prevent them from clicking the link.

> It's the simple realization that good journalism requires good money, and that the current balance between news organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task.

Nobody owes anyone else a business model.

> Nobody owes anyone else a business model

But there is public interest in having newspapers. (A tax on large digital ad platforms to subsidise newspapers makes much more sense.)

Canada does have a bunch of subsidies for news already (not to mention cbc is gov funded)

> While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt.

First attempt for Canada maybe. Australia did it a few years ago:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56163550

The first draft of that law was initially written by the news companies themselves, and was a hilarious exercise in overreach. (For example, the first draft insisted news companies be allowed to edit joe citizens posts to the media companies Facebook page.) The version put before parliament was watered down and vague enough that after Facebook stopped posting Australian news, a compromise was reached that oddly didn't require a change to the legislation (and the media companies got far less).

But Australia wasn't the first either. The Australian media companies got their idea from the French(?):

    https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/21/google-agrees-to-pay-french-publishers-for-news.html

I agree with some other posters here. It's not welcome. It's a shakedown from dinosaurs grasping for straws, and to accommodate them the pollies stretched the definition of copyright even further.

It was obvious it wouldn't work, and clearly hasn't worked in Australia. The newspapers are still posting large losses, still shutting down newsrooms. It's inevitable they will disappear in their current form. The newspapers business wasn't selling news or doing investigations to create news. Their business is the same as Google's: selling ads. The news was always just the bait they used to get people to read their ads and they shamelessly copied it, often with only a few words changed, between mastheads. Each had their own little area they sold to, the size largely determined by how far you ship dead trees in about 6 hours. Now the BBC, CNN, The Guardian and the other remaining big ones can reach the entire world now, so we don't need thousands of little mastheads all repeating the same news items. These big news rooms do a far better job that the little ones at gathering news, and selling ads. And so, the little mastheads will die.

It's bad law because in order to cover this use case, they banned creating 10 or 20 word summaries of a 200 or 300 word article, expanding copyright accordingly. That had to do that because at least in Google's case, as all Google every did was post a few words and a link to the actual content, on the newspapers site. Copyright terms have already been stretched well beyond their utilitarian justification, probably by an order of magnitude. This stretches the definition of what is covered by copyright by a similar amount. Admittedly this stretch is fairly harmless here, but if it leaks into other domains we will have a mess on our hands.

> It's the simple realization that good journalism requires good money, and that the current balance between news organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task. It is also true of other type of content creators, by the way: there is a structural imbalance between content creators and content brokers. This is even more true with Google's zero-click efforts.

then why were most news publications as bad as they are now 20 years ago? maybe they just suck. I learn more from HN that some news site ever did.

When I read american aerticles about my country, they are just plain WRONG.

> It's the simple realization that good journalism requires good money

If this were about good journalism then the law wouldn’t be necessary at all. The revenue these companies are generating from the journalism content is from displaying a headline. The whole point of the law is that the actual content of these articles is so utterly worthless, that users can’t even be bothered clicking on it. A substantial portion of those users derive all of the limited value that they believe it has by reading the headline alone. There is no legislative solution to that problem. This is law is only a solution to the problem of useless businesses being selected out of the market by their consumers.

> It's a bad thing to prevent sites from linking to one another. It's a bad thing to interfere with the ability to access information on the Internet for reasons of nationalist politics.

Would this prevent embedding links into your posts? I thought it's about platforms displaying enough information discouraging the person to visit the news site. I get that they want people to stay on their platforms 24/7 but I also get the other side wanting a slice of the advertising cake.

When they said uncapped financial liability, I took that to also mean any meta user's post or search engine result that displayed the content could expose them financially - If I were a malicious actor, I would flood meta with posts from bots, and the equivalent to google results like posting too much of the article in the website's header.

No, the issue in this case is linking.

This is false. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36528169

Having any portion of the text present is enough.

I thought so too, and thought that removing the sites from Google Search was a bit bullyish, but it looks like the bill specifically targets links in (2)(b).

"Making available of news content (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."

https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...

This would include HN

No, it only applies to specifically regulated "digital news intermediaries" who are selected for regulation according to the criteria:

Application

6 This Act applies in respect of a digital news intermediary if, having regard to the following factors, there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news businesses:

(a) the size of the intermediary or the operator;

(b) whether the market for the intermediary gives the operator a strategic advantage over news businesses; and

(c) whether the intermediary occupies a prominent market position.

So it would be up to the CRTC to decide whether or not to put HN on the list of "digital news intermediaries" by applying the above 3-part test. Given that HN is a (relatively) small forum, compared to Google or Facebook, it's unlikely for that to happen.

so then it depends on if HN ever embarasses the CRTC or the government. Better toe the line else be designated

I don’t think HNers will be losing any sleep over the inability to link to a couple of CBC articles!

The law tries to sort of massage this issue by just upfront saying that it only applies if you have a "significant bargaining power imbalance" over the news companies you're displaying.

