If the persons who grew the coffee beans/roasted/brewed gave the beans away without asking for compensation because they hoped to obtain ad revenue, most people wouldn't go out of their way to pay the bean producers.

Canadian news media (unlike the vast majority of US news media besides NPR and PBS) is very significantly government subsidized, so this bill is really a stealth tax on Meta and Google.

At the end of the day, the question remains : do we want local news?

Meta and Alphabet are not gonna run news room in Manitoba and Northern Ontario.

If we don’t, fine. Local news can die and be replaced by influencer I guess ?

Then if we do, who is paying for it.

In your analogy, Meta & Alphabet are installing a patio in front of the coffee shops, and offer samples of the most popular latte of the day for free and you can get as many as you want.

> Then if we do, who is paying for it.

Simple, whoever wants the news.

> In your analogy, Meta & Alphabet are installing a patio in front of the coffee shops, and offer samples of the most popular latte of the day for free and you can get as many as you want.

Nah, the right analogy is Meta/Google drive a large bus of customers (only a fraction with tickets) to the coffee shop and not everyone goes into the shop. News orgs are then asking Google to pay them for Google driving the bus.

Your analogy is flawed. It's like someone smelling the coffee but not wanting to compensate the person who grew/roasted/brewed the coffee.

Smelling is not strong enough. People get enough from headlines. I would say “free sample” like those tiny bits or minuscule shots at Whole Food.

I agree. The people giving away the samples, in this case the news media themselves, are enticing you to their articles with the headline, maybe a blurb, and maybe an image. If you take the sample and don't care for the rest, that's fine. Nobody should have to pay for that. The whole point is that it's advertising. If nobody wants the product then nobody wants the product.

Charging someone for the "free" samples is no solution.

I think it's like someone talking about coffee, because that's literally what they're doing, talking about the news.

Someone has to come up with that headline, the contractor in the Manitoba newsroom office is doing it.

The shooter is usually dead, should be link to the victim’s obituary comment sections instead of a local news article ?

But someone has to write those too? LLM to the rescue!

Why is asking Fangs to give an obole to local news so insulting ?

Until those articles are writing themself, they don’t.

Someone comes up with the headline, and gives it away for free. If they dont want to give it away for free, they dont have to. If they want to charge for the headline, that is fine too.

What they don't get to do is say, you must buy this headline from us, if you want it or not.

This is all beside the point because the object at issue here is links, which don't even necessarily contain content.

>Why is asking Fangs to give an obole to local news so insulting ?

It is insulting because if anything, local news should be paying FANG. They get much of their web traffic from social media and search.

They dont need the governments help to ask for money. They can simply stop letting their headlines and links be indexed. The fact is they don't want to do that because it benefits them. They could try to negotiate with GOOGLE/Meta, but GOOGLE/Meta would rather drop them than pay.

Nobody wants to pay for what they have so they have to resort to bills to force companies to buy something they would rather not have.