Absolutely crazy that governments around the world want websites to pay to allow users to link to content. It's the kind of thing that makes no sense to anybody with a bit of technical education.
Because there are technical nuances in what they're actually reproducing, where it came from and how it was shared with you.
Are they actually reproducing content wholesale? If so, I would think copyright law would allow content producers to stop that unless it's properly licensed anyway.
Are they posting content from meta tags that use Facebook's OpenGraph standard for specifying how content should be previewed when linked? Then how is that not intended for this exact use case in the first place?
Are they scraping content, and using heuristics / ML to generate an appropriate subset of the content for a preview and choose an appropriate picture, that they then reproduce? Okay - that's more of a grey area. But do the people debating this even understand the difference between what would actually be happening for these different use cases? Do they know enough to clearly write a law that allows one but not the other? I hardly think so.
I just had a meeting with some lawyers at a massive tech company, whose job it is to approve the use of open-source licenses, who couldn't grasp the concept that viewing a web page results in code being downloaded and executed by the browser. Because somebody assigned that job to corporate lawyers who don't understand technology, thinking it wasn't a technical issue and didn't require any technical education, experience, or understanding.
The perspective of Canada is useful here. Canada is culturally dominated by the US, with a 10x larger population only an hour’s drive from the majority of the Canadian population. Canadians are generally supportive of some level of government protection for the fragile and tiny Canadian cultural industry (music, the press, TV, and film).
Meanwhile, Canada’s media and telecom industry is concentrated in the hands of three wealthy families. These empires have successfully lobbied the Canadian government for decades to achieve a degree of protection from US competitors, to the detriment of Canadians in terms of higher mobile phone and internet bills, a bland selection of privately produced journalism, and underwhelming TV content.
The same playbook is at work with this latest bit of protectionism. The media empires leverage Canadians’ somewhat justified desire to protect Canadian culture to convince politicians in Ottawa to provide some monopoly-preserving protectionist measures.
It’s a disgusting symbiosis that suppresses dynamism, but it’s likely not going away any time soon.
The most interesting thing is what's defined as "Canadian Content".
Most of what Celine Dion produced in her career doesn't fit the government approved list of cultural content, so is considered foreign music. Celine Dion, probably Canada's most recognizable voice and signer, signing in French, a language almost exclusively spoken in Canada on the North American continent, isn't considered Canadian culture.
But some recordings from Elvis do count because he happened to record them on Canadian soil. [0]
Makes sense, if you pick up and make a career for yourself using American resources you shouldn't be cancon, same with startups, can't get amazing startup Canadian capgains if you start Canadian and later basically become an American company.
JB, Celine, Brian Adam's etc arguably started because Canada is such a hospitable environment to artists, if they pick up and basically come American... Why should we classify them as Canadian artists? Don't think any of them even live in Canada anymore, can't say I think they do much for the industry. Matt Dusk, CRJ, lightfoot etc keep it real.
> the only difference between a canadian and an american is a line on a map
Kindly keep this kind of ignorant viewpoint to yourself.
There are a lot of differences, and if you can't or won't see them that not our problem.
As a Canadian, I don't want your two party political structure (soon to be one maybe?) and your supreme court of mostly old clerics making decisions based on their religious views in my country thanks. Or shall we talk about your daily mass shootings?
If you guys think that is working for you, so much the better for you.
You know @dang, I appreciate what you're trying to foster here, but despite that I think that some of the commenters on this site are keeping people away.
My friend—who is much more restrained in speech than I am—and I were saying that we don't like to come to the 'orange site' as much as before, despite the sometimes excellent discussions, and though it's hard to say precisely why, the reason we came up with is the libertarian slant.
You are doing a great job keeping the tone civil, but I think in the end it just leaves us with a community made up of say 33% of people politely saying impolite things.
By controlling the tone, could it be that our trolls have just learned to deliver their absolutist, unfeeling and insensitive comments in polite language?
We can detect tone but not intent, right? So we control the tone, but the trolls here (and no doubt about it we have them like anywhere else) have just learned to sealion people.
And I stand by the provocative nature of the parent post.
What if he/she had said 'The difference between a Russian and a Ukrainian is just a line on a map?' That is a politely stated idea. Would a Ukrainian have to take that with restraint too?
Certainly the parent post was provocative. That's why I moderated it and asked the user not to post like that again. I'm not clear on what else you think I should have done?
It doesn't change the fact that you also broke the site guidelines by taking the bait and responding with an outright flamewar post. People need to follow the rules regardless of how provocative another comment is. Otherwise we get a downward spiral (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
We don't think in terms of civility on HN; I haven't used that word in years except to tell people we don't use that word. We're going for kindness, which is something quite different.
[Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We asked you this at least once before.
my answer, while terse, was in fact a legitimate attempt at answering the parent question:
"Why should we classify them as Canadian artists? Don't think any of them even live in Canada anymore"
i think its a good question.
i attempted to point out, rather simply, how attempts to answer this question in terms of where an artist was born vs where the artist lives vs where the artist recorded their music, etc are arbitrary distinctions. in my view, there is no difference between these artists, qua artists or their art qua art, regardless of which lines they cross on a map, or when. i am struggling to see that distinction alone as a valid criterion to determine which forms of art are worthy of supporting and promoting, or, in the active, suppressing. and i am sensitive to the censorship of art in particular, so perhaps this is reason for my emotional "hot take".
but my hope was that my comment would evoke a thoughtful response, and not some sort of racist flame war, yes indeed.
That's fine, but what you actually posted was an unambiguous case of flamebait. The burden is on you as a commenter not to do that.
That is, the burden is on you to disambiguate your intent. Your intent exists in your head, but not in anyone else's—you have to communicate it clearly if you want other people to give you thoughtful responses.
> The perspective of Canada is useful here. Canada is culturally dominated by the US, with a 10x larger population only an hour’s drive from the majority of the Canadian population. Canadians are generally supportive of some level of government protection for the fragile and tiny Canadian cultural industry (music, the press, TV, and film).
Like with anything "cultural", this depends on who you ask. I'm Canadian I don't support any form of government interference in speech and "cultural" matters. I don't feel "dominated" by USA culture, and I live in a border city where it is common for people to live on one side and work on the other, where people have family on either side of the border etc. where our traditional media broadcast (tv and radio) are a mix of local and American.