Basically it only applies against you if you're big/important enough. I assume in practice this means Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Apple, and probably some others. Reddit, I suppose.

Essentially if the news orgs have the ability to cancel you, you don't apply. Considering the amount of funding the news orgs in Canada take from the government, seems like the government just wants a better stick.

I have heard it only applies to Google and Facebook at this point in time. I doubt any other companies would be even capable of complying.

Why wouldn’t it apply to Microsoft, Apple, Twitter and Reddit if it applies to Google and Facebook?

Apple and Microsoft generally get their pay from licensing fees rather than advertising fees and are therefore not in competition with news media companies. Reddit has generally been a fairly niche player, although if things change it might get covered. I don't know whether Twitter is as important as people have said it is, or if it is niche: it seems both Canada and a few years ago Australia both decided it was niche. And if anything, I gather than Elon Musk's purchase has made it less dependent on its limited advertising revenue and more dependent on subscriptions etc; if so it is even less in competition with news media organisations today than it was when Australia reviewed it.

Remember that even though people misleadingly call Google and Facebook tech companies, they are in fact advertising companies; and although people speak of news companies, they have generally seen news, opinion and analysis as tools for connecting eyeballs to advertising i.e. they're effectively advertising companies. This bill is about the direct competition between the two kinds of advertising companies - traditional, ~domestic companies with close and personal ties to the people who govern vs new, foreign companies who don't have such essential ties to politicians as journalists do.

If it were literally just about the provision of news, then Canada and Australia fund the CBC/RC and the ABC/SBS so why would they be so fussed? There are people who today make a living from podcasts and substacks who could not make money from traditional advertising/media companies. News would be provided.

(In fact, just to bring the point home, the original version of Australia's equivalent bill didn't allow the ABC and SBS to participate, because as government-funded media organisations they didn't suffer from the transition of advertising from news-sponsoring to tech-sponsoring in the same way as private companies.)

I suspect, in practice, it means an ambiguous new power that can be leveraged in any way that seems useful at the time.

> the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced

Do they define "portion" in more detail anywhere else? Otherwise, it's sounds like it's saying that using a single word that's contained by any news article means that "news content is made available", which is obviously absurd.

> Many people who would otherwise be appalled at laws like this seem to want to rationalize this because its specifically targeting Google and Meta.

That was exactly the sentiment in Australia when similar laws were passed there. Many, many people just said "Good, it's about time Google and Meta paid their fair share of taxes".

But they completely misunderstood they are not taxes at all, it's the Australian government collecting money, by law, to give directly to Rupert Murdoch (by law)

Yeah, the biggest winner under the Canadian law will be the American hedge funds who own PostMedia, the company that owns the vast majority of Canadian newspapers. But that's good apparently, since at the least the money doesn't go to those icky tech nerds.

I don't see how we can call this nationalistic politics. I'm sure if a (hypothetical) Canadian big-tech impacted news organizations similarly, they would also have been a target of this law.

Many of the biggest tech have origins in US and any country trying to make a law regulating businesses and technology within its borders is bound to impact American companies one way or the other. We can take the easy route and call it just nationalism or we can try to understand the intention/reasons behind the law. We may not agree with their laws but it is their right.

> I'm sure if a (hypothetical) Canadian big-tech impacted news organizations similarly, they would also have been a target of this law.

Very unlikely, IMHO. The CRTC isn't in the habit of making decisions that harm large Canadian companies.

Nobody denies its their right, but that doesn't mean it's not a very stupid action, motivated by dumb nationalism. You can't handwave circumstances away, as if the legislators don't know it is a cashgrab against foreign corporations and genuinely believe Google and Facebook are Canadian companies.

If you're registered in Canada as "Facebook Canada" and "Google Canada" then yes, you ARE a Canadian company. You can't have both the benefits of being locally registered and protected/treated like other domestic organisations but also pretend you have no unique responsibilities to the country you're making money from.

The amount of people here riding Facebook and Google's dick is absurd, and no one here at all are even the slightest perturbed by the fact that two major private corporate entities are trying to basically strongarm a sovereign nation into enacting its own legislation? It's disgusting.

I also love the choice of CTV news, the most corporate-friendly trash in Canada which ofcourse is highlighting the "fallout" first and foremost oh and look, the Canadian Minister didn't respond in time to our story but we'll quote at length the Google propagandist.

I don't think it adds anything to the discussion to personify and sexualize these companies.

It’s not dumb nationalism, it’s typical lobbying, sold as nationalism.

What's new?

We have been using that same excuse to block out Japanese and Chinese goods in various eras.

Just feels weird the Canadians are copying our playbook

They're using this playbook because it worked. Look at China, they were once a big threat to American Exceptionalism or whatever and now... <checks notes>... oh. Nevermind.

