I live in Canada and I'm 100% on meta / Google's side.
If you mandate that to link to you I must pay you. Then you get to deal with people not linking to you. It's a bad law, and it's basically mugging tech companies to prop up big news orgs.
Yes? Because corporations shouldn’t have rights, should only exist to benefit citizens, and should have legislation applied when they are being harmful. I can’t tell if you were being sarcastic.
Corporations don't have rights. The people running them, however, do.
I don't know about Canada but here in the States we have a constitutionally guaranteed right to equal protection under the law. That includes the people that own and work for corporations.
How does Reddit and Twitter (maybe even Hackernews) and basically everyone else get around this besides Facebook? Is Reddit paying for every link now? I don't understand why I'm only hearing about Facebook with regard to issue
> (d) requires the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (the “Commission”) to maintain a list of digital news intermediaries in respect of which the enactment applies;
CRTC is a government entity so the government reserves the power to decide who is on the list. I couldn't find the list online though.
It's about compensating the news agencies for the lack of ad income they get from people following links because of the summaries. If every summary has a similar click through rate then using the clicks through to distribute the news dollars makes sense. It's just assuming that 1 in 10[0] people who see the summary click through, so they use that to compensate for the other 9.
Again, this doesn’t talk about summaries. It talks about following a link.
At the end of the day it’s not facebook’s responsibility to make sure the news are profitable, nor does it make sense to charge Facebook per link when it’s the users posting them.
The same with Google. All the sites need to do is adjust their robot.txt file and Google will leave them alone.
Then the law should allow an exception for links which are not rendered as rich links. If it’s a plain html link, then problem solved.
Social media is killing what’s left of their business model, but Craigslist and the like gutted it first.
If we as a society want news outlets to stay afloat because they provide a service we deem valuable, let’s skip all the way to the logical conclusion of funding them directly.
I don't understand the problem. Canadian government agencies can continue to freely post information about the wildfires on Meta platforms, and users can share those posts or share links to government web sites. The legislation mentioned in the article doesn't prevent any of that. It seems like they're conflating two separate issues.
Don't give them ideas... They'll happily spring for a way to funnel taxpayer dollars into the media empire while laundering it through this innocent-sounding setup.
"... after the country passed a law that allows news organizations to negotiate with tech giants to receive payment for articles shared on their platforms" is a really funny way to describe a law that FORCES tech giants to pay for having links to news articles.
Of course you can force somebody to do something that will cost them money. Why wouldn't you be able to? Why would it be immoral to make people do things even if it costs them some marginal income?
The government can imprison you, they can take your things and they can even kill you but they can't force you to do something.
What they can do is incentivize and disincentivize behaviors. What they never seem to learn though is that disincentivizing bad behavior doesn't lead to good behavior, it leads to different behavior. If they want people to do something specific, they have to incentivize that thing.
Seems like a lot of vitriol and misunderstanding in these comments, so a few thoughts as someone directly affected by the McDougall Creek fire.
Imagine you run a business, doesn’t matter what kind. Prospects look up your service on, say, Google, where Google in many cases now shows them enough of an extract of your content so that they may never even have to click through to your page to learn about what you do. So you can never analyze, ab test, tag, sign up, retarget or monetize these otherwise-visitors who are no longer clicking through. Effectively Google can be argued to be leveraging your content to make their own page stickier at your expense, eg to sell more ads. How would this make you feel? Turns out many people have a real problem with this, in 2019 I realized this at a telco conference where Rand Fishkin in a keynote was advocating people take this to their members of congress.
Firstly, Bill C18 is not even in effect yet. Secondly, its primarily concerned with the intermediaries reproducing the copyrighted news content or summaries/extracts on their own sites, which is the same situation as above where visitors never come to your site because your content is being reproduced/extracted/summarized elsewhere outside of your control. The matter of links to news articles is one interpretation of the secondary concept of “facilitating access” but as already explained in some of the comments here, thats not actually the core driver of this bill and Meta etc are refusing even to participate in the drafting of the regulations around that despite being invited to do so.
On the ground, here is what is happening today: neighbours evacuated or on alert are posting questions in private neighbourhood groups, on everything from food access, water use to garbage collection, and when answers are behind news articles, Meta is stopping other neighbours from posting links to those articles in response. (Incidentally, use of news in private discussion groups is something specifically exempted by C18).
