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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Traditional paper-based newspaper is ad-supported too.
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.
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What's happening here is that publishers and their owners somehow figured these pesky internet wiz kids owe them more money.