Bill C-18: Google to remove news links in Canada over online news law
ctvnews.ca
ctvnews.ca
Sometimes taking the simple view is correct: It's a bad thing to prevent sites from linking to one another. It's a bad thing to interfere with the ability to access information on the Internet for reasons of nationalist politics.
It's not just a matter of the targeted companies being Google and Meta, even though these two especially deserve it.
It's the simple realization that good journalism requires good money, and that the current balance between news organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task. It is also true of other type of content creators, by the way: there is a structural imbalance between content creators and content brokers. This is even more true with Google's zero-click efforts.
While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt.
What's happening here is that publishers and their owners somehow figured these pesky internet wiz kids owe them more money.
As evidenced by the average RoI at Google compared to news organisations.
Not a good metric.
The ROI difference is because of both entities being in different industries, and other things unrelated to the power balance. We can similarly compare the ROI of a news organization and say a restaurant and lament that there is an imbalance of power.
The imbalance is that as platforms, newspapers cross-subsidize content. Interesting headlines attract readers to the newspaper, but once in hand readers are likely to continue reading the other, less unique articles. (See also why newspapers carry sports scores and comics). An investigative report is by itself a money-loser, but the overall effect on net readership is a win.
Aggregators break newspapers as platforms. Google et al provide extra discoverability for a single article, certainly, but then there's no lock-in to keep readers on the (now) website, reading more and seeing other ads. Headline-and-summary view might even result in zero-click satisfaction, denying the outlet even that first impression.
This might just be a change that the industry must adapt to, in the same way that television and radio news took over the news-breaking role. However, it is more than a trivial threat to the fundamental business model of a news outlet; it's not (just) superficial greed.
I'm huge into supporting good journalism, and think we need some sort of intervention here. But I'm very very strongly opposed to this new law. If news sites want to charge for their content they should put it behind a pay gate.
I pay for news, but insultingly they STILL feed me ads. There is no tier that I can pay for that will eliminate the ads. I really don't have much sympathy for them given their refusal to somehow adapt to the times and offer service that users feel valuable enough to pay for.
Traditional paper-based newspaper is ad-supported too.
This is the 'trade journalism' model. Here, good journalism still exists, but the price is more than most people would afford. People buy trade journals when the news is important, with direct financial implications that justify the cost of admission.
General journalism, however, is something close to a public service. It's better in a vague, hand-wavy way to have an educated citizen body that's informed about current affairs, but few individual citizens derive much value from their own knowledge. (This is also why people tend to gravitate towards 'entertaining' news, by some definition. Come for the sports scores, stay for current events.)
In this model, the benefit of news is externalized. I benefit when other people are educated. This is a classic market failure, and it suggests that a reader-pays framework will underprovide news.
<meta name="googlebot-news" content="nosnippet">By acting at national level, news publishers (partially) avoid that dilemma.
I normally agree with release early, collect data and iterate. I'm not sure the law, with a bill of this impact, dependent on a bunch of politicians with obvious bias, who just went on summer vacation for 3 months, falls into this category.
Then we’d not only have enough financial resources to subsidize a free and healthy press but also for other worthy endeavours like better health care, open source software, science, etc.
All without hampering with basic pillars of the web.
The problem is media companies have been pushing this exact blueprint for d years. decades. It is a terrible, terrible template.
If countries want to tax big tech and give the money to media organizations, they should be honest about it. Laws like this distort reality.
>the current balance between news organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task.
This doesn't make sense. Newspapers want links to their stories. I've even seen media organization paying "internet brokers" to advertise stories.
The law has the economics of the internet backwards. To receive a link is to benefit, everyone knows this except the government.
Newspapers want monetization. There are three ways linking to stories equal monetization:
* Newspapers get enough ad money through these link. This mostly doesn't work.
* Newspapers cut their costs and deliver shitty clickbait.
* Newspapers get funded by "philantropy". This ranges from newspapers independently funded by trust funds to newspapers being bought by magnates.
Overall, we can see that linking is far from enough for most newspapers to publish independent, quality work.
> To receive a link is to benefit, everyone knows this except the government.
This appears to no longer be true. Groups benefiting from internet are mostly eyeball brokers, not content distributors.
I personally believe reader support is the only viable option going forward.
In general, the costs of running a journalistic organization (one which discovers news for itself, not just repackaging news from other media) far outweigh what people are willing to pay for this. Remember that newspapers, even in the times before radio was widespread, were always dirt cheap.
Not to mention, there is a problem of competition. Facts can't be copyrighted, so nothing can stop me from buying a subscription to NYT and reporting everything they write, in my own words, charging much less if I want to. Sure, I don't have their reputation, but if their subscription were high enough to cover their costs alone, plenty of people would chose to trust me.
For that specific example, science publications don't create any content, nor do they have paid staff curating collected content. That kind of helps their bottom line.
These organizations are closer in their model to Google than they are to news organizations (ie they gatekeep a specific type of resource that content producers need).
From what little I know from business press, in my business area they also get a significant share of their content for free, although it is much less predatory than science publications.
Not anymore - I used to buy the New York Post to read in a bar from time to time, and it was 25 cents (and arguably overpriced then). It’s how 1-1.50USD depending on day, if you can even find a copy.
The idea that big tech would pay the appropriate amount of tax to the appropriate country is laughable.
So, if big companies and small companies are being treated differently, the governments are not doing their jobs and have to be replaced by someone who will do it.
As seen in Twitch.tv vs Kick.com where streamers are dropping Twitch and migrating en-masse to Kick. Abusing the content creators can backfire. However Google is in a different situation; they have a virtual monopoly on content discovery and not existing on Google basically means not existing at all. How do you fix that? Is Google an internet-utility? Should it be regulated as such?
Another thing about utilities: water or electricity are fungible goods, easily measured. Search is rather trickier to decide what a good outcome is, and the thought of paying for politicians and administrators to debate search rank orders for eternity seems a terrible use of money.