This “interference” is purposeful by Meta as a calculated protest against a bill that is not yet in effect and isn’t about that use case. Yes, some might call this kind of behaviour bullying.
They can of course do what they want, they’re not under any obligation to let anyone communicate anything. Its really just a reminder to everyone that they’re driven entirely by self interest and not the interests of whichever communities they choose to operate in. By implication this makes them unreliable as an emergency communication utility or as a foundational element of community fabric.
>Imagine you run a business, doesn’t matter what kind. Prospects look up your service on, say, Google, where Google in many cases now shows them enough of an extract of your content so that they may never even have to click through to your page to learn about what you do. So you can never analyze, ab test, tag, sign up, retarget or monetize these otherwise-visitors who are no longer clicking through.
So kinda like the yellow pages in the phone book? Where I would go to the section on lock smiths and read the ads, and call the ones I want to talk to? You're wanting to basically force prospective clients to call each locksmith even if they don't want to. The company that allows ease of access gets the business. You're free to add a robots.txt blocking google today.
>its primarily concerned with the intermediaries reproducing the copyrighted news content or summaries/extracts on their own sites,
This is factually incorrect. The bill does not say "pay to summarize" it's pay to link. The notion that the news orgs are not getting any benefit out of this is insane to me. They're paying staff to manage their Facebook and Instagram accounts. Everything I know about businesses, and especially suffering businesses is that they don't want to burn a bunch of human hours posting stories that are apparently costing them money.
>neighbours evacuated or on alert are posting questions in private neighbourhood groups, on everything from food access, water use to garbage collection, and when answers are behind news articles, Meta is stopping other neighbours from posting links to those articles in response.
Sounds like we should stop depending on our news orgs who paywall public cood content anyways. That information should be on Government run websites.
>This “interference” is purposeful by Meta as a calculated protest against a bill that is not yet in effect and isn’t about that use case.
And I for one welcome it, our news orgs have a dying model and instead of adapting they're lobbing the government to bully the tech companies as they have money. Why have 400 meetings to discuss this bill and not change the text at all?
I'm not advocating any side here, I'm simply relaying what is actually happening on the ground, because the prevailing opinion here seems to be getting shaped by a very selective cherry picking of ideas that don't represent the reality on the ground here.
In the current conditions as you can imagine there is a lot of chatter on social media from people trying to find and share up to date information. A lot of this info is by definition hearsay, and so news articles are often getting referenced when a source of authoritative info is needed. I guess that is because the reporters working for those news orgs are on the ground at the press conferences, working the phones, working their networks of contacts, and working to get verification on when there are insufficient sources to a report. So what they bring here is some combination of a measure of trust, access to info before it hits official government pages, and aggregating of many diverse sources of into fewer places.
These news orgs are not the ones you're thinking of; they're our local community news outlets that have no paywalls and who run totally open/free sites supported by display ads on their sites.
Their articles are in many cases ahead of the official info on government sites. As an example, overnight reporting on one of these news sites sourced updates about the fireline hours before the official update is set to hit the government site, comments from gvt meteorologist about the smoke visibility around the airport which gives us some sense of when the water bombers will be able to fly again, again hours before this info will become officially available, last-minute changes in garbage collection info that is more current than what's on the government site, updates about the drinkability of water and so forth. We learnt from them first that some commercial flights at the airport would resume overnight, and so on.
No matter what you might generally think about reporters and news sites during "normal" times - right now these guys seem to be doing an amazing job of delivering exactly this -- actual news -- making it an extremely valuable resource.
So, Meta's "interference" is causing a lot of people irritation by not allowing us to share links to our community news org articles in private groups, instead forcing people to reference articles by screenshot, description etc. Surely it's inevitable that for some this irritation will lead to calls to boycott FB.
Not sure where the statements about factual correctness come from because the text of C18 is publicly available. It doesn't even contain the word "link". It does speak a lot about "content". And again, it isn't actually in effect yet. Yes the idea of "linking" is one interpretation of one aspect of C18 that pertains to "access of content" -- a cherry picked one that seems calculated to stir up outrage since C18 at least to me reads far more about the use of the content itself.
