After watching this play out in Australia, it doesn't feel like there are many new arguments to be made. It's just sad to watch.
As a Canadian, it bothers me that our politicians are willing to jump through mental hoops to avoid considering the most obvious solutions.
If news companies don't want people accessing their content through the web, shouldn't they simply take down their web sites? If they aren't willing to do that (because, say, the benefits outweigh the costs), then perhaps this isn't an issue that warrants legislation...
The problem here is that people are not, at scale, hitting the news company website. Users of social media platforms see headlines, sometimes an alt text/description followed with a picture, and that is it. They start jumping to a discussion on said topic with whoever posted the news piece.
People are not reading the articles in full (and therefore being presented with ads, or a subscription paywall), but they are engaging on the social media platform that in turn is making money with ads and other features thanks to the engagement produced by the shared news article.
News companies are being cannibalized by social media companies who get all the engagement (and ad revenue), while people at scale are not signing up for paywalls or even visiting the news site to read the article in full.
I believe this will hopefully make news companies get back to a profitable business, while making conversations on social media platforms a lot healthier.
Maybe the news companies should figure out how to attract more people to their sites rather than trying to charge rent on other sites?
Maybe the news companies should write articles that are worth reading in full?
If Facebook links to an article people might follow the link and read it. If they don't link to an article, nobody will read it. There is nothing but upside for the news companies, and people with business savvy would love to have their site linked on Facebook (that's why people pay them so much money for ads!).
I think you could easily argue that social media links to the news websites provides more value to the news website than vice-versa. If, for example, only the headline and sub-headline were quoted in the posts without the link -- which the Heritage Minister indicated would not constitute a fee -- any discussion could still take place, and certainly there would be even less benefit to the news organization.
Any news website can already prevent Facebook from generating link previews through meta tags, as I understand. But very few, if any, websites do this indicating that they understand it's not in their interests.
Perhaps people are not reading the articles because the _discussion_ is more valuable to them than the content of the article? Don't we all occasionally jump to the comment section on HN/reddit instead of reading the article? Seems to me that many news organizations have not yet figured out how to provide their customers with a product they are willing to "pay" for.
I mean, any brief visit to a small news website without an ad-blocker or, worse, a scroll through the comment section, should make this fairly evident.
People were content only reading headlines before. They couldn't be bothered to click the link and read the articles. I get why that's a problem. But now that the users aren't even being given links... the expectation is that users will go out of their way to find and read those articles?
Is their strategy litterally just playing hard to get?
You're right, but this law does a terrible job of tackling that problem.
It only affects links, not the headline/description/picture blurb. A plain text link would cost FB money, while a headline/description/picture with no link would cost FB nothing.
And presumably FB would only block link-sharing if doing so was a net positive for them.
This implementation is based off fundamentally backwards understandings of the flow of value on the web. The appropriate implementation of this would just be a straight-up corporate tax of social media companies and an accompanying subsidy of news orgs, not this weird linking nonsense.
The news sites can certainly add a robots.txt page or stop crawling from Facebook/Google in other ways. I'd even be fine with the law saying "Google/Facebook can't do automated summaries of the page content" or whatever, allow that to be opt-in/out.
The bullshit part is saying Google has to pay for the privilege of linking out to the sites. Ridiculous.
Most of the Canadian media market is owned by American interests so really we're just watching two American companies duke it out over who gets advertising money paid by companies selling American consumer shit.
As a Canadian it's really hard to give a shit about any of this.
> People are not reading the articles in full (and therefore being presented with ads, or a subscription paywall), but they are engaging on the social media platform
> I believe this will hopefully make news companies get back to a profitable business
It won't. Very few people who current aren't paying for news are just going to start. The incenssent news readers pay for news already. The others will move on to other less reliable content.
Would a robots.txt-equivalent solution satisfy both parties?
Media orgs could ban the indexing of their pages by specific scrapers, and users on those social networks would just see a raw URL, not a preview with headline+image+blurb?