This is just my personal opinion, of course... but if our "cultural industries" are so fragile that they can't compete with other artists across the border, then that is their own fault and it indicates that haven't earned the right to my attention. I don't base my choice on what media to absorb on superficial criteria like the country of origin. Especially in the age of the Internet where my choices are literally global.
The real cultural difference here, in my opinion, is constitutional. Such media regulations would likely be considered a violation of the First Amendment in the USA. The idea that we have regulatory bodies setting rules around what kinds of information we can be exposed and under what circumstances to is a violation of everything that I believe in and I will never vote for any politician that favours this sort of government overreach.
So while you're not necessarily wrong in your generalization about the "perspective of Canada" (depending on which Canadians you speak of), as an individual Canadian I say "speak for yourself."
> I don't base my choice on what media to absorb on superficial criteria like the country of origin
Other countries, including the USA, advertise and hype their own content. Your preferences are deeply influenced by the country of origin, because advertising works.
> Other countries, including the USA, advertise and hype their own content. Your preferences are deeply influenced by the country of origin, because advertising works
This bill isn't blocking American advertising in Canada. It's just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Also Canadian. You seem to be saying "As long as I am entertained I don't care whether the entertainers are my peers, cultural or otherwise, or the serfs in some content factory in some lawless backwater."
You definitely don't speak for us all, whatever the case.
> You definitely don't speak for us all, whatever the case.
That was my point. No one can make broad generalizations about "the Canadian perspective." Like everyone, everywhere, we are all individuals. As such, those who speak of "the Canadian perspective" are not representing everyone in Canada. They can't. They certainly don't speak for me.
> "As long as I am entertained I don't care whether the entertainers are my peers, cultural or otherwise
Pretty much. Although I wouldn't use the words "serfs in some content factory." That choice of language speaks to an ideological bent that is VERY far removed from my own. But if I buy a music album that was recorded by a band based out of British Colombia, for example, they are no more "my peers" than if they were a K-Pop group based out of South Korea.
Culturally? Culture is a matter of individual choices and preferences. One Canadian does not speak for another. So we're going in circles now.
> You definitely don't speak for us all, whatever the case.
Yeah OP doesn't speak for me either. While this might not be implemented in the best way, Canadian culture is a real thing, but only because we are active in trying to protect it.
And it goes double for French Canadian culture! I don't want my province to become another Louisiana, i.e.: a once French speaking region that is now nearly 100% anglophone, but hey there's this great French influence!
Also FB puts news orgs in a bind because in order to compete, they need to give their content away for free on Facebook.
This has put the squeeze on an industry that was already bleeding money from all the ads moving online.
Because we are a small news market, this has been especially damaging to our journalism industry. If we lose it then it will be foreigners telling us what the 'facts' are in our own country, no thanks.
Aren’t the French Canadians notorious for buying and consuming their own culture?
Friend of mine here in the bay area is French Canadian and his teenagers (both full Americans born here) both watch and follow French Canadians on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
He explained to me that under Canadian law, absolutely none of that is Canadian Content or Culture. No subsidies, no quotas. Even a Denis Villeneuve movie isn't either.
Apparently, to watch original content in French he has to VPN in Canada to be allowed to watch content that's only produced in Canada for French Canadians by CBC; they won't even make the smallest attempt at exporting it.
Quebec is basically a confederate state that periodically holds a brexit referendum to threaten the rest of the country, and we all kiss their ass for a while and (so far) the secession No votes win out, for twenty years or so, rinse, repeat.
The cancon rules play out in absurd ways on a regular basis; there was a case where a Bryan Adams album didn't qualify but an Aerosmith album did due to where it was recorded, and while I never looked too closely at either case I'm sure there was some bureaucratic discretion exercised somewhere along the way.
That said, Cancon will always get my vote, I think we do have a distinct set of musical conventions from other places and it's got a lot to do with the government assistance.
Well, they have racist laws aimed mainly at a specific group, and they literally have voted twice in my life about leaving Canada and shortly before I was born they had an IRA style terrorist group called the FLQ.
It's a pretty loaded situation.
Cause we're neither French nor English
Parle Anglais ou Francis
We hate each other like the plague
And we hope it stays that way
That's not at all like the US Confederation or Civil War.
> they had an IRA style terrorist group called the FLQ.
Did they actually get convicted under terrorism laws? From my understanding, it was a series of mailbox bombing, some of them by the feds themselves. [0] Nothing remotely looking like 9/11.
The laws in question are framed as secularist, but aimed at Muslims who dress differently. I daresay nobody who wears a crucifix in that highly catholic province is going to get much hassle, but wear a hijab, on the other hand...
I'm not particularly interested in a contest of anti-wit where you try to convince me the government of Quebec are actually superduper committed anti-religionists and I get increasingly frustrated, but I definitely consider it a law based in racist motivation and which is playing out in a highly racist way, just like the crack laws down there in the 90s were targeted at black people. Superpredators and all that.
Anyways I'm not sure what you're after here - is it that, the Confederate South was the pinnacle of racism? And nothing should ever be compared to it, because that's insulting to the pride of the generations of Southern Racists who have worked very hard to successfully maintain an aura of abject Hun-like barbarism against a tide of woke PCism that grows ever more powerful?
Am I making you feel like maybe, as an American, your racism is maybe not as remarkable as you think it is, and in fact, is just another case of US exceptionalist ego tripping? I mean, let's face it, Jefferson Davis was no Hitler, and neither is whoever is running Quebec right now, they're all just boring assholes throwing red meat to their boring fans.
And lest you think I'm some sort of Anglo nationalist, no, I live on Treaty One Territory and I despise my own government just as much for the exact same reasons. It's the same everywhere, dude - you people just have more guns and less self-control about it.
The law specifically bans the wearing of religious symbols or garb, is my understanding, for gov employees.
But the question is not what the law says, but how it is applied, and to whom, which gets lost in the transition to the paper trail.
edit: A good way to think about it, IMO, is to remember for a moment that everything a politician does is performative - whether they believe it or don't, every public action is actually a pantomime which is intended to please or appease. With that in mind, who is Quebec pleasing or appeasing with this law? Atheists? Please.
Another comparison one could draw, and perhaps a more apt one than the confederacy, would be to Utah, where it's known that if you try to do business there, it is not a secular government and you need to either bribe or work around the church. Quebec enjoys a similar license to pass shit laws/policies that do not pass the Charter, and the feds do nothing because they'll just have another referendum about it.