Finally, things like water supply have been around for tens of thousands of years. Thinking search hasn't done so much in the last 10 maybe be a little short term! Thinking it will be around in the long term at all, and thus worth converting may also be a little short term.
Twitch claims it loses money on big streamers[1] and Kick is almost certainly being subsidized by online gambling company Stake[2][3].
[1] https://twitter.com/djfluffkins/status/1479362350566109184
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/12/06/trainw...
Let's go 100%. Will journalists then pay people who they report on?
CBC has received $1.2 billion annually from the federal government (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporat...) and is very ... government friendly ... in matters like the trucker protests.
I remember more independent press around 2000-2010, where there was true opposition in the media. I see nothing like that now.
Nobody owes anyone else a business model.
But there is public interest in having newspapers. (A tax on large digital ad platforms to subsidise newspapers makes much more sense.)
First attempt for Canada maybe. Australia did it a few years ago:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56163550
But Australia wasn't the first either. The Australian media companies got their idea from the French(?):
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/21/google-agrees-to-pay-french-publishers-for-news.html
It was obvious it wouldn't work, and clearly hasn't worked in Australia. The newspapers are still posting large losses, still shutting down newsrooms. It's inevitable they will disappear in their current form. The newspapers business wasn't selling news or doing investigations to create news. Their business is the same as Google's: selling ads. The news was always just the bait they used to get people to read their ads and they shamelessly copied it, often with only a few words changed, between mastheads. Each had their own little area they sold to, the size largely determined by how far you ship dead trees in about 6 hours. Now the BBC, CNN, The Guardian and the other remaining big ones can reach the entire world now, so we don't need thousands of little mastheads all repeating the same news items. These big news rooms do a far better job that the little ones at gathering news, and selling ads. And so, the little mastheads will die.
It's bad law because in order to cover this use case, they banned creating 10 or 20 word summaries of a 200 or 300 word article, expanding copyright accordingly. That had to do that because at least in Google's case, as all Google every did was post a few words and a link to the actual content, on the newspapers site. Copyright terms have already been stretched well beyond their utilitarian justification, probably by an order of magnitude. This stretches the definition of what is covered by copyright by a similar amount. Admittedly this stretch is fairly harmless here, but if it leaks into other domains we will have a mess on our hands.
then why were most news publications as bad as they are now 20 years ago? maybe they just suck. I learn more from HN that some news site ever did.
When I read american aerticles about my country, they are just plain WRONG.
If this were about good journalism then the law wouldn’t be necessary at all. The revenue these companies are generating from the journalism content is from displaying a headline. The whole point of the law is that the actual content of these articles is so utterly worthless, that users can’t even be bothered clicking on it. A substantial portion of those users derive all of the limited value that they believe it has by reading the headline alone. There is no legislative solution to that problem. This is law is only a solution to the problem of useless businesses being selected out of the market by their consumers.
Would this prevent embedding links into your posts? I thought it's about platforms displaying enough information discouraging the person to visit the news site. I get that they want people to stay on their platforms 24/7 but I also get the other side wanting a slice of the advertising cake.
Having any portion of the text present is enough.
"Making available 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."
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...
Application
6 This Act applies in respect of a digital news intermediary if, having regard to the following factors, there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news businesses:
(a) the size of the intermediary or the operator;
(b) whether the market for the intermediary gives the operator a strategic advantage over news businesses; and
(c) whether the intermediary occupies a prominent market position.
So it would be up to the CRTC to decide whether or not to put HN on the list of "digital news intermediaries" by applying the above 3-part test. Given that HN is a (relatively) small forum, compared to Google or Facebook, it's unlikely for that to happen.
Basically it only applies against you if you're big/important enough. I assume in practice this means Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Apple, and probably some others. Reddit, I suppose.
Remember that even though people misleadingly call Google and Facebook tech companies, they are in fact advertising companies; and although people speak of news companies, they have generally seen news, opinion and analysis as tools for connecting eyeballs to advertising i.e. they're effectively advertising companies. This bill is about the direct competition between the two kinds of advertising companies - traditional, ~domestic companies with close and personal ties to the people who govern vs new, foreign companies who don't have such essential ties to politicians as journalists do.
If it were literally just about the provision of news, then Canada and Australia fund the CBC/RC and the ABC/SBS so why would they be so fussed? There are people who today make a living from podcasts and substacks who could not make money from traditional advertising/media companies. News would be provided.
(In fact, just to bring the point home, the original version of Australia's equivalent bill didn't allow the ABC and SBS to participate, because as government-funded media organisations they didn't suffer from the transition of advertising from news-sponsoring to tech-sponsoring in the same way as private companies.)
Do they define "portion" in more detail anywhere else? Otherwise, it's sounds like it's saying that using a single word that's contained by any news article means that "news content is made available", which is obviously absurd.
That was exactly the sentiment in Australia when similar laws were passed there. Many, many people just said "Good, it's about time Google and Meta paid their fair share of taxes".
But they completely misunderstood they are not taxes at all, it's the Australian government collecting money, by law, to give directly to Rupert Murdoch (by law)
Many of the biggest tech have origins in US and any country trying to make a law regulating businesses and technology within its borders is bound to impact American companies one way or the other. We can take the easy route and call it just nationalism or we can try to understand the intention/reasons behind the law. We may not agree with their laws but it is their right.
Very unlikely, IMHO. The CRTC isn't in the habit of making decisions that harm large Canadian companies.
We have been using that same excuse to block out Japanese and Chinese goods in various eras.
Just feels weird the Canadians are copying our playbook
"We may not agree with their laws but it is their right"
This statement can be used to justify any law. We are also not debating whether it's their right but if it's a good law.
A good law can be passed with ill intentions and a bad law can be passed with good intentions. We should judge a law based on its merits and consequences but not based on who or why it was introduced. In this case, we can discuss on outcomes of this law and how it is bad for the internet but speculating on the intentions is just a lazy argument.