> The problem here is that people are not, at scale, hitting the news company website
Maybe that's something the news companies have to work on - such as working on making these sites more useful and attractive to the users, instead of adding more ads and paywalls and then running to the government screaming "people don't want to visit our sites, please save us".
How is this different to people from yesteryear just skimming the headlines at the local grocers then putting the paper down and buying their cigarettes?
I'm old enough to remember my grand father doing that in the 90s in the same store he visited since the 50s.
> If news companies don't want people accessing their content through the web, shouldn't they simply take down their web sites?
That's clearly not the issue. The news companies obviously do want people to access their sites over the web and pay for the privilege. This argument is both incorrect and disingenuous.
The problem is that search and social media companies have been permitted to appropriate and monetize other people's content in different ways. They're parasitic. I don't think that links are really the problem and I'm not surprised that the Liberals have missed the forest for the trees. They do that. The real issue is providing the significant part of the content without requiring people to go to the actual site.
> The problem is that search and social media companies have been permitted to appropriate and monetize other people's content in different ways. They're parasitic.
By this logic, Facebook, Google et.al. dropping links to these news outlets would help these companies. Furthermore, they can already opt out of being crawled through their robots.txt file. But of course, this logic is total BS which is why they don't opt of being indexed.
Then the news media needs to modify their headlines, images and summaries to be less revealing so their content isn't stolen and so people will want to click through and read their articles.
Forcing social media to pay for links users post or click is only going to end up in the news media becoming poorer because social media will demote articles that cost more and promote articles that cost less.
I scanned through the bill (at third reading [1]). On the face of it, it seems to be intended to "level the playing field" between powerful search engines and social media platforms and Canadian news organizations, allegedly because "there is a significant bargaining power imbalance" between the platforms and the journalists.
But if you have lived in Canada for any length of time, you will know that this is a country ruled by a small number of highly profitable corporations, which are largely controlled by a few wealthy families. For instance:
- Corus Entertainment is 80% controlled by the family of JR Shaw.
- Rogers Communications is controlled by the family of Ted Rogers (via a trust)
- Quebecor is controlled by Pierre Péladeau
Indeed, only BCE (the company that owns Bell Canada) is truly a diversely controlled public corporation.
So really, this bill could be considered as the government acting to protect the interests of three wealthy Canadian families.
Good. Payment for links is a really dumb policy, and if it works for news it will leech into other areas until the internet is a minefield of tolls and taxes for anyone who wants to aggregate information in a useful way -- including sites like HN and Wikipedia.
Seems like the news companies are shooting themselves in the foot, but it sounds good to me.
I would love a world where google and facebook are full of links to primary sources instead of news articles.
Imagine a world where you search "supreme court decision X", "California covid policy", or "FDIC action today" and the top result is the responsible agency statement followed by blogs.
Under C-18 it also includes "indexing", and Google has indicated they will also remove them from search results, this isn't just shooting in the foot, its suicide.
Canadian news organizations don't care, because they're all heavily subsidized by the government, and so essentially state media[1]:
> But given the trend in Canadian media, I’d guess low Thousands… possibly 10-20k if they do really well, but also quite possibly down into the hundreds some episodes… C-SPAN, a sorta equivalent network, got 440,000 viewers for the 2020 republican convention and 76,000 for the 2020 Democratic convention (Citation)… so divide by 10 for the Canadian population…divide by 2 to 10 again for how exciting a week night of TVO isn’t compared to a 2020 US political convention… and ya a few single digit thousand, or even a few hundred viewers on an off night… that’s what we’d estimate for an Average episode of the Agenda.
> The Agenda was thriving as a property in the Internet age. If anything the internet was a massive boon to it. It went from this obscure regional talk show in Ontario to regularly getting hundreds of thousands of views internationally on YouTube.
> The Agenda had dozens of videos in the 2015-2016 period that got millions of views. One of Jordan Peterson’s more famous appearance on The Agenda got 8.5 million views. for a long form interview!? Those are Joe Rogan numbers!