It's timewasting to try to keep going with this, but it is nonetheless fascinating, the level of cognitive dischord in the rhetoric. A ransom is paid to someone who has taken something that belongs to you; implying that Facebook somehow inherently has the right to do whatever they like, wherever they like, and if our appointed public representatives decide they have something to say about that, the brigands are the ones who legitimately have the right to set policy for how business is done in our country.
It's not quite a gish gallop, but the time investment to engage directly is far too high.
>No, I just believe that force is only justified in response to force. Problem?
So yes, I am implying that Facebook has the right to offer an internet service to Canadians, and you are violating the above principle with your ransom. News that hurts your feelings is not force, as much as you’d like it to be.
As an American, it’s strange seeing this discussed so openly.
In the US, any notion of “protecting the culture” is considered taboo. Implying that outside influence would not be your peers, and using terms like “serfs in some content factory in some lawless backwater” would be considered downright racist.
Personally, I can see value in keeping a thriving industry locally (which, again, is almost taboo in the US). I wonder how this compares to countries like, say, Japan or South Korea, which have thriving entertainment sectors of their own. Do they also have protection laws to enable this, or are they able to maintain this organically?
I can see why people steeped in capitalist ideology, using phones built with child slavery, might not want to talk about the lawless backwaters where they do business. Discussing our own personal, sleek, pretty, touchscreen-having artifact of child slavery and how we all have one in our pockets would definitely make the people who own stock in the slave mine (edit: and that would be anyone with a retirement plan, more or less) uncomfortable.
I seem to recall your president talking about "shithole countries" and to be clear, I do not mean countries.
We have lawless backwaters right here in Manitoba. It's not a question of this or that geographical location, but of the willingness of capital to find the most lawless place it can find in which to operate, and the willingness of governments to be bought out of doing anything about it.
My countryman wants his entertainment cheap at any cost, and that's the entirety of the problem we've got right now. The most destructive weapon I've seen in the last forty years is price tags.
Just rereading this, and I have to say, that was the most vague and noncommittal version of "the left are the real fascists" that I ever read lol
Anyone who thinks there should be laws against child slavery, and that we should not do business with people who use child slavery, I'm going to agree with that person on that point. I have a lot of other things that I think we should prohibit people from doing business with as well, but let's start with child slavery, since we are all active users of it, right?
>if our "cultural industries" are so fragile that they can't compete with other artists across the border, then that is their own fault and it indicates that haven't earned the right to my attention.
It would be great if the cream would always rise to the top but that's just not how it works. The entertainment industry is marketing driven. More money means more marketing and being US based means more reach. Entertainment industry consolidation among massive US conglomerates becomes a self perpetuating cycle. Once they are big enough, those corporations start lobbying the government to make rules in their favour (ie copyright extension) that affect people globally.
I'm not advocating full protectionism, or anything close to it, but lets be realistic. It's not a level playing field out there.
>where our traditional media broadcast (tv and radio) are a mix of local and American
I'm not sure if this is an argument for, or against. Those local TV and radio stations are huge beneficiaries of certain protectionist measures. And the fact you don't feel "dominated" by US culture could also be seen as a sign the existing measures are working.
(I realize that Canadian media is also dominated by a few big corps, and that deserves its own discussion but the general idea of helping local cultural industries compete with US ones is sound IMHO)
This is a fair comment. I ought to have clarified that I was indeed making a gross generalization. I share your perspective on the creative arts; I don’t care where it comes from, if it’s good.
IMO this is a bogus perspective. Any culture activity ultimately needs curation or you end up with shit.
I am an American that grew up near the border and always listened to Canadian radio because it was so much more diverse musically. The only thing that could compete was local college radio because it was heavily subsidized by student tuition.
Otherwise, you end up with the lowest common denominator of shit with culture competing in an open market.
The alternative is great if you just want to watch super hero movies and listen to pop music all day.
> media and telecom industry is concentrated in the hands of three wealthy families
> monopoly-preserving protectionist measures
That’s exactly what it is. They don’t like it that others can bypass their influence and become successful without them, so they lobby the government to legislate them back into a rent seeking position.
Rogers is owned by the Rogers family. I don't actually know if there are two other families, but gp comment is clearly about Rogers, Bell, and Telus, all of which lower their rates so that other companies can't compete, and then raise rates after everyone else is either out of business or bought up. Affectionately known as Robellus, since there isn't much difference between them.
There is a real problem. Content creators are not getting enough income to operate on. Middle companies (e.g., Google and Facebook) are making a lot of money. This is a problem especially for local and regional content.
Useful solutions to the problem are where we are running into disagreements. And, any useful solution is going to run into disagreement because it's going to change the distribution of wealth from the status quo. Content creators will get more of it.
Two analogies come to mind...
1. It reminds me of record labels and artists. There have traditionally been many cases where the artists made very little income but the producers and label made a lot of money. The distribution channel captured the profits.
2. I also think of cars and car dealerships. Imagine if car manufacturers couldn't make enough money to run a functioning business but car dealerships were making a lot of income.
In the case of news articles the underlying problem isn't discovery of content. Instead, it's about the income model around advertisements. The middle companies that broker ads are making a lot of money while the organizations displaying them get a fraction of the income. The issues are often part of todays advertising model.
>There is a real problem. Content creators are not getting enough income to operate on. Middle companies (e.g., Google and Facebook) are making a lot of money.
The solution to "someone makes more money than someone else" is not necessarily "steal from the one who makes more money".
>In the case of news articles the underlying problem isn't discovery of content. Instead, it's about the income model around advertisements. The middle companies that broker ads are making a lot of money while the organizations displaying them get a fraction of the income. The issues are often part of todays advertising model.
Newspapers not making enough money from their ads is not Facebook's fault. Facebook is not brokering ads for those publishers.
The examples you provided are irrelevant because the relationship publishers have with Facebook is nothing like that. For starters, Facebook and publishers do not enter any kind of agreement or contract.
I didn't claim it was Facebook's fault. I did write...
> Useful solutions to the problem are where we are running into disagreements.
I consider Useful to be Usability + Utility.
One of the problems in finding a useful solution is that politicians are driving solutions based on things they are not experts in. A reasoned understanding of the situation with information on which knobs to turn is not present.
> Newspapers not making enough money from their ads is not Facebook's fault.
Yes and no. A specific issue is local and regional news. Facebook and Next Door are examples of applications that have changed how we engage with and know about local and regional happenings. That means less traffic to Newspapers to learn about local happenings.