Lately, the go to terms against any law impacting big tech have been 'nationalism', 'authoritarianism' and 'crash-grab' etc. Many times the laws on anti-trust or data-residency laws enacted by other countries have been termed as 'threat to democracy', authoritarian and as impacting basic structure of the internet etc.
Any country trying to regulate, promote its own tech or maintain sovereignty over its citizen's data is strong armed into abandoning them by utilizing various trade organizations, lobbying and diplomatic pressure. At the same time, there is lot of official and unofficial complaining and investigation about TikTok storing data of 'American citizens' in China.
To me this looks entirely hypocritical and any discussion that accuses 'nationalism' comes off as a bad faith argument.
It wasn't that long ago that Google was forcing AMP onto the same publishers by making it a requirement to appear in the news carousel. That forced a lot of unwanted intrusion into content that wasn't Google's to mess with. Including a forced banner in the most valuable space, hijacking right/left swipes to navigate to competitor publisher sites, etc. They have a strong demonstrated history of doing the wrong thing in this space.
Though, I agree, this law and the outcome aren't the solution.
There needs to be a distinction between reference to content and the content itself. When platforms start to profit from other people's work without their consent that shouldn't fly. Google search's primary purpose is to make links discoverable and I don't think anyone ever took offense to that. But in recent years companies have started to deliberately blur that line by showing more content upfront, essentially to turn themselves into a middleman and choke content producers. It's perfectly legitimate to not allow this.
This is Canada but it can easily be any country. We need a fix, big tech has monopolized ad revenue and is choking out the publishers. The quality of newspaper stories has deteriorated over the years and local news has suffered to the point of almost being nonexistent. Also, we now have very few companies that dominate the news. Look at how big the New York times has gotten. It's now the national newspaper in the US. All the other newspapers are nipping at it's ankles. It's a direct result of the fact that other newspapers can't compete without a steady flow of ad revenue. Big tech has sucked all the money which makes it hard for any newspaper to survive, specially regional ones. We need a fix.
I’d happily pay good money for high quality news / journalism presented appropriately for the medium. That means a lot of concise real time information, coupled with long form discussion and debate. All packaged up in a modern, high quality web app, with auxiliary mobile applications.
Or after 20 years, non Americans recognize information control should be more nationalized instead of under perview of US companies.
Ultimately, this is the wrong approach. The internet should be "open," and people or companies should be free to link to whatever they want without penalty.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech
Perks of the job mainly consist of being able to sporadically say “Gentlemen. You can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!” and having critics in the mainstream media that hate your guts and will—uncompensated!—drop your name on a frequent basis and imply you are much much much more important and influential than you actually are.
I find that a puzzling comment. EFF has a strange way of showing its allegiance to "Big Tech".
What do I not know? How does the EFF demonstrate its allegiance to them?
I took the EFF's work on privacy as an impediment to "Big Tech"'s business model. How am I wrong?
Which RFC is that?
These news organizations want to have their cake and eat it too. They rely on these platforms for traffic. Now they also want to be paid for getting that traffic. That's not how this works.
> Break up the ad-tech sector, open up app stores, end-to-end delivery
I thought they stood for freedom, and now they want to pass laws on how software can work?!
Their literally saying this software code can't be this way, you need to submit a PR to change how it works to match this law. If this isn't the antithesis of freedom I don't know what is.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree unfortunately.
To paraphrase a great Canadian -- Yes they probably do. And don't call me Shirley.
It's like California but on a national level, still not quite as insane thankfully.
Actually, no.
It might be a symbiotic relationship for a small-time blog, but for a major news organization, it isn't. The Toronto Star and Global TV don't need freepub from Google.
One example among many: Most people see the headline – the headline written by a paid headline writer based on an article from a paid journalist on a staff of other professionals with families to feed - and then move on.
Very often a headline is all someone needs or wants. That has value. Without anyone clicking through to the web site, Google is getting the value from the headline, and contributing nothing to the web site in return.
It's like saying that when Google steals content from web sites and presents it as an answer card in search results that the web site somehow gets something out of it. That's completely false. The only one getting anything out of it is Google.
Very often a headline is all someone needs or wants. That has value. Without anyone buying that newspaper, the newspaper stand has got value from the headline, and contributed nothing to the newspaper publisher in return.
The reality is that headlines are advertisements for articles. That's why there are headline writers in the first place. Make a better advertisement, get more sales.
In the case of Google, publishing links with headlines means publishing free ads for that website. The website most certainly benefits from that relationship, if they didn't, they would just use robots.txt to block Google indexing their website, which someone has always been free to do.
The real problem is that newspapers would just like to take a percentage of Google revenue, because they're a big company.
The counterpoint here is that this bill is very protectionist in nature and aims to give something to the Canadian news & media industry.
If that's the case, let Google do its own reporting and write its own headlines. It's not like it doesn't have the money. Problem solved.
They already capture most of the ad revenue.
And Google is notoriously bad when it comes to paying humans to investigate issues, as shown by their absent customer service.
I think the bill will lead to further litigation, specifically if a headline counts as reporting or explaining. I doubt a headline can investigate.
It does also seem to put a limit on a platform's ability to negotiate which is worrying. After 3 rounds of negotiations an arbiter can come in and decide what is a fair price and companies are not allowed to treat different news organizations differently. This seems to have room to abuse for me.
I do. I remember when the newspaper was 10¢.
The guy working the stand didn't let you stand in front of it and read all the headlines in every page of every newspaper and magazine for free.
"I'm only reading the headlines" would get you a slap upside the head.
If outlets don't want the headlines scraped and displayed, then they're free to modify their `robots.txt` file accordingly. But they don't because they're well aware that this would reduce, not improve, their bottom line.
I have worked for two major newspaper companies. I might know a little bit about this.
So the solution Google is proposing works out for everyone. Canadian news sites can ensure people go to their site for headlines and Google can no longer show information for those sites. The Canadian news sites should see increased revenue in terms of subscriptions and advertisements.
