Won't somebody think of poor Meta?

Extortion isn't okay, even if you're extorting people you don't like.

And extortion codified into law is doubly not okay. Anyone with common sense should understand this.

What? Just because they are a megacorp, it is okay to breach their rights?

Yes? Because corporations shouldn’t have rights, should only exist to benefit citizens, and should have legislation applied when they are being harmful. I can’t tell if you were being sarcastic.

Corporations don't have rights. The people running them, however, do.

I don't know about Canada but here in the States we have a constitutionally guaranteed right to equal protection under the law. That includes the people that own and work for corporations.

Even in the US it is considered bad idea by many.

and who will incorporate these 'non-profit' 'companies' that will get bankrupt in a single lawsuit? Monks?

i also would love a system like this, but 'should's never truly apply in the real world.

How does Reddit and Twitter (maybe even Hackernews) and basically everyone else get around this besides Facebook? Is Reddit paying for every link now? I don't understand why I'm only hearing about Facebook with regard to issue

The Canadian law names Meta and Google specifically. Others are not affected. It's targeted extortion.

I am not aware of Meta or Google being specifically named in the law, could you please provide a source for this?

This page does not make that reference at least: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/online-n...

The bill text is here: https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a... The relevant piece from the summary is:

> (d) requires the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (the “Commission”) to maintain a list of digital news intermediaries in respect of which the enactment applies;

CRTC is a government entity so the government reserves the power to decide who is on the list. I couldn't find the list online though.

No presence in Canada?

It's not about linking to them, it's about supplying a comprehensive summary so that people read that and don't follow a link to them.

This is factually incorrect.

“The act says digital companies must pay news organizations when someone gets to a web story through a link on one of their products.” - https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/c-18-your-questions-answered-1...

It's about compensating the news agencies for the lack of ad income they get from people following links because of the summaries. If every summary has a similar click through rate then using the clicks through to distribute the news dollars makes sense. It's just assuming that 1 in 10[0] people who see the summary click through, so they use that to compensate for the other 9.

[0] or whatever the ratio is.

That’s, of course, assuming that those 10 people would have gone to that specific news site and read that specific story if it wasn’t linked.

Which is, of course, ridiculous. Those news sites are almost certainly gaining visitors from those links, not losing them.

It assumes that had FB not summarized the article, people would have followed the link in the same location in their feed. Seems fair to me.

You can claim that news sites gain more than they lose. That's a different argument.

Again, this doesn’t talk about summaries. It talks about following a link.

At the end of the day it’s not facebook’s responsibility to make sure the news are profitable, nor does it make sense to charge Facebook per link when it’s the users posting them.

The same with Google. All the sites need to do is adjust their robot.txt file and Google will leave them alone.

The law measures and thus talks about following a link. The reason it exists is that the summaries replace following the link.

Meanwhile, I have no problem with Google and Facebook giving some of the money the create to the people who make the content that is consumed.

Then the law should allow an exception for links which are not rendered as rich links. If it’s a plain html link, then problem solved.

Social media is killing what’s left of their business model, but Craigslist and the like gutted it first.

If we as a society want news outlets to stay afloat because they provide a service we deem valuable, let’s skip all the way to the logical conclusion of funding them directly.