This kind of change isn't necessarily a bad thing. But, it is transformative with trade-offs that are worth looking into. For example, I can easily get the scores for the local high school football games via social media. But, getting a good understanding about some outstanding players is going to be missing. Something gained and something lost.
There is a lot here. And, while I don't like the proposed law I do see a need for understanding and change. Some knobs needs to be adjused around this space.
Isn't the crux of the issue that FB and Instagram (and Google) do everything they can to keep users from clicking away from their website? Thereby starving the producers of the content. HN only posts the titles of articles with outbound links, I don't think it's a comparable situation.
What do they do to keep users from clicking away? I post a link on Facebook, you click it, the website opens. What do you mean? The opengraph tags? They are opt-in, the website puts it there voluntarily. Robots reading the pages? Robots from Google, FB, etc obey robots.txt directives (and if they didn't, it's the open web after all - reproducing the title of an article is fair use).
I suppose the closest analog is when YouTube pays the music industry for music distributed on their platform? This isn't just about links, it's about the work being copied onto meta platforms and distributed there.
The death of local news is a real problem. This, like the California bill [1][2], is a stupid solution. Better: a social media tax that funds a subsidy regime.
Facebook is the company that attempted to seize the internet in the developing world about a decade ago by attempting to provide a gratis, curated "internet" that they controlled as the entry point for people just getting online. Meanwhile, Facebook was making every attempt to do the same through its various methods; I distinctly remember when they told me I now have an @facebook email address that nobody asked for or wanted.
They wanted to be the internet, essentially, the conduit for all useful information. What they had in mind was to do that capture, and then start squeezing the news themselves by choking off the supply of readers. The fact they are retreating in the face of a tax is actually a bit stunning, because I don't see how they'll ever retake this territory they are ceding, and that more or less dooms their entire strategy in a very visible way.
I think by paying the tax, it opens up other governments (especially individual states) to introduce similar legislation for that effortless tax revenue. In the US alone, California could charge, Texas could charge, Alabama could, each having their own percentages and qualifying methods of considering what is taxed.
Easier for Meta to decline the tax and make an example by punishing the affected Canadian users, than it is to welcome the tax and end up paying millions.
For a physical anology, it's like if you have a new robotaxi company that drives to anywhere people want to go very cheaply/easily, and this hurts the operators of short-haul flights when people figure they'd rather sleep in a car for 3 hours rather than dealing with airports, so your response is to force the robotaxi company to pay the short-haul flight operators for every trip to the airport in a way that's unprofitable for the robotaxis. The obvious response from the robotaxi is to stop providing rides to/from the airport.
The appropriate way for the government to do this is to slap a general corporate tax on Facebook, and then subsidize news agencies out of general revenue, not this convoluted/backwards link tax approach.
I agree this is the wrong way of going about it, but their response is ultimately a retreat, which will cause users to look elsewhere for their news headlines, and that will pretty much be it, cause I don't see the gov pulling back on that - in the final analysis I'm pretty sure they would like to have less people on there for their news, for obvious bloody reasons.
The term "link tax" is always a bit of a misnomer. It is a tax for copying small snippets, which those companies would claim fair use on.
I am unsure what is the most appropriate way. Fair use laws was never designed with the idea of facebook copying news segments, search copying whole segments of websites and inline them, google making full copies of every page of every book, machine learning models, and so on. It also seem to have failed rather extremely with sites like youtube. All those cases of fair use also happens to only provide rights to large companies with hordes of lawyers. Anything smaller just get gunned down with copyright claims and strikes.
I can imagine someone trying to write a bot that join every public facebook group and copy a snippet of every comment that is being made (with a helpful link if anyone want to read the full text) and publish that outside of facebook and their ads. How fast would that bot be kicked out by facebook?
> The term "link tax" is always a bit of a misnomer. It is a tax for copying small snippets, which those companies would claim fair use on.
I don't think it is; as far as I can tell, both the spirit and letter of the law is to require payment for links only, that include no content snippets.
"Under the Bill, a digital news intermediary could make news content available by reproducing it or by facilitating access to the news content, including by generating links to news content. Facilitating access to news content could be done through any means, including by way of an index, aggregation or ranking, all of which are methods used by online platforms to organize and distribute news content."
1: "Facebook has said that they may consider removing the ability of news to be shared on their platform so that they cannot be scoped into this legislation. If they were to make that decision and Canadians wanted to take a quote from a newspaper article and post that quote on their Facebook page as a small snippet, would Facebook be allowed to permit that without being captured by this legislation?"
2: "[...]Regarding the example you give, in a context where Facebook has made the business decision to essentially prevent the ability of users to link to news articles but an individual is quoting from a particular news article without a link, no, I do not believe that would engage or trigger the application of the act."
1: "But as soon as a link is included, then they would be scoped into this legislation."
2: "From my perspective, the act of linking is a critical one. It boils down to the facilitation of access. Again, at the crux of this bill is a recognition that the ways that a significant number of Canadians navigate to news content is via social media services or via a search service, which involves clicking on the link. Yes."
If the intention was for this law to apply to snippets rather than links, it should have been written that way, because as-is, it applies to links, and not snippets.
Clause 2(2) stipulates that news content is “made available” if two conditions are met:
that it, or any portion of it, is reproduced; and
that access to it is facilitated by “any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.”
The word link or hyperlink is not mentioned a single time.
I'm not familiar with legalistic conventions around summaries vs bill text, but the "and" there looks to be directly at odds with the actual text of Clause 2(2) in the full text of the bill, which reads:
(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.
Given the "any means" wording, I don't think the absence of the word "link" or "hyperlink" should be taken to mean that links aren't covered by "any means".
> The appropriate way for the government to do this is to slap a general corporate tax on Facebook, and then subsidize news agencies out of general revenue, not this convoluted/backwards link tax approach.
I'm unclear how this is different than what you described. Taxing the replacement to subsidize the incumbents
Because what they're doing isn't a general tax, it's taking an action that's already more beneficial to news organizations than it is to Facebook (linking to news), and making it less appealing for Facebook to continue this action.
Please see the entirety of my original post in context, the part you quoted doesn't stand alone. The robotaxi analogy helps to illustrate the difference that your comment is alluding to.
But nearly everyone who has Gmail signed up for it. We were all lazy and now we are getting what we deserve for our laziness.
My official email is a gmail, I'm currently shopping around for who I should plan to pay for the rest of my life to handle a new one for me. It's gonna take a while, but I do not intend to let them retain the ability to turn my life off with an algorithm.