I appreciate most of your argument and I also agree that we can't just use nationalism to dismiss laws like this BUT

"We may not agree with their laws but it is their right"

This statement can be used to justify any law. We are also not debating whether it's their right but if it's a good law.

I'm not justifying any law here. Saying a law is bad because it is passed in nationalistic fervor is a weak argument. It is a government's right and responsibility to make laws of their land and whether a law is passed because the current government is nationalist or not is speculative and irrelevant.

A good law can be passed with ill intentions and a bad law can be passed with good intentions. We should judge a law based on its merits and consequences but not based on who or why it was introduced. In this case, we can discuss on outcomes of this law and how it is bad for the internet but speculating on the intentions is just a lazy argument.

Lately, the go to terms against any law impacting big tech have been 'nationalism', 'authoritarianism' and 'crash-grab' etc. Many times the laws on anti-trust or data-residency laws enacted by other countries have been termed as 'threat to democracy', authoritarian and as impacting basic structure of the internet etc.

Any country trying to regulate, promote its own tech or maintain sovereignty over its citizen's data is strong armed into abandoning them by utilizing various trade organizations, lobbying and diplomatic pressure. At the same time, there is lot of official and unofficial complaining and investigation about TikTok storing data of 'American citizens' in China.

To me this looks entirely hypocritical and any discussion that accuses 'nationalism' comes off as a bad faith argument.

It's a little more nuanced than "many people...rationalize...because it's specifically targeting Google".

It wasn't that long ago that Google was forcing AMP onto the same publishers by making it a requirement to appear in the news carousel. That forced a lot of unwanted intrusion into content that wasn't Google's to mess with. Including a forced banner in the most valuable space, hijacking right/left swipes to navigate to competitor publisher sites, etc. They have a strong demonstrated history of doing the wrong thing in this space.

Though, I agree, this law and the outcome aren't the solution.

AMP made the internet on my phone work. Most sites seem to dedicate 50% or more of the screen space to advertisements and load very slowly -- AMP sites were just crazy more performant -- I'm not saying AMP was the right move to make, but, it was trying to solve a real problem (similar to this bill also likely being the wrong move)

It did have some benefits for consumers (and some drawbacks also). That doesn't really change what they did to publishers with it though.

AMP worked like shit for me. Any time I had weird behavioural issues with a site, I’d look to the address bar and spot AMP. Using an extensions to prevent AMP stealing my clicks has made my phones browser work much better.

Guess: you were running iOS and your parent was running Android

I've always considered linking perfectly fine, but what to me is shady when platforms start to summarize or preview content of the link to the point where that functions as a substitute for the site.

There needs to be a distinction between reference to content and the content itself. When platforms start to profit from other people's work without their consent that shouldn't fly.

Snippets are explicitly declared in the metadata of a web page. Those previews only appear because the publisher explicitly asked for them to be used.

Well for Google specifically isn’t your ranking severely impacted if you don’t include them? In that case it’s hardly a choice.

How tightly does Google check if the preview matches the real content?

Governments are there to serve their citizens, not the interests of foreign multinational companies. If this is good for Canadian businesses and the citizens running them and working for them then good for them.

How is Google and Meta removing links to news businesses that really on eyeballs to generate revenue a good thing for those Canadian businesses?

If robbing is good for Canadian businesses and the citizens running them and working for them then good for them.

What about the citizens not running those businesses? This may not exactly be a "great firewall", but it seems like your argument could be applied equally to that, and it's hard for me to believe it's really a "good" for citizens in general

On the other hand, less people arguing over news articles may be what the world needs.

We have seen that in other markets this type of law has hurt not helped publishers.

This is Canada but it can easily be any country. We need a fix, big tech has monopolized ad revenue and is choking out the publishers. The quality of newspaper stories has deteriorated over the years and local news has suffered to the point of almost being nonexistent. Also, we now have very few companies that dominate the news. Look at how big the New York times has gotten. It's now the national newspaper in the US. All the other newspapers are nipping at it's ankles. It's a direct result of the fact that other newspapers can't compete without a steady flow of ad revenue. Big tech has sucked all the money which makes it hard for any newspaper to survive, specially regional ones. We need a fix.

These News orgs haven’t adapted. They’re sitting around publishing long winded, biased stories on their shitty Wordpress implementation with sketchy ads wondering why they’re failing.

I’d happily pay good money for high quality news / journalism presented appropriately for the medium. That means a lot of concise real time information, coupled with long form discussion and debate. All packaged up in a modern, high quality web app, with auxiliary mobile applications.

Are you paying for Reuters, New York Times, WaPo, et al right now?

No I’m Canadian, and those are American. I subscribe to Apple News for access to some Canadian sources, including my local newspaper. Though I don’t think it’s very good.

Fully agree. The unfortunate part is Canadians don’t seem to care.

> bad thing to interfere with the ability to access information on the Internet for reasons of nationalist politics

Or after 20 years, non Americans recognize information control should be more nationalized instead of under perview of US companies.