> How the hell does that happen!? How do you go from Joe Rogan big, to smaller than my hobby Substack?
> Hell How does The Agenda pay the production costs!? As of writing, this substack doesn’t pay for the coffee I drink writing it. (please subscribe) How do they produce a 5 day a week show with multiple full time staff for…
I would love a world where google and facebook are full of links to primary sources instead of news articles.
That's great if you have time to read whatever it is and/or have the knowledge to parse through the language. Most folks aren't going to read the paper nor the overall decision. Time constraints, stress, and simply not being educated in the field (or understanding legal terms) keep folks from doing this.
On top of that, there are definitely times that the news is the primary source. Where else are you going to learn about war, drought, weather, protests, food recalls, and other such things? You'll probably find weather, but nothing on protests. Sure, you can go to "sources", but you have to actively find them.
News might not be the same as it was, but it isn't like it doesn't still have a use.
I'd really like to have rules about headlines/reporting accurately portraying things, but that's a conversation for another time.
That is because most of the "news" is not original reporting any more. Everyone is just feeding off each other so if the store is not at site A, it will be on Site B through 184,284,756 of which at least one of them will still be sharable on Facebook, and in Google news thus the traffic will just move to those sites and users will share and engage with them losing nothing...
Tech companies said the same in Australia. They are all now paying. Because as soon as their ability to bully content companies due to their monopoly scale is taken away, turns out they still making a ton of money scraping news content, even if they have to pay for it now.
I think that is highly wishful thinking. In reality the links will just go to misinformation sites that are not on the up-and-up and thus not classified as actual news sources.
Rupert Murdoch literally forced google and facebook to pay him money for directing traffic to his sites.
> Imagine a world where you search "supreme court decision X", "California covid policy", or "FDIC action today" and the top result is the responsible agency statement followed by blogs.
That would be ideal but ultimately, the social media companies always cave. Shows you the power of news companies and what they truly are when they can bully the likes of apple, google, facebook, microsoft, etc.
You would think that news publishers like news corp or the nytimes or cnn are no match for the tech giants. But history has proven otherwise.
Over here (New Zealand) the newspaper websites never link to anywhere. Especially not the webpage a story is talking about. Pictures get grabbed off websites[1] and credited to "Supplied".
This seems to mean that fewer Canadians will be engaging on Facebook, and that news articles from outlets that meet the official standards of Facebook and the government will have a smaller audience.
In terms of improving the quality of public discourse, how is this not win-win?
Arguably fewer news articles means less outrage, yielding lower engagement. The recipe for a news story requires events and a conflict to tell the story of, and official news sources largely fabricate that conflict and decorate it with the events of the day.
The fabrication comes from ideology, one that percieves everything as conflict and power struggle. It's why the news often seems like utter nonsense. I don't watch it anymore because I can't sustain a state of cringe that long, but anything that reduces its reach is something I can get behind.
I don't get people who don't understand www make these laws. The concept of linking something is core to the idea of web. It is beautiful and useful and no one should need to pay for adding an hyperlink.
If media publications want others to not get access to the content, they can choose to not add OG tags or just not let the Google or social media bots scrape the information.
It's not about not understanding the web or the concept of linking. It's a reaction to a fundamental way that users are engaging with content.
User behavior has changed online, people are conditioned to tiktok / twitter length information snips, having off the cuff reactions, being the first to be outraged, etc.
It used to be that if someone linked something the BULK of the people who saw that link and were interested would click it and if they wanted to engage, they likely engaged on the site hosting the content first... now the bulk to the people don't click the link to read and instead engage only on their social media platform of choice.
This leads to:
* Increasingly divisive click bait titles
* Less informed populace (although they FEEL more informed)
* Echo chambers where people get re-enforced on their view of the TITLE (not content) because they are sharing and commenting with likeminded people rather than getting opposing opinions on the source website.