There are plenty of reasons to make a google account other then gmail, like syncing chrome accross device or using google docs, and you get a gmail account whether you want it or not.
Yes, but that doesn't mean you are forced to receive e-mail with it.
I recently made a Google account to use Family Link so I could regulate what my kids do with their Chromebooks. I first tried the approach of making an account with a non-Google address and while this works for a lot of Google things, it didn't work for Family Link for whatever reason. So now we all have regular GMail accounts and haven't looked at the mail or used the address for a single other thing.
Would be nice to not have to deal with all that but we're getting a lot of value out of the situation and the kids enjoy apps like Duolingo and Scratch Jr.
I've been happy with Migadu for about a year. Their current webmail is nothing fancy but that's supposed to be updated with a new version at some point. And it's perfectly fine if you're using a traditional mail client.
Facebook and other tech companies are a great example of what would have happened if AT&T had not been split up for monopolistic practices. AT&T would have become a middleman in all communications. Can you imagine having to pay AT&T and other internet providers a chunk of your on-line revenue? That is what Facebook, Apple, Twitter and others are doing.
The new monopolistic middlemen are taking a big percentage of the world economy just because they are providing the infrastructure needed to run business. They decide who can reach consumers and who cannot. It is not sustainable.
But this isn’t happening because Facebook wants to extract a toll from someone. It’s happening because the government wants to extract a toll from Facebook – to be paid to news organizations, for the privilege of Facebook users being able to send other Facebook users links to those organizations’ content.
To be more accurate, the newspapers had a psuedo-monopoly, as they controlled what content got delivered to people's doorsteps. They made people pay huge amounts for classified ads and the like.
Now someone else controls the delivery mechanism, and they're passed.
They're still mad at Craigslist, but they don't make enough to be a worthwhile target.
One important difference is that Facebook is not cutting up streets and accidentally severing other utility cables, pipes etc in order to extend their reach into target markets. A rival telco would have to do that if it wasn't required to give them access to this physical infrastructure. They are also not using a precious limited resource (such as radio spectrum) that would be spoiled if everyone used it without regard for the impact on other broadcasters and consumers.
AT&T was a monopoly; many consumers didn't realistically have a choice. When it comes to social media, FB isn't a monopoly. Twitter, SnapChat, and TikTok compete very successfully in the same market. You could include iMessage and YouTube in that segment too depending on your definition of social media.
I could argue the same for Apple; other companies compete successfully in the manufacture of phones, personal computers, and tech accessories.
A company can be large and powerful without being a monopoly.
You know how “nobody reads the article” before commenting? That phenomenon is massive on Facebook. News organizations are tired of providing fodder for Facebook comment sections and not getting eyeballs on their own websites. CBC News turned off comments on their Facebook articles to drive more people to their website.
> News organizations are tired of providing fodder for Facebook comment sections and not getting eyeballs on their own websites.
That's not limited to Canada. It's a worldwide phenomena.
But the question media company should be asking themselves is why aren't people actually clicking on the articles and reading the content?
It's perplexing to me because it would cost them (the media companies) billions of dollars if they had to buy adds on platforms like Facebook for their content. They get all of it for free and yet these links don't translate into actual clicks.
That's not exactly a new thing. More people walked past the news stands and looked at the headlines than actually paid for a newspaper.
Traditionally though, news companies have paid for that attention. The kid on the corner yelling about the day's headlines, or TV ads "Tonight, on the 10:00 news:...".
Looking at the legislature, news will still be available on publishers' site or a news aggregator. People will adopt.
Assuming most digital platforms block news in Canada through, this will not provide much revenue for the News Businesses, and they will still need to solve their monetization problem somehow.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadAre they actually reproducing content wholesale? If so, I would think copyright law would allow content producers to stop that unless it's properly licensed anyway.
Are they posting content from meta tags that use Facebook's OpenGraph standard for specifying how content should be previewed when linked? Then how is that not intended for this exact use case in the first place?
Are they scraping content, and using heuristics / ML to generate an appropriate subset of the content for a preview and choose an appropriate picture, that they then reproduce? Okay - that's more of a grey area. But do the people debating this even understand the difference between what would actually be happening for these different use cases? Do they know enough to clearly write a law that allows one but not the other? I hardly think so.
I just had a meeting with some lawyers at a massive tech company, whose job it is to approve the use of open-source licenses, who couldn't grasp the concept that viewing a web page results in code being downloaded and executed by the browser. Because somebody assigned that job to corporate lawyers who don't understand technology, thinking it wasn't a technical issue and didn't require any technical education, experience, or understanding.
Meanwhile, Canada’s media and telecom industry is concentrated in the hands of three wealthy families. These empires have successfully lobbied the Canadian government for decades to achieve a degree of protection from US competitors, to the detriment of Canadians in terms of higher mobile phone and internet bills, a bland selection of privately produced journalism, and underwhelming TV content.
The same playbook is at work with this latest bit of protectionism. The media empires leverage Canadians’ somewhat justified desire to protect Canadian culture to convince politicians in Ottawa to provide some monopoly-preserving protectionist measures.
It’s a disgusting symbiosis that suppresses dynamism, but it’s likely not going away any time soon.
Marketed as "protecting Canadian culture". In reality it's oligarchs lobbying to keep the status quo and their margins fat.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content
It's part of the reason why so many artists come out of Canada. Inorder to satisfy the content regulations the government heavily subsidized the arts.
Most of what Celine Dion produced in her career doesn't fit the government approved list of cultural content, so is considered foreign music. Celine Dion, probably Canada's most recognizable voice and signer, signing in French, a language almost exclusively spoken in Canada on the North American continent, isn't considered Canadian culture.
But some recordings from Elvis do count because he happened to record them on Canadian soil. [0]
[0] https://nationalpost.com/news/extremely-canadian-media-that-...
JB, Celine, Brian Adam's etc arguably started because Canada is such a hospitable environment to artists, if they pick up and basically come American... Why should we classify them as Canadian artists? Don't think any of them even live in Canada anymore, can't say I think they do much for the industry. Matt Dusk, CRJ, lightfoot etc keep it real.
Kindly keep this kind of ignorant viewpoint to yourself.
There are a lot of differences, and if you can't or won't see them that not our problem.
As a Canadian, I don't want your two party political structure (soon to be one maybe?) and your supreme court of mostly old clerics making decisions based on their religious views in my country thanks. Or shall we talk about your daily mass shootings?