So have those publications opted out of search and Google News? If not, it's pretty clear that they're getting more benefit from those links than they're losing to people "reading the headline and getting all they needed from it".
I assume these news organizations don't even bother writing the article, right? Because your story obviously applies equally well to their own site. Users will open the frontpage of the site, read the expertly crafted headline, and leave.
News sites could get rid of their <title> and OpenGraph tags, and people could share the raw story URLs without any context. No-one would click through as they'd have no idea where the URL went, though, so news sites provide these titles willingly and have full control over how they write them or what level of detail they share.
The idea that headlines like "Queen Elizabeth has died", "Madonna discharged from hospital", or "Interest rates go up" replace the need for the rest of the story for any substantial part of the target audience seems far fetched to me, and if the meat of the story is given away in the og:description.. they wrote it!
For those unfamiliar, Pablo Rodriguez is the Minister of Canadian Heritage under whose auspices all these censorship and control schemes are being pushed forward.
Ironically, Pablo Rodriguez is the son of an Argentine Peronista (the far-left populism that cripples Argentina to this day). The family fled the country when the war broke out. Pablo was old enough to see first hands what happens when there is no free independent press, and now he's eagerly fostering those same conditions onto Canada.
But realistically this the current Canadian government trying to shake down google and facebook for money to transfer to the ailing news industry in canada. The merits of the position for a link tax are pretty bad, and don’t really matter to the issue at hand. The government already gives hundreds of millions in grants and tax incentives to make the current journalism landscape in canada possible, without even looking at CBC the national broadcaster.
This is just a shake down job. They see google and facebook have a ton of money and the government thought they could threaten them into parting with some of it. The government doesn’t care about the implications of a link tax on the web, or mutually beneficial relationships, or any of that. It’s a shakedown.
I agree; I'd argue you don't have much of a valuable service if all users need is a headline. Print media needs to give up the traditional shallow breadth fueled by advertising and go niche, and go deep. Cable TV should learn this lesson as well.
If I open up the local paper and see associated press articles that’s not the right content for them. I can see that anywhere, probably before the newspaper is delivered.
It needs to be local journalism about things that matter. Actual local issues, hard journalism about local politics and city hall and whatnot. That’s what’s missing from the big sites and when it is there its sort of after the fact. They need to be investigating not just repeating press releases.
I don’t know about cable tv - its essentially a syndication not a local thing. I think the internet will kill it off. Now that the lines to the home aren’t a moat around being a cable company every video website is the new cable company. They need to have content you can’t get on the internet and I don’t think that’s going to happen. As old people die who couldn’t adapt to internet tv, so cable will die.
Nowadays, it looks more like a newsletter than a newspaper. My late roommate subscribed to the local paper up until the end of his life. At that point, he was really only interested in the crosswords and sudokus.
Then the solution is to modify your `robots.txt` file to prohibit these snippets.
Of course, no-one actually does this because they're well aware that the headlines are what drives attention and clicks.
Spot on. In Canada it's about the handful of the oligarchs who have control over almost everything. It has nothing to do with the average plebs
I won't be surprised if we (the taxpayers) end up having to support them even more. Who knows maybe they'll have to pass more tax subsidies for the other major players too.
I don't see how Meta and Google weren't completely predictable, and I don't see how Canadian media benefits from getting shut out. I am so confused.
Meanwhile american news is still free to share in canada, so linking to american news will be the norm and the act to protect and fund canadian news will create an increase in consumption of US news and will remove money these companies already receive from google traffic.
It's so bad its upside down.
This isn't a one way street either. Entrenched big tech use news and any other carrot to keep people locked into their closed platforms. Google Search, Google News, Facebook etc.. are just that much more ripe for disruption having one less bullet to keep the average person plugged into their walled gardens.
So this bill does the opposite of what it claims to do - it reduces the reach of canadian news, increases the reach of american news, and reduces the amount of money coming in to canadian journalism. Its literally the opposite of everything it claims.
Not sure what will happen this time.
I feel like a similar thing was tried in Europe somewhere a few years ago and then quickly ditched, because all the publications saw their traffic crater.
Looks like something similar was enacted in Australia, and Google/Facbook settled: https://www.reuters.com/technology/australia-says-law-making...
And an update from Google's blog from 4 hours ago: https://blog.google/intl/en-ca/company-news/outreach-initiat...
In hindsight the whole internet bubble looks strange. Nobody cared about monetisation only users!
Probably depends.
In some cases, Google scrapes the interesting bits and people never click through to the host site. In other cases, Google has provided a way for people to circumvent paywalls.
Some of this was a strategy by news organizations - but it seems it might not work long term. I, for one, click through to far fewer Wikipedia articles now that Google includes the synopsis embedded in search results...
Mike Masnick's schadenfreude alone could have powered a small nation for a week.
> Last November [2021], Spain overturned the 2014 law and instead signed on to a European Union copyright directive that lets publishers negotiate their agreements directly with platforms.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/06/after-8-years-google-news-...
This is really the icing on the cake for me. Not only are you losing a lot of search traffic, but now those users are going to be directed to international sources so they won't even be looking for you. What a great way to screw over national media.
I honestly figured it would not even help the big sites - users would have to start deliberately going to those sites directly without first arriving there through an aggregator/search. Apparently that’s incorrect for major news organizations though still true for smaller ones (which I guess have not enough brand awareness for users to directly go to the site). I guess as it long as link taxes appear beneficial for major news organizations that can afford to lobby for them, we can sadly expect this to happen in more and more countries.
IANAL but I understand that most Anglosphere countries outside the US have very different interpretations/not as strong guarantees of freedom of expression as in the US and some other Western countries. In countries with stronger protections I can’t imagine a link tax having legs. Given that a link itself is not IP/content (I think), what would be the legal basis for displaying it on a website requiring compensation to the linked site? Though I suppose there is some precedent for requiring link removal from eg Google through DMCA, it seems different because in that case it’s driving traffic to “stolen” content.