Not saying this bill is the solution but I disagree that it's being considered because people don't understand how linking on the web works.
> It used to be that if someone linked something the BULK of the people who saw that link and were interested would click it and if they wanted to engage...
I find myself reading comments more than news articles these days because almost every site is littered with modal popups, floating autoplay videos, dickbars covering most of the screen, consent banners, notification consent, location consent, not to mentioned ads, after every paragraph and sometimes almost impossible to scroll past without clicking. The internet has become extremely user hostile, and the true irony here (I can't believe I'm saying this) is that social media sites are focused on engagement so they're actually motivated to not make their UX a painful experience.
> now the bulk to the people don't click the link to read and instead engage only on their social media platform of choice.
but this is the fundamental issue with the bill, if I am hanging out with my friends IRL and I bring up a news report, the discussion happens between us without them going to the media site. They are confused about what happens when offline behaviour moves online.
As I said if they were really bothered about the users reading the title/subtitle from the news report on the social media site, all they need to do is to stop the bot from crawling and not add OG tags. That way a user just sees a hyperlink. It was mostly media sites who added OG tags willingly so that their content looked good in the feed.
Oh no. Users will have to interact with content other than largely low-quality, reposted, copied news articles. This will surely be the downfall of general public discourse online, as social media sites simply don't have a purpose beyond resharing news.
Good riddance. News sites lose, facebook loses, this feels like a net gain for sanity online.
Readit News
As a Canadian, it bothers me that our politicians are willing to jump through mental hoops to avoid considering the most obvious solutions.
If news companies don't want people accessing their content through the web, shouldn't they simply take down their web sites? If they aren't willing to do that (because, say, the benefits outweigh the costs), then perhaps this isn't an issue that warrants legislation...
People are not reading the articles in full (and therefore being presented with ads, or a subscription paywall), but they are engaging on the social media platform that in turn is making money with ads and other features thanks to the engagement produced by the shared news article.
News companies are being cannibalized by social media companies who get all the engagement (and ad revenue), while people at scale are not signing up for paywalls or even visiting the news site to read the article in full.
I believe this will hopefully make news companies get back to a profitable business, while making conversations on social media platforms a lot healthier.
Maybe the news companies should write articles that are worth reading in full?
If Facebook links to an article people might follow the link and read it. If they don't link to an article, nobody will read it. There is nothing but upside for the news companies, and people with business savvy would love to have their site linked on Facebook (that's why people pay them so much money for ads!).
Any news website can already prevent Facebook from generating link previews through meta tags, as I understand. But very few, if any, websites do this indicating that they understand it's not in their interests.
Perhaps people are not reading the articles because the _discussion_ is more valuable to them than the content of the article? Don't we all occasionally jump to the comment section on HN/reddit instead of reading the article? Seems to me that many news organizations have not yet figured out how to provide their customers with a product they are willing to "pay" for.
I mean, any brief visit to a small news website without an ad-blocker or, worse, a scroll through the comment section, should make this fairly evident.
People were content only reading headlines before. They couldn't be bothered to click the link and read the articles. I get why that's a problem. But now that the users aren't even being given links... the expectation is that users will go out of their way to find and read those articles?
Is their strategy litterally just playing hard to get?
It only affects links, not the headline/description/picture blurb. A plain text link would cost FB money, while a headline/description/picture with no link would cost FB nothing.
And presumably FB would only block link-sharing if doing so was a net positive for them.
This implementation is based off fundamentally backwards understandings of the flow of value on the web. The appropriate implementation of this would just be a straight-up corporate tax of social media companies and an accompanying subsidy of news orgs, not this weird linking nonsense.
The bullshit part is saying Google has to pay for the privilege of linking out to the sites. Ridiculous.
You cannot legislate changes to human nature.
As a Canadian it's really hard to give a shit about any of this.
I feel like you just described Hacker News.
What's Facebook done wrong here?