If you guys think that is working for you, so much the better for you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My friend—who is much more restrained in speech than I am—and I were saying that we don't like to come to the 'orange site' as much as before, despite the sometimes excellent discussions, and though it's hard to say precisely why, the reason we came up with is the libertarian slant.
You are doing a great job keeping the tone civil, but I think in the end it just leaves us with a community made up of say 33% of people politely saying impolite things.
By controlling the tone, could it be that our trolls have just learned to deliver their absolutist, unfeeling and insensitive comments in polite language?
We can detect tone but not intent, right? So we control the tone, but the trolls here (and no doubt about it we have them like anywhere else) have just learned to sealion people.
And I stand by the provocative nature of the parent post.
What if he/she had said 'The difference between a Russian and a Ukrainian is just a line on a map?' That is a politely stated idea. Would a Ukrainian have to take that with restraint too?
It doesn't change the fact that you also broke the site guidelines by taking the bait and responding with an outright flamewar post. People need to follow the rules regardless of how provocative another comment is. Otherwise we get a downward spiral (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
We don't think in terms of civility on HN; I haven't used that word in years except to tell people we don't use that word. We're going for kindness, which is something quite different.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
"Why should we classify them as Canadian artists? Don't think any of them even live in Canada anymore"
i think its a good question.
i attempted to point out, rather simply, how attempts to answer this question in terms of where an artist was born vs where the artist lives vs where the artist recorded their music, etc are arbitrary distinctions. in my view, there is no difference between these artists, qua artists or their art qua art, regardless of which lines they cross on a map, or when. i am struggling to see that distinction alone as a valid criterion to determine which forms of art are worthy of supporting and promoting, or, in the active, suppressing. and i am sensitive to the censorship of art in particular, so perhaps this is reason for my emotional "hot take".
but my hope was that my comment would evoke a thoughtful response, and not some sort of racist flame war, yes indeed.
That is, the burden is on you to disambiguate your intent. Your intent exists in your head, but not in anyone else's—you have to communicate it clearly if you want other people to give you thoughtful responses.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Like with anything "cultural", this depends on who you ask. I'm Canadian I don't support any form of government interference in speech and "cultural" matters. I don't feel "dominated" by USA culture, and I live in a border city where it is common for people to live on one side and work on the other, where people have family on either side of the border etc. where our traditional media broadcast (tv and radio) are a mix of local and American.
This is just my personal opinion, of course... but if our "cultural industries" are so fragile that they can't compete with other artists across the border, then that is their own fault and it indicates that haven't earned the right to my attention. I don't base my choice on what media to absorb on superficial criteria like the country of origin. Especially in the age of the Internet where my choices are literally global.
The real cultural difference here, in my opinion, is constitutional. Such media regulations would likely be considered a violation of the First Amendment in the USA. The idea that we have regulatory bodies setting rules around what kinds of information we can be exposed and under what circumstances to is a violation of everything that I believe in and I will never vote for any politician that favours this sort of government overreach.
So while you're not necessarily wrong in your generalization about the "perspective of Canada" (depending on which Canadians you speak of), as an individual Canadian I say "speak for yourself."
Other countries, including the USA, advertise and hype their own content. Your preferences are deeply influenced by the country of origin, because advertising works.
This bill isn't blocking American advertising in Canada. It's just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
You definitely don't speak for us all, whatever the case.
That was my point. No one can make broad generalizations about "the Canadian perspective." Like everyone, everywhere, we are all individuals. As such, those who speak of "the Canadian perspective" are not representing everyone in Canada. They can't. They certainly don't speak for me.
> "As long as I am entertained I don't care whether the entertainers are my peers, cultural or otherwise
Pretty much. Although I wouldn't use the words "serfs in some content factory." That choice of language speaks to an ideological bent that is VERY far removed from my own. But if I buy a music album that was recorded by a band based out of British Colombia, for example, they are no more "my peers" than if they were a K-Pop group based out of South Korea.
Culturally? Culture is a matter of individual choices and preferences. One Canadian does not speak for another. So we're going in circles now.
Are you very right-wing?
Yeah OP doesn't speak for me either. While this might not be implemented in the best way, Canadian culture is a real thing, but only because we are active in trying to protect it.
And it goes double for French Canadian culture! I don't want my province to become another Louisiana, i.e.: a once French speaking region that is now nearly 100% anglophone, but hey there's this great French influence!
Also FB puts news orgs in a bind because in order to compete, they need to give their content away for free on Facebook.
This has put the squeeze on an industry that was already bleeding money from all the ads moving online.
Because we are a small news market, this has been especially damaging to our journalism industry. If we lose it then it will be foreigners telling us what the 'facts' are in our own country, no thanks.
Friend of mine here in the bay area is French Canadian and his teenagers (both full Americans born here) both watch and follow French Canadians on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. He explained to me that under Canadian law, absolutely none of that is Canadian Content or Culture. No subsidies, no quotas. Even a Denis Villeneuve movie isn't either.
Apparently, to watch original content in French he has to VPN in Canada to be allowed to watch content that's only produced in Canada for French Canadians by CBC; they won't even make the smallest attempt at exporting it.
Honestly the whole concept, to me, is bizarre.
The cancon rules play out in absurd ways on a regular basis; there was a case where a Bryan Adams album didn't qualify but an Aerosmith album did due to where it was recorded, and while I never looked too closely at either case I'm sure there was some bureaucratic discretion exercised somewhere along the way.
That said, Cancon will always get my vote, I think we do have a distinct set of musical conventions from other places and it's got a lot to do with the government assistance.
I don't know if these words have the same connotation in Canada as in the US, but these are two pretty loaded terms out here.
It's a pretty loaded situation.
Cause we're neither French nor English Parle Anglais ou Francis We hate each other like the plague And we hope it stays that way
Like, against black people?
> voted twice in my life about leaving Canada
That's not at all like the US Confederation or Civil War.
> they had an IRA style terrorist group called the FLQ.
Did they actually get convicted under terrorism laws? From my understanding, it was a series of mailbox bombing, some of them by the feds themselves. [0] Nothing remotely looking like 9/11.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involvin...
I'm not particularly interested in a contest of anti-wit where you try to convince me the government of Quebec are actually superduper committed anti-religionists and I get increasingly frustrated, but I definitely consider it a law based in racist motivation and which is playing out in a highly racist way, just like the crack laws down there in the 90s were targeted at black people. Superpredators and all that.