There are plenty of web sites that will be happy to take the free traffic and it isn't like it matters to Facebook's bottom line if their mostly elderly users are arguing over some article from Fox News (which supports the journalism cartel bill in the US) or some article from Breitbart (which opposes the journalism cartel bill). I imagine it won't take long for Murdoch to change his mind and stop trying to shake down tech companies for the privilege of sending his media outlets free traffic.
The only options are to accept the rigged negotiation process and pay all news business vastly inflated rates, or to link to none of them.
The problem with this is there's no direct relationship between the two. So Google and Facebook can arbitrarily decide to "punish" a paper by demoting or flat out filtering their content.
These platforms aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. They put this content on their platform because it made their platform more popular and provided value for them, and now that they've monopolized user attention, they're directly weaponizing it.
> There are plenty of web sites that will be happy to take the free traffic
So.. it's a race to the bottom. News sources are no longer selected based upon quality or user demand, but on their willingness to be used by billion dollar tech giants. I'm sure the quality of the reporting will be identical.
So.. your argument is, because you don't like some media companies and are willing to speak on behalf of all Canadians, the market really isn't worth protecting at all?
The "abuse" here is certain media companies that think they're entitled to shake down tech companies that do them the favor of sending traffic their way. The core business model of Google and Facebook, which has made them into 2 of the most valuable companies in the world, literally involves other companies paying them for ads to draw some incoming Google and Facebook traffic to their web sites. If you can't run a profitable business when you're getting an enormous inbound of free inbound traffic from Google and Facebook then you're so utterly incompetent at running a business that it is best for everybody that capitalism be allowed to work its "creative destruction" magic and reallocate those resources to somebody who can use them profitably.
Showing news is a net negative for Facebook and probably not very positive for Google. Facebook's short and long term metrics were better without news. Facebook and Google are basically doing charity when they link to local news sites. These laws make absolutely no sense when you think about that.
Even if a person only searches for news items a few times a month, if they suddenly can't do that, they'll just go find an alternative search engine.
[1] Source: https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/politica/2023/04/50899...
https://css-tricks.com/essential-meta-tags-social-media/
They're not generating anything
I really wish these big techs would do that to Brazil. They made enemies of the current administration when they opposed their censorship laws.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/report-google-wi...
At least it’s easier in Canada where Google can go “okay, we’ll just remove you from our index that we included you in without charge that if you wanted to, you could have removed yourself from at any time.”
So, how does Brazil stop them from withdrawing from Brazil entirely?
When viewed with this angle, the next question is why news agencies get their own dedicated taxes and nobody else?
I just opened it on a browser with no ad blocker and scrolled to the bottom. There are no ads in there. It's all news.
The scare quotes are actually warranted here. I’d love to see how you can come to fair terms when the other side know that you cannot walk away.
If you're not on Google, you don't exist to 99% of the world.
I expect their readership to fall at least 50% overnight.
Most news outlets have rss feeds
The category of each individual item doesn't help filtering, most of them are just labeled News/Canada/Toronto.
I love RSS but I don't find these news company feeds compelling. They just pump out too much junk to fill the void of real news.
However I would definitely click through links to their site when searching for news about specific events. But they have shot themselves in the foot. Now I am just going to be directed to US sources instead.
Don't they allow to show the contents of those feeds on websites?
And isn't showing the content of the RSS feed "fair use" anyhow?
When I look at the content of the Toronto Star for example:
https://www.thestar.com/content/thestar/feed.RSSManagerServl...
My gut feeling is that showing those short snippets with a link to the articles should be fair use. Am I wrong?
Fair use and copyright are 'artificial' legal constructs, so if they were defined in an 'arbitrary' way to begin with, they can be redefined to add or remove provisions. These online publishing laws could tweak those provisions.
Also: when an RSS/Atom feed is published, it is still copyrighted, and the terms and conditions would/could perhaps be defined what "fair use" is by copyright holder (maybe?).
But what is the situation in Canada now? Did they really put a law into place which says "When you link to a page with a short excerpt to show what the link is about, this is now a copyright violation"?
Wouldn't that also make search engines illegal?
Seems like yes. From the article:
"The tech giant plans to remove news links from its search engine, Google News and Google Discover for only Canadian publishers and readers."
If Google and Meta just generate free traffic for the news site, then I'm not really sure why they're complaining. If their write is straight up reproduced without permission then I understand.
Even on HN it’s not uncommon to see people commenting on articles they’ve only read the title of.
I don't understand anyone who just visits a general news site and reads arbitrary articles. I understand with physical newspapers, because they deliver it to your house in the morning and there was no alternative but to subscribe to multiple papers. I have to think that only senior citizens do it now. I only pay for outlets because I want them to be healthy and to continue publishing, and I don't personally care about some major city's establishment paper, and don't care whether it shuts down.
This seems like an incredible self-own. News aggregators drive traffic and relavence. If anything news sites were getting the better end of the bargin
Luckily the beaverton is unaffected: https://www.thebeaverton.com/2023/06/editorial-with-news-blo...
https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/fair-re...
And for no gain at all. No Canadian heritage will be saved, and this doesn't remove american influences because google and meta were going to be charged for linking to canadian news, not american news. Still 100% ok to link to american news. This legislation does the opposite of what you're claiming.
https://mediapolicy.ca/2022/11/09/nanos-survey-shows-public-...
This is also a new development in journalism at CBC, older journalists tend to value reporting over opinion pieces, whereas younger journalists feel like it's their "duty" to push their opinion onto the readership which is an extremely toxic ideology.
Are you calling the media woke, or are you saying that Conservative leaders are calling the media woke?
Your comment, "Top Bell Media executive urged CTV to avoid ‘negative spin’ on coverage of parent company" equally applies to CBC and the current government or leading political party.
The CBC is the only chance left for some sort of even keeled news in Canada.