It won't. Very few people who current aren't paying for news are just going to start. The incenssent news readers pay for news already. The others will move on to other less reliable content.
Media orgs could ban the indexing of their pages by specific scrapers, and users on those social networks would just see a raw URL, not a preview with headline+image+blurb?
Shouldn't everyone who posts on social media get a cut of advertising revenue?
Maybe that's something the news companies have to work on - such as working on making these sites more useful and attractive to the users, instead of adding more ads and paywalls and then running to the government screaming "people don't want to visit our sites, please save us".
I'm old enough to remember my grand father doing that in the 90s in the same store he visited since the 50s.
That's clearly not the issue. The news companies obviously do want people to access their sites over the web and pay for the privilege. This argument is both incorrect and disingenuous.
The problem is that search and social media companies have been permitted to appropriate and monetize other people's content in different ways. They're parasitic. I don't think that links are really the problem and I'm not surprised that the Liberals have missed the forest for the trees. They do that. The real issue is providing the significant part of the content without requiring people to go to the actual site.
By this logic, Facebook, Google et.al. dropping links to these news outlets would help these companies. Furthermore, they can already opt out of being crawled through their robots.txt file. But of course, this logic is total BS which is why they don't opt of being indexed.
Forcing social media to pay for links users post or click is only going to end up in the news media becoming poorer because social media will demote articles that cost more and promote articles that cost less.
Their business model is under stress because of the internet. Link taxes won't fix this and they set a terrible precedent.
Quoting from Candaland[0]. "In Australia, an estimated 90 per cent of negotiated revenues flowed to the three largest media companies."
That hardly bodes well for independent journalism. This is just a shakedown.
[0] https://www.canadaland.com/canadas-online-news-act-must-be-t...
But if you have lived in Canada for any length of time, you will know that this is a country ruled by a small number of highly profitable corporations, which are largely controlled by a few wealthy families. For instance:
- Corus Entertainment is 80% controlled by the family of JR Shaw. - Rogers Communications is controlled by the family of Ted Rogers (via a trust) - Quebecor is controlled by Pierre Péladeau
Indeed, only BCE (the company that owns Bell Canada) is truly a diversely controlled public corporation.
So really, this bill could be considered as the government acting to protect the interests of three wealthy Canadian families.
[1] https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/third-r...
Echoes of the Family Compact, 200 years later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Compact
Deleted Comment
I would love a world where google and facebook are full of links to primary sources instead of news articles.
Imagine a world where you search "supreme court decision X", "California covid policy", or "FDIC action today" and the top result is the responsible agency statement followed by blogs.
> But given the trend in Canadian media, I’d guess low Thousands… possibly 10-20k if they do really well, but also quite possibly down into the hundreds some episodes… C-SPAN, a sorta equivalent network, got 440,000 viewers for the 2020 republican convention and 76,000 for the 2020 Democratic convention (Citation)… so divide by 10 for the Canadian population…divide by 2 to 10 again for how exciting a week night of TVO isn’t compared to a 2020 US political convention… and ya a few single digit thousand, or even a few hundred viewers on an off night… that’s what we’d estimate for an Average episode of the Agenda.
> The Agenda was thriving as a property in the Internet age. If anything the internet was a massive boon to it. It went from this obscure regional talk show in Ontario to regularly getting hundreds of thousands of views internationally on YouTube.
> The Agenda had dozens of videos in the 2015-2016 period that got millions of views. One of Jordan Peterson’s more famous appearance on The Agenda got 8.5 million views. for a long form interview!? Those are Joe Rogan numbers!
> How the hell does that happen!? How do you go from Joe Rogan big, to smaller than my hobby Substack?
> Hell How does The Agenda pay the production costs!? As of writing, this substack doesn’t pay for the coffee I drink writing it. (please subscribe) How do they produce a 5 day a week show with multiple full time staff for…
> Oh right my tax dollars.
[1] https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/p/why-is-legacy-media-li....