Anyways I'm not sure what you're after here - is it that, the Confederate South was the pinnacle of racism? And nothing should ever be compared to it, because that's insulting to the pride of the generations of Southern Racists who have worked very hard to successfully maintain an aura of abject Hun-like barbarism against a tide of woke PCism that grows ever more powerful?
Am I making you feel like maybe, as an American, your racism is maybe not as remarkable as you think it is, and in fact, is just another case of US exceptionalist ego tripping? I mean, let's face it, Jefferson Davis was no Hitler, and neither is whoever is running Quebec right now, they're all just boring assholes throwing red meat to their boring fans.
And lest you think I'm some sort of Anglo nationalist, no, I live on Treaty One Territory and I despise my own government just as much for the exact same reasons. It's the same everywhere, dude - you people just have more guns and less self-control about it.
But the question is not what the law says, but how it is applied, and to whom, which gets lost in the transition to the paper trail.
edit: A good way to think about it, IMO, is to remember for a moment that everything a politician does is performative - whether they believe it or don't, every public action is actually a pantomime which is intended to please or appease. With that in mind, who is Quebec pleasing or appeasing with this law? Atheists? Please.
Another comparison one could draw, and perhaps a more apt one than the confederacy, would be to Utah, where it's known that if you try to do business there, it is not a secular government and you need to either bribe or work around the church. Quebec enjoys a similar license to pass shit laws/policies that do not pass the Charter, and the feds do nothing because they'll just have another referendum about it.
It's not quite a gish gallop, but the time investment to engage directly is far too high.
>No, I just believe that force is only justified in response to force. Problem?
So yes, I am implying that Facebook has the right to offer an internet service to Canadians, and you are violating the above principle with your ransom. News that hurts your feelings is not force, as much as you’d like it to be.
In the US, any notion of “protecting the culture” is considered taboo. Implying that outside influence would not be your peers, and using terms like “serfs in some content factory in some lawless backwater” would be considered downright racist.
Personally, I can see value in keeping a thriving industry locally (which, again, is almost taboo in the US). I wonder how this compares to countries like, say, Japan or South Korea, which have thriving entertainment sectors of their own. Do they also have protection laws to enable this, or are they able to maintain this organically?
People might start getting woke, who knows.
You have plenty of people both willing and unwilling to face this issue everywhere.
And you might be surprised by the types of people who share your attitude. They aren’t all as woke as you might think.
We have lawless backwaters right here in Manitoba. It's not a question of this or that geographical location, but of the willingness of capital to find the most lawless place it can find in which to operate, and the willingness of governments to be bought out of doing anything about it.
My countryman wants his entertainment cheap at any cost, and that's the entirety of the problem we've got right now. The most destructive weapon I've seen in the last forty years is price tags.
Anyone who thinks there should be laws against child slavery, and that we should not do business with people who use child slavery, I'm going to agree with that person on that point. I have a lot of other things that I think we should prohibit people from doing business with as well, but let's start with child slavery, since we are all active users of it, right?
It would be great if the cream would always rise to the top but that's just not how it works. The entertainment industry is marketing driven. More money means more marketing and being US based means more reach. Entertainment industry consolidation among massive US conglomerates becomes a self perpetuating cycle. Once they are big enough, those corporations start lobbying the government to make rules in their favour (ie copyright extension) that affect people globally.
I'm not advocating full protectionism, or anything close to it, but lets be realistic. It's not a level playing field out there.
>where our traditional media broadcast (tv and radio) are a mix of local and American
I'm not sure if this is an argument for, or against. Those local TV and radio stations are huge beneficiaries of certain protectionist measures. And the fact you don't feel "dominated" by US culture could also be seen as a sign the existing measures are working.
(I realize that Canadian media is also dominated by a few big corps, and that deserves its own discussion but the general idea of helping local cultural industries compete with US ones is sound IMHO)
I am an American that grew up near the border and always listened to Canadian radio because it was so much more diverse musically. The only thing that could compete was local college radio because it was heavily subsidized by student tuition.
Otherwise, you end up with the lowest common denominator of shit with culture competing in an open market.
The alternative is great if you just want to watch super hero movies and listen to pop music all day.
> monopoly-preserving protectionist measures
That’s exactly what it is. They don’t like it that others can bypass their influence and become successful without them, so they lobby the government to legislate them back into a rent seeking position.
For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the Canadian media landscape, could you please name these families?
Corus Entertainment is owned by the Shaws (along with Shaw Cable, which is now Rogers). They run YTV, HGTV, TÉLÉTOON, etc…
Québecor Media is majority owned by Pierre Péladeau. They operate Videotron, Freedom Mobile, and others.
There’s a million of us in America. We are very disproportionately represented in American media, especially comedy.
Useful solutions to the problem are where we are running into disagreements. And, any useful solution is going to run into disagreement because it's going to change the distribution of wealth from the status quo. Content creators will get more of it.
Two analogies come to mind...
1. It reminds me of record labels and artists. There have traditionally been many cases where the artists made very little income but the producers and label made a lot of money. The distribution channel captured the profits.
2. I also think of cars and car dealerships. Imagine if car manufacturers couldn't make enough money to run a functioning business but car dealerships were making a lot of income.
In the case of news articles the underlying problem isn't discovery of content. Instead, it's about the income model around advertisements. The middle companies that broker ads are making a lot of money while the organizations displaying them get a fraction of the income. The issues are often part of todays advertising model.
The solution to "someone makes more money than someone else" is not necessarily "steal from the one who makes more money".
>In the case of news articles the underlying problem isn't discovery of content. Instead, it's about the income model around advertisements. The middle companies that broker ads are making a lot of money while the organizations displaying them get a fraction of the income. The issues are often part of todays advertising model.
Newspapers not making enough money from their ads is not Facebook's fault. Facebook is not brokering ads for those publishers.
The examples you provided are irrelevant because the relationship publishers have with Facebook is nothing like that. For starters, Facebook and publishers do not enter any kind of agreement or contract.
> Useful solutions to the problem are where we are running into disagreements.
I consider Useful to be Usability + Utility.
One of the problems in finding a useful solution is that politicians are driving solutions based on things they are not experts in. A reasoned understanding of the situation with information on which knobs to turn is not present.
> Newspapers not making enough money from their ads is not Facebook's fault.