Otherwise maybe some YouTube personalities might make a showing - I'm sure the farmer into the middle of Alberta will watch that.
Also, I have to believe that some of these outlets will go under without social media traffic. You can get Canadian wire service content from any US website that decides to publish it.
Does anyone know what’s different this time? Is the law different? Is Canada a less valuable market?
My impression is it's something like "news websites provide content that creates engagement which drives ad revenue, and the news websites want a piece of that revenue."
Is my understanding correct? Also, I can see how it applies for Facebook, how does it apply to Google?
The Liberal party is also trying to protect Canadian content (again, not to defend or advocate for this policy), and I'm sure this is part of it, even though it may ironically backfire and end up hurting Canadian news outlets.
They make money by building a profile from your usage. And then selling that profile to advertisers. They make money by having news, because they can build a profile based on what you click and sell ads to those same websites you visit.
Problem with this model is that it's too simplistic. Big tech doesn't sell news. They sell ads. In fact, the main reason why news companies are ailing today is because big tech siphons off much of the ad revenue that they would have sold directly before the Internet. Google or Facebook can take the 5% that news companies might ask for and just... deduct it from their ad revenue somehow. They control the analytics behind this and news companies are in no position to credibly question them. The only way to stop this madness is to ban economic centralization - i.e. enforce antitrust law by breaking up all these companies and forcing them to be sold to different competing owners.
Governments, of course, don't want to do that. This is not because they've suddenly become right-libertarians or ancaps. This is because large monopolies are both legible and corrigible[2]. Google, Facebook, or Reddit is far more likely to pay a 5% link tax than, say, hundreds of individual Fediverse instance operators. This is, of course, a regulatory curse - the bigger you make the organization, the more likely that organization can exert power back upon your government. This is not solely the function of generalized abstract "corruption." Economic power is itself a form of political power and letting companies grow too big is like Congress delegating legislative power to the President.
[0] Legible meaning that the organization can understand it at an institutional level.
[1] As in, if all you have is copyright, everything looks like a nail.
[2] Corrigible meaning that the organization is capable of maintaining regulatory controls over the target organization.
If this is the primary concern, though, then wouldn't it make more sense to draft a law regulating content caching, rather than the pay-per-click approach? It seems like a law that said "Sites that serve any content which wasn't part of a 'you can cache me' section need to pay for that content" would address the concerns of both parties here.
This would solve the alleged issue that news organizations are bringing up, while also making it totally clear what the consequences are. If you don't want Google to be able to use your content within search results that's totally fine, but you can't then also be mad that they don't surface your content in search results.
Seems like letting news site determine what content Google can cache for its results, and then letting Google determine ranking based only on that data would be a completely reasonable compromise. As it stands now, though, Google is directly incentivized to just never surface these websites, which hurts everyone involved.
Because you can't have your cake and eat it too. If Google can't cache the whole article, they can't provide search for the article. That's why publishers are serving the full, unpaywalled article to Google: how do you index an article you can't cache? The publishers—today—can simply serve the paywalled versions to Google.
The publishers want Google to keep a copy of their data to offer search services to Google's customers, but then want Google to pay for the privilege.
Google can index the articles independently of serving their entirety to visitors. Might as well claim that wikipedia can't have articles covering movies without acting as the worlds largest piracy site.
> but then want Google to pay for the privilege.
On the other hand Google wants all the articles for free, but doesn't have any motivation to share the users or ad impressions they attract.
AFAIK Google doesn't show ads on Google News, they don't show ads on news queries, and they send the users to the news site via the link. There is no revenue to share, and the users are being shared to the extent that is possible given they're humans who have free will and will decide themselves which articles to read and which not.
> Google can index the articles independently of serving their entirety to visitors
I don't know what you're referring to here. AMP? The news site has to do extra work to enable AMP, and the entire point of AMP was always the cache. (But the revenue from the ads on the AMP page goes to the publication, not to Google). The search cache? The news site can opt out. The snippet? They can opt out. Images? I'm pretty sure they actually have to opt in for that, by emitting specific meta tags. The title? That is mandatory, but for the simple reason that you have to give the searcher something or they won't click through.
What's happening (afaict) is that Google is showing the excerpt of the article surrounding the user's query as they do with every other search result. The publishers are claiming "well, Google makes money from users searching for our stuff, therefore we should get a cut".
To borrow your analogy, the evolution of this bill is publishers demanding a share of Wikimedia donations because they use their articles as sources. Why should Wikipedia have revenue built on the reporting of a third party and not share it?
Yeah, this is exactly the point that such a regulation would bring up. Businesses can't expect Google to both use your data and not use your content in their search results.
If you say "I don't want Google's indexers to read my content and surface it to people that haven't clicked my site", that's fine -- Google won't be able to index your content (as requested), though, so your site won't appear in search results.
This seems like a situation where the cards are much more clearly on the table, and my expectation is that no reasonable business would choose to have Google not index their full content.
For example, Australia passed a law forcing Google to negotiate with news publishers regarding payment.[1]
When France passed a law requiring that Google pay news sites for linking to them, Google tried to stop linking to those sites. In response, France sued Google for half a billion dollars for antitrust violations.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/25/after-facebooks-news-flex-...
For France, the devil is in the details. Google has agreements to fund news in many countries. This is generally a bribe it pays publishers not to pursue laws like this. Whereas the Canadian law seeks fairly unlimited payments.
So the question in the French case is how much Google could actually be forced to pay. It sounds like they can still accept an unreasonable deal.
https://www.politico.eu/article/french-competition-authority...
If it wasn’t Canadian outlet favouring, a generalized form of this bill would be like saying, aggregate feeds shouldn’t aggregate their competitor aggregate feeds for free.
I guess this could potentially make the ecosystem less organized around a few big sharing platforms, but I don’t feel like this helps a lot of the smaller outlets. It feels like it maybe just works for the big ones who already have a lot of mind share and can worry less about being linked to in a feed.