I've also never seen the Yellow Pages try to dynamically answer questions about a business, so people don't have to call that business, by automatically extracting parts of collateral the business authored but didn't give permission to use in that way.
Rather, the Yellow Pages has a formal spec/interface where they and the business can agree on the extent of what is OK to show.
And this seems to me exactly what C18 is trying to establish: that Meta et all can't simply extract as much out of a news article as they wish, but that there is a framework (with rules that remain to be drafted) where they must agree with the news orgs, what level of summary they can reproduce for free. Not much different than what Apple News presumably already has in place. Except Meta is refusing even to engage in this.
Is C18 perfect? No. Are news orgs in general perfect? Hell no. Is there lobbying and cronyism related to the legacy orgs? Probably. Again I'm not arguing a specific s...
48 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadIf you mandate that to link to you I must pay you. Then you get to deal with people not linking to you. It's a bad law, and it's basically mugging tech companies to prop up big news orgs.
I don't know about Canada but here in the States we have a constitutionally guaranteed right to equal protection under the law. That includes the people that own and work for corporations.
i also would love a system like this, but 'should's never truly apply in the real world.
This page does not make that reference at least: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/online-n...
> (d) requires the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (the “Commission”) to maintain a list of digital news intermediaries in respect of which the enactment applies;
CRTC is a government entity so the government reserves the power to decide who is on the list. I couldn't find the list online though.
“The act says digital companies must pay news organizations when someone gets to a web story through a link on one of their products.” - https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/c-18-your-questions-answered-1...
[0] or whatever the ratio is.
Which is, of course, ridiculous. Those news sites are almost certainly gaining visitors from those links, not losing them.
You can claim that news sites gain more than they lose. That's a different argument.
At the end of the day it’s not facebook’s responsibility to make sure the news are profitable, nor does it make sense to charge Facebook per link when it’s the users posting them.
The same with Google. All the sites need to do is adjust their robot.txt file and Google will leave them alone.
Meanwhile, I have no problem with Google and Facebook giving some of the money the create to the people who make the content that is consumed.
Social media is killing what’s left of their business model, but Craigslist and the like gutted it first.
If we as a society want news outlets to stay afloat because they provide a service we deem valuable, let’s skip all the way to the logical conclusion of funding them directly.
Yes there is no reason why they can't just use the government links since those r not banned.
It's almost as if WP has a horse in the race.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188502
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37182579
Maybe Should have thought about that before passing a law that made no sense…
I am sure Facebook would gladly enable link sharing of news articles if the laws were put back.
You can’t force somebody to do something that will cost them money.
Meta called your bluff and you are just mad.
What they can do is incentivize and disincentivize behaviors. What they never seem to learn though is that disincentivizing bad behavior doesn't lead to good behavior, it leads to different behavior. If they want people to do something specific, they have to incentivize that thing.
Imagine you run a business, doesn’t matter what kind. Prospects look up your service on, say, Google, where Google in many cases now shows them enough of an extract of your content so that they may never even have to click through to your page to learn about what you do. So you can never analyze, ab test, tag, sign up, retarget or monetize these otherwise-visitors who are no longer clicking through. Effectively Google can be argued to be leveraging your content to make their own page stickier at your expense, eg to sell more ads. How would this make you feel? Turns out many people have a real problem with this, in 2019 I realized this at a telco conference where Rand Fishkin in a keynote was advocating people take this to their members of congress.
Firstly, Bill C18 is not even in effect yet. Secondly, its primarily concerned with the intermediaries reproducing the copyrighted news content or summaries/extracts on their own sites, which is the same situation as above where visitors never come to your site because your content is being reproduced/extracted/summarized elsewhere outside of your control. The matter of links to news articles is one interpretation of the secondary concept of “facilitating access” but as already explained in some of the comments here, thats not actually the core driver of this bill and Meta etc are refusing even to participate in the drafting of the regulations around that despite being invited to do so.
On the ground, here is what is happening today: neighbours evacuated or on alert are posting questions in private neighbourhood groups, on everything from food access, water use to garbage collection, and when answers are behind news articles, Meta is stopping other neighbours from posting links to those articles in response. (Incidentally, use of news in private discussion groups is something specifically exempted by C18).
This “interference” is purposeful by Meta as a calculated protest against a bill that is not yet in effect and isn’t about that use case. Yes, some might call this kind of behaviour bullying.