Yes and no. A specific issue is local and regional news. Facebook and Next Door are examples of applications that have changed how we engage with and know about local and regional happenings. That means less traffic to Newspapers to learn about local happenings.
This kind of change isn't necessarily a bad thing. But, it is transformative with trade-offs that are worth looking into. For example, I can easily get the scores for the local high school football games via social media. But, getting a good understanding about some outstanding players is going to be missing. Something gained and something lost.
There is a lot here. And, while I don't like the proposed law I do see a need for understanding and change. Some knobs needs to be adjused around this space.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-bill-c18-on...
It's an interesting point, not sure how I feel about it...
YouTube plays full music content on their site and shows ads on top of it.
Whereas Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter link to the sites. You can’t consume that content in the same way that you can music videos on YouTube.
Isn't it consistent? Publishers want to be paid, not shared per se.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/05/31/1179184256/news-facebook-cali...
[2] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
Facebook is the company that attempted to seize the internet in the developing world about a decade ago by attempting to provide a gratis, curated "internet" that they controlled as the entry point for people just getting online. Meanwhile, Facebook was making every attempt to do the same through its various methods; I distinctly remember when they told me I now have an @facebook email address that nobody asked for or wanted.
They wanted to be the internet, essentially, the conduit for all useful information. What they had in mind was to do that capture, and then start squeezing the news themselves by choking off the supply of readers. The fact they are retreating in the face of a tax is actually a bit stunning, because I don't see how they'll ever retake this territory they are ceding, and that more or less dooms their entire strategy in a very visible way.
Easier for Meta to decline the tax and make an example by punishing the affected Canadian users, than it is to welcome the tax and end up paying millions.
For a physical anology, it's like if you have a new robotaxi company that drives to anywhere people want to go very cheaply/easily, and this hurts the operators of short-haul flights when people figure they'd rather sleep in a car for 3 hours rather than dealing with airports, so your response is to force the robotaxi company to pay the short-haul flight operators for every trip to the airport in a way that's unprofitable for the robotaxis. The obvious response from the robotaxi is to stop providing rides to/from the airport.
The appropriate way for the government to do this is to slap a general corporate tax on Facebook, and then subsidize news agencies out of general revenue, not this convoluted/backwards link tax approach.
I am unsure what is the most appropriate way. Fair use laws was never designed with the idea of facebook copying news segments, search copying whole segments of websites and inline them, google making full copies of every page of every book, machine learning models, and so on. It also seem to have failed rather extremely with sites like youtube. All those cases of fair use also happens to only provide rights to large companies with hordes of lawyers. Anything smaller just get gunned down with copyright claims and strikes.
I can imagine someone trying to write a bot that join every public facebook group and copy a snippet of every comment that is being made (with a helpful link if anyone want to read the full text) and publish that outside of facebook and their ads. How fast would that bot be kicked out by facebook?
I don't think it is; as far as I can tell, both the spirit and letter of the law is to require payment for links only, that include no content snippets.
e.g. the bill's charter reads: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_...
"Under the Bill, a digital news intermediary could make news content available by reproducing it or by facilitating access to the news content, including by generating links to news content. Facilitating access to news content could be done through any means, including by way of an index, aggregation or ranking, all of which are methods used by online platforms to organize and distribute news content."
This also comes up in the clause-by-clause review: https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/CHPC/meetin...
1: "Facebook has said that they may consider removing the ability of news to be shared on their platform so that they cannot be scoped into this legislation. If they were to make that decision and Canadians wanted to take a quote from a newspaper article and post that quote on their Facebook page as a small snippet, would Facebook be allowed to permit that without being captured by this legislation?"
2: "[...]Regarding the example you give, in a context where Facebook has made the business decision to essentially prevent the ability of users to link to news articles but an individual is quoting from a particular news article without a link, no, I do not believe that would engage or trigger the application of the act."
1: "But as soon as a link is included, then they would be scoped into this legislation."
2: "From my perspective, the act of linking is a critical one. It boils down to the facilitation of access. Again, at the crux of this bill is a recognition that the ways that a significant number of Canadians navigate to news content is via social media services or via a search service, which involves clicking on the link. Yes."
If the intention was for this law to apply to snippets rather than links, it should have been written that way, because as-is, it applies to links, and not snippets.
I'm unclear how this is different than what you described. Taxing the replacement to subsidize the incumbents
Please see the entirety of my original post in context, the part you quoted doesn't stand alone. The robotaxi analogy helps to illustrate the difference that your comment is alluding to.
Funny to hear a complaint about this when one is so used to hearing people complain that gmail dominates email now.
My official email is a gmail, I'm currently shopping around for who I should plan to pay for the rest of my life to handle a new one for me. It's gonna take a while, but I do not intend to let them retain the ability to turn my life off with an algorithm.
I recently made a Google account to use Family Link so I could regulate what my kids do with their Chromebooks. I first tried the approach of making an account with a non-Google address and while this works for a lot of Google things, it didn't work for Family Link for whatever reason. So now we all have regular GMail accounts and haven't looked at the mail or used the address for a single other thing.
Would be nice to not have to deal with all that but we're getting a lot of value out of the situation and the kids enjoy apps like Duolingo and Scratch Jr.
The new monopolistic middlemen are taking a big percentage of the world economy just because they are providing the infrastructure needed to run business. They decide who can reach consumers and who cannot. It is not sustainable.
Now someone else controls the delivery mechanism, and they're passed.
They're still mad at Craigslist, but they don't make enough to be a worthwhile target.
I could argue the same for Apple; other companies compete successfully in the manufacture of phones, personal computers, and tech accessories.
A company can be large and powerful without being a monopoly.
You know how “nobody reads the article” before commenting? That phenomenon is massive on Facebook. News organizations are tired of providing fodder for Facebook comment sections and not getting eyeballs on their own websites. CBC News turned off comments on their Facebook articles to drive more people to their website.
That's not limited to Canada. It's a worldwide phenomena.
But the question media company should be asking themselves is why aren't people actually clicking on the articles and reading the content?
It's perplexing to me because it would cost them (the media companies) billions of dollars if they had to buy adds on platforms like Facebook for their content. They get all of it for free and yet these links don't translate into actual clicks.
Traditionally though, news companies have paid for that attention. The kid on the corner yelling about the day's headlines, or TV ads "Tonight, on the 10:00 news:...".
Assuming most digital platforms block news in Canada through, this will not provide much revenue for the News Businesses, and they will still need to solve their monetization problem somehow.