Canadians will no longer have access to news content on Facebook and Instagram

Google and other social media platforms seem like the primary source of traffic for these legacy media companies. I mean a lot of news organizations upload links to their content themselves because that's how people find what to read. I reckon very few people go directly to the news websites to find articles and that's certainly not going to change because of this law in my opinion. The concept of a service provider having to pay to host links is absurd and goes against the nature of how the internet works. It's an attack on the very nature of the internet framed in a manner of "Protecting Canadian's" when in reality, the people who's pockets its meant to line ironically are the ones who are going to be hurt the most by it.

What a disaster.

I can't wait to watch how this backfires when the legacy media companies start complaining about how they are getting next to no traffic once this passes. That's not even to mention the smaller publishers who now aren't able to promote their own content on these platforms because of this bill.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-23/facebook-reverses-new...

> "If the government can't stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?" said Rodriguez.

How is this "stand[ing] up for Canadians"? More like standing up for news corps. The framing of the response from Meta by Trudeau as "bullying tactics" is a bit irritating. I'd expect Meta's experiments with blocking news to be checking whether the new costs mean it's still worth for them to post news or now. I still don't really understand what the purpose of this law is.

However, the giants then give a giant middle finger to the news outlets.

Full disclosure: I hate <please accept our cookies> News outlets <please provide your email address for our newsletter> and the way they <you have reached 5/5 articles this month, click here to get a subscription>.

*WirelessGigabit navigates to archive.is/link_to_article

... try to do everything to NOT focus on the article they just wrote...

But, looking at the history, I'm sure it'll play out like this:

    * News outlet has website, gets visitors.
    * Facebook comes along, gets many visitors.
    * News outlet posts content on Facebook for exposure.
    * News outlet gets visitors via Facebook and makes money on advertisement revenue.
    * Facebook starts to things to keep people in their ecosystem.
    * News outlet gets no visitors as everybody considers Facebook their 'entrypoint' to the WWW.
    * New bill gets lobbied that force tech giants need to pay to post news.
    * Tech giants don't post news.
    * News outlet still doesn't get visitors.

It's not exactly new information that journalism is in a tough spot right now. As subscriber revenue has dried up, national and multinational companies have bought up virtually all newspapers in Canada. Where there were once a plethora of independent newspapers, now there is just one or two national papers producing localized versions under different names all pretending to be local.

Some major Canadian cities have newspapers with no physical offices. e.g. Calgary's "Calgary Herald" building was recently turned into a bus depot, and the few employees still working in the Post Media paper are now working from home. In it's heyday, the paper had a building downtown, and city councillors would stroll from city hall to the Herald's office when news was breaking. Now the work-from-home crew only produces localization for a national paper, and interacts with city hall on reddit more than they do in person. Not surprisingly, the quality of local coverage has declined massively.

Journalism is a key part of democracy, informing the public and holding government accountable. The federal Liberals, currently in power, were correct to recognize this, but their actions have left a little to be desired. They implemented government subsidies for media with the intention of shoring up news media so that they can continue to function. This, obviously, produces a conflict of interest that the opposition has pointed out but. However, the problems with this program go even further. A few large media corporations with influential lobbyists now control the board that decides which news companies get funding, and they've used that power to freeze out upstart competition. Some of the best journalism being done in Canada right now is by upstart companies that get zero funding from the government, and will get none in the forseeable future.

So, where is the money that Meta or Google are supposed to pay for news going to go? It's likely going to go the same place that current media subsidies go, and not to the independent news sources that really need it.

This really is an awful implementation, but at least it's something. We can only hope that successive governments will iterate and improve rather than simply cancelling both subsidies and this new bill. The need for quality, local journalism is very real, and current funding models are badly broken.

The headline is misleading without that attribution. Canadians aren't "losing" access, they are having it taken away from them because Meta would rather just turn off the feature for the country rather than follow the new law.

Now do America.

Pity that it's so difficult nowadays to be accurately informed about anything.

Ironic