They can of course do what they want, they’re not under any obligation to let anyone communicate anything. Its really just a reminder to everyone that they’re driven entirely by self interest and not the interests of whichever communities they choose to operate in. By implication this makes them unreliable as an emergency communication utility or as a foundational element of community fabric.
So kinda like the yellow pages in the phone book? Where I would go to the section on lock smiths and read the ads, and call the ones I want to talk to? You're wanting to basically force prospective clients to call each locksmith even if they don't want to. The company that allows ease of access gets the business. You're free to add a robots.txt blocking google today.
>its primarily concerned with the intermediaries reproducing the copyrighted news content or summaries/extracts on their own sites,
This is factually incorrect. The bill does not say "pay to summarize" it's pay to link. The notion that the news orgs are not getting any benefit out of this is insane to me. They're paying staff to manage their Facebook and Instagram accounts. Everything I know about businesses, and especially suffering businesses is that they don't want to burn a bunch of human hours posting stories that are apparently costing them money.
>neighbours evacuated or on alert are posting questions in private neighbourhood groups, on everything from food access, water use to garbage collection, and when answers are behind news articles, Meta is stopping other neighbours from posting links to those articles in response.
Sounds like we should stop depending on our news orgs who paywall public cood content anyways. That information should be on Government run websites.
>This “interference” is purposeful by Meta as a calculated protest against a bill that is not yet in effect and isn’t about that use case.
And I for one welcome it, our news orgs have a dying model and instead of adapting they're lobbing the government to bully the tech companies as they have money. Why have 400 meetings to discuss this bill and not change the text at all?
In the current conditions as you can imagine there is a lot of chatter on social media from people trying to find and share up to date information. A lot of this info is by definition hearsay, and so news articles are often getting referenced when a source of authoritative info is needed. I guess that is because the reporters working for those news orgs are on the ground at the press conferences, working the phones, working their networks of contacts, and working to get verification on when there are insufficient sources to a report. So what they bring here is some combination of a measure of trust, access to info before it hits official government pages, and aggregating of many diverse sources of into fewer places.
These news orgs are not the ones you're thinking of; they're our local community news outlets that have no paywalls and who run totally open/free sites supported by display ads on their sites.
Their articles are in many cases ahead of the official info on government sites. As an example, overnight reporting on one of these news sites sourced updates about the fireline hours before the official update is set to hit the government site, comments from gvt meteorologist about the smoke visibility around the airport which gives us some sense of when the water bombers will be able to fly again, again hours before this info will become officially available, last-minute changes in garbage collection info that is more current than what's on the government site, updates about the drinkability of water and so forth. We learnt from them first that some commercial flights at the airport would resume overnight, and so on.
No matter what you might generally think about reporters and news sites during "normal" times - right now these guys seem to be doing an amazing job of delivering exactly this -- actual news -- making it an extremely valuable resource.
So, Meta's "interference" is causing a lot of people irritation by not allowing us to share links to our community news org articles in private groups, instead forcing people to reference articles by screenshot, description etc. Surely it's inevitable that for some this irritation will lead to calls to boycott FB.
Not sure where the statements about factual correctness come from because the text of C18 is publicly available. It doesn't even contain the word "link". It does speak a lot about "content". And again, it isn't actually in effect yet. Yes the idea of "linking" is one interpretation of one aspect of C18 that pertains to "access of content" -- a cherry picked one that seems calculated to stir up outrage since C18 at least to me reads far more about the use of the content itself.
I've also never seen the Yellow Pages try to dynamically answer questions about a business, so people don't have to call that business, by automatically extracting parts of collateral the business authored but didn't give permission to use in that way.
Rather, the Yellow Pages has a formal spec/interface where they and the business can agree on the extent of what is OK to show.
And this seems to me exactly what C18 is trying to establish: that Meta et all can't simply extract as much out of a news article as they wish, but that there is a framework (with rules that remain to be drafted) where they must agree with the news orgs, what level of summary they can reproduce for free. Not much different than what Apple News presumably already has in place. Except Meta is refusing even to engage in this.
Is C18 perfect? No. Are news orgs in general perfect? Hell no. Is there lobbying and cronyism related to the legacy orgs? Probably. Again I'm not arguing a specific s...