Google and Facebook (along with other social media sites) are the primary method by which news orgs have their individual articles percolate through the population. This law cuts that exposure off at the knees, and by proxy, any revenue gained from having readers pulled into these articles.
Most people don’t go directly to a news org website to read news. I don’t. No-one I know does. We just see interesting articles as they pop up in our social media.
Bill C-18 changes the rules for linking by requiring two companies, including Google, to pay Canadian news publishers simply for linking to their sites.
Was it just linking? Or was it providing a useful summary that essentially renders no need to click the provided link? + the link
Otherwise I can see why Google and Meta got the law, while Reddit, Apple news and others don't.
But since I'm in Canada, I suppose I'll go back to RSS or maybe AP news.
That's an odd sentence. Shouldn't it just say "From the government"? Seems weirdly leading to point that it out as "because of the liberal government". I dunno, I don't read much news.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_of_Canada
So the (capital-l) Liberals are currently running the government. So Liberal government.
There is also the capital-c Conservatives:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Party_of_Canada
- Your revenue goes up, because people are now visiting your website and giving you ad hits instead of just seeing a blurb on Facebook.
- Your revenue goes down, because nobody cares about news unless it's dropped in their feed, and the few page views you were getting are now gone. Not to worry, you can strike a deal with Facebook and Google for them to reinstate your links for $0.
The secret third option is that your revenue goes down, you go to Facebook and Google to ask them to show your links again, and they ask you to pay them for the privilege of having your links shown.
Diclaimer: I have not yet read the bill.
Edit: After reading the bill, it looks like if Google links to any news at all in Canada, it has to participate in the bargaining and arbitration process, so their only winning move is not to play. Looks like Option B won't work unless all of the news outlets decide on it together.
That option does not exist in practice.
The companies cannot strike a deal with just one publication and not others. After having made one deal, even at $0, the other publications will just be able to name their price, because the law sets up forced arbitration with parameters that basically tell the arbitrators to give the publication what they want.
[ ] I want to see results from sites I'd have to pay to access
For news sites and netflix we now have subscriptions shielded by paywals, which really is incompatible with hyperlinked sites or search engines. Even if you subscribed to 1000 services, the experience would probably be horrible. The internet was designed to be free, but evidently that's not a good business model if you want to make a living.
Sad but true. The closest we have to a solution right now is PressReader, which is just too expensive in my opinion at $30 per month.
With trusted third parties or block chains, the transaction costs are unfortunately much, much higher, especially initially without proper scales economics.
But a lot of work and planning would be needed to get anywhere with such an idea.
My definition of "best" includes my ability to actually read the content under my terms.
Cost has nothing to do with determining the quality of a search result, and search engines shouldn't discriminate against paywalled content. But I think it's a good idea to let users like you check a box to hide paywalled results.
Long gone are the days of "surfing the web", when most of us spent our time online just randomly browsing around.
I've come to learn that many people on hacker news have an ethos of never paying for digital content or services. Most people here make an hourly salary of $20 or more in my estimate, yet they will spend days and days of their time to avoid paying $5 for something. So you spend $100-$200 of your time to save $5. What's the rationale?
It reminds me of my travels around the world, where I'd hang out with backpackers that would spend a long time in the supermarket looking for the cheapest noodles, instead of spending their time enjoying the exotic location they were in. Or spent half the day walking along the highway to a bus stop instead of taking a taxi that would cost $5.
I think it is fair that a search engine by default should be unbiased and look for the best result for the query, and not account for price or such.
No, I won't answer my mommas house because you can't just show up and eat there as a restauraunt. It doesn't fit the search criteria you asked for.
If you ask what the best restauraunt in town is, I'll give you a restauraunt.
If you ask what the best restauruant in town is, I won't send you to a place where you can buy a "best restauraunts in town guide" for 5 bucks, because that's not what you're asking for.
Ironically, the predatory and terrible academic journal industry is probably the only thing out there right now that comes close to getting this right. Rather than expecting anyone to subscribe to each journal individually, they give a bulk subscription to an entire publishing service that then grants access to many journals.
If someone out there offered a $20 a month service that granted access to Bloomberg, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, WaPost, Financial Times, all in one, I'd gladly buy that. But there is no way in hell I'm subscribing to all of those separately. Even if the aggregate price was cheaper, I wouldn't want to do that.
2. Just because you paid at the paywall, doesn't mean you have to subscribe for life. You can pay to get the information you need and then instantly cancel any subscription.
> If someone out there offered a $20 a month service that granted access to Bloomberg, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, WaPost, Financial Times, all in one, I'd gladly buy that.
PressReader is pretty much this, although the price is $30 and not $20.
Could there be a way to sustainably make enough money from visitors without making it all suck?
1. https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032158891-Wha...
And where it's impossible to tell difference from a (pseudo) random stream of numbers.
Well, sure. Who pays for it?
I disagree. I think there's a lot of it out there, in the form of blogs and small forums. It's just really hard to find, like mining for gold in the Super Pit [1]. You need to sift through mountains of rubble to find tiny amounts of gold.
Companies should earn my by building good competitive products.
I'm not sure what you really mean by "monopoly" or what sort of monopoly you think can persist in the absence of government support.
Note, I started my participation in this thread by advocating for minimizing government, which is not the same as eliminating government. So I'm not trying to assert an absolutist position that free markets should have no regulation.
In the case of market economy, if you can't use violence, then the world would be split into natural monopolies and monopolies after market consolidation. Everyone else will be feudalized because someone else will control their access to water, electricity, education or whatever. Because property is sacred and we can't use violence no matter the consequences.
The ever expanding free to enter and free to participate market is a delusion, so let's not delude ourselves that it will take care of everything without us taking responsibility.
"Man Bites Dog" More discussion: CBC, National Post, Toronto Star, CTV, etc.
However, Google doesn't want to pay human beings, they want to "borrow' other people's content to make a profit.
