Facebook to block news for some users in Canada
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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.
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.
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.”
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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)
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Marketed as "protecting Canadian culture". In reality it's oligarchs lobbying to keep the status quo and their margins fat.
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.
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.
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.
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:...".
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/05/31/1179184256/news-facebook-cali...
[2] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
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.