That's great if you have time to read whatever it is and/or have the knowledge to parse through the language. Most folks aren't going to read the paper nor the overall decision. Time constraints, stress, and simply not being educated in the field (or understanding legal terms) keep folks from doing this.
On top of that, there are definitely times that the news is the primary source. Where else are you going to learn about war, drought, weather, protests, food recalls, and other such things? You'll probably find weather, but nothing on protests. Sure, you can go to "sources", but you have to actively find them.
News might not be the same as it was, but it isn't like it doesn't still have a use.
I'd really like to have rules about headlines/reporting accurately portraying things, but that's a conversation for another time.
However, traffic originating from Facebook has to represent a sizeable portion of incoming traffic for news site.
I would love a world where Facebook doesn't exist, and Google is but one player in a healthy search ecosystem.
A boy can dream.
No. They are using their political power to extort money from social media companies.
"Facebook to pay News Corp for content in Australia".
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56410335
Rupert Murdoch literally forced google and facebook to pay him money for directing traffic to his sites.
> Imagine a world where you search "supreme court decision X", "California covid policy", or "FDIC action today" and the top result is the responsible agency statement followed by blogs.
That would be ideal but ultimately, the social media companies always cave. Shows you the power of news companies and what they truly are when they can bully the likes of apple, google, facebook, microsoft, etc.
You would think that news publishers like news corp or the nytimes or cnn are no match for the tech giants. But history has proven otherwise.
[1] - Loophole in copyright laws for reporting
To the point where AU Sub Reddits posters often put 'F U Murdoch' style watermarks on their images.
So much of the news and headlines is ripped straight from Reddit posts it's no longer amusing...
In terms of improving the quality of public discourse, how is this not win-win?
I'd expect most users to continue what they were doing before, but now their feed of headlines will come exclusively from international sources.
I doubt I'd engage less with HN if they banned articles from US companies.
The fabrication comes from ideology, one that percieves everything as conflict and power struggle. It's why the news often seems like utter nonsense. I don't watch it anymore because I can't sustain a state of cringe that long, but anything that reduces its reach is something I can get behind.
If media publications want others to not get access to the content, they can choose to not add OG tags or just not let the Google or social media bots scrape the information.
User behavior has changed online, people are conditioned to tiktok / twitter length information snips, having off the cuff reactions, being the first to be outraged, etc.
It used to be that if someone linked something the BULK of the people who saw that link and were interested would click it and if they wanted to engage, they likely engaged on the site hosting the content first... now the bulk to the people don't click the link to read and instead engage only on their social media platform of choice.
This leads to:
* Increasingly divisive click bait titles * Less informed populace (although they FEEL more informed) * Echo chambers where people get re-enforced on their view of the TITLE (not content) because they are sharing and commenting with likeminded people rather than getting opposing opinions on the source website.
Not saying this bill is the solution but I disagree that it's being considered because people don't understand how linking on the web works.
I find myself reading comments more than news articles these days because almost every site is littered with modal popups, floating autoplay videos, dickbars covering most of the screen, consent banners, notification consent, location consent, not to mentioned ads, after every paragraph and sometimes almost impossible to scroll past without clicking. The internet has become extremely user hostile, and the true irony here (I can't believe I'm saying this) is that social media sites are focused on engagement so they're actually motivated to not make their UX a painful experience.
but this is the fundamental issue with the bill, if I am hanging out with my friends IRL and I bring up a news report, the discussion happens between us without them going to the media site. They are confused about what happens when offline behaviour moves online.
As I said if they were really bothered about the users reading the title/subtitle from the news report on the social media site, all they need to do is to stop the bot from crawling and not add OG tags. That way a user just sees a hyperlink. It was mostly media sites who added OG tags willingly so that their content looked good in the feed.
It's public intervention to preserve a business model by deliberately inserting hurdles to the access of information.
Good riddance. News sites lose, facebook loses, this feels like a net gain for sanity online.