People seem to conflate "indexing your story on our search engine" with "borrowing your headline and photo for our own news site".
I think there's a very reasonable argument to be made that Google should simply link to the information and not extract and re-present the information that would be much fairer in enabling websites to support themselves. If the content you're creating is stolen and reposted elsewhere you're losing that portion of revenue and Google's news strategy has driven click throughs to the actual articles way down which reduces ad revenue and discourages subscription.
As a general rule, not being willing to entertain a state other than the way things currently are, is a bad habit to get into.
The first can be fixed with a simple robots.txt file.
How do you tell Google they may index your story, but may not "borrow" your headline or photos for their own news site?
By following the example I gave previously and only using the name of the news site and not any of it's content?
> Hire a human being to write headlines in their own words and then link to articles in the press discussing that story.
> "Man Bites Dog" More discussion: CBC, National Post, Toronto Star, CTV, etc.
In that example, "Man Bites Dog" was the headline written by an employee on Google's dime, and then you have a list of links that do not "borrow" any of the target website's text or images.
Since it's common case law that a mere link is not illegal, I don't see how a law banning a link (without using content that does not belong to you) would stand up in Canadian courts given the free speech guarantees in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
> (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.
See point b. Simply facilitating access, for example by linking or having the article in a search index, would be enough.
(Also, really smooth move deleting your original toplevel comment and just moving it to a reply under the highest voted thread. Not even any pretense that you're replying to jeffbee, but just cynically trying to get the maximum visibility for your entirely made up claim.)
(Laws can make previously legal things illegal.)
I thought that Blackstone owned Globe and Mail but it seems they sold it in 2021 so your info is the current info.
Before Google, search engines were basically just doing keyword matching and so you'd have the issue that every search for a programming topic landed you on expertsexchange. Google was the first to start leveraging click-away signal, and they were able to successfully down-sample keyword-farmers like that one and their ilk.
It was the worst. Crawling a ring all day to find useful content was incredibly inconvenient.
Independent of the elections I think social media websites had by this time “perfected” engagement-driven algorithmic feeds and online news had started getting good at optimizing their content for those purposes. And around this time, anecdotally, is when I think a lot of older people started taking the internet more seriously, as real-world services like Airbnb/Uber/Amazon prime (to be fair, started earlier) became popular and middle aged people started using social media more. This, in combination with the polarizing content of the elections, made the internet into the hostile and echo-chambery place it is today. And it also attracted a lot more Government attention leading to things like GDPR (good in theory, bad inasmuch as it led to the current cookie banner bullshit) and link taxes.
And with the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict.
But a lot of people will debate the actual overall influence of that vs it being a scapegoat used to delegitimize the right wing surge at the time; undeniably even if the right wing surge/political divisiveness trend was aided by Russian activity, it was still real people who engaged with it online and voted for the right wing causes.
The shift away from desktop and laptops to cell phones is a major factor as well.
To me 2016 was just a continuation of what started before, there was no inflection then.
The 2000's are when things started to change, not 2016. And Obama's first election was when the internet started to be taken seriously by politicians (2008). It's basically what gave him the win.
this might also be a leeway for charging the same cost to social media sites. might this be an insidious form of censorship?
given the canadian government's strong ties to its government-funded media, this sounds like it could be concerning.
But fair is fair. If publishers want to force social media to pay for news content. Social Media has every right to refuse to pay and refuse to redistribute.
Unfortunately Brazil is trying to take that right away, too. Hopefully they fail at doing so.
The fact that this is being lead by the Minister of Heritage should tell you how little this has to do with actual business and technology justifications.
I see why this "works" now. The effect is censorship and silencing of disfavoured outlets with the pretense of deniability. This country is a lost cause.
... "if the internet platforms drop all Canadian media as a result of this law, it demonetizes all Canadian media, and then the only Canadian media that survives is what is directly subsidized by the government at its discretion."
Does Canadian media have no other revenue stream other than the Internet?
I won't miss google news. And I never saw any real value in facebook.
So, my response to this, as a Canadian, is "who cares, eh?"
The way i see it, it's a clear case of "we tried nothing and we're out of ideas" on BOTH sides. The canadian medias are boring and are mostly opinions and a few Reuters/AFP articles. On the other hand, GOOG and Meta are not even acknowledging that they're trying to bully nations around while providing a slowly worse service as time goes by and profiteering from work they acquire for free. I do understand that people weren't forced to use this service in the past and can (with some level of difficulties) remove their content.
It's not as clear an issue some would like it to be. I know that I will remove myself of both these services in the future as they are hostile (and really, i should move to my own domain for lots of reasons).
I'm not sure why people here are defending GOOG so much.
Your assumption that traffic is generated by content (alone) is incorrect. Google is certainly profiting, but the news publisher will struggle to find readers without Google. It's a symbiotic relationship, but Google is doing the REAL work. If you don't believe that, build your own website and try to get people to read your content. Believe me, content doesn't matter as much as reach.
If you want to support Canadian news outlets, then go to their websites directly. Let's see them stand on their own without Google, and see who provides the most value.
This law will kill Canadian news outlets. No one pays for their content when there's a global ecosystem of stuff to subscribe to. That's capitalism. Good riddance.
I subscribe for a specialized publication that offers free articles because i find the publication useful.
I might be dumb but i can't understand how content matters less than reach. Without content, reach is useless. (and without reach, content is mostly useless as well..)
My take is that both are things of the past and using legal ways to fight for relevancy, each for different reasons. I don't have a horse in this race.
It sure doesn't seem to me like creating a link & giving people an extremely concise blurb that hopefully entices them to follow it is the content. As an individual I expect to be able to cite things in the world and to tell people how they can read it too. Legislating that basic right away feels like madness.
Probably hyperbole, but catastrophic failure of our economy/institutions/society isn't something I would choose to experience.
This nihilistic attitude is dangerous, IMHO. In the extreme, it is a self-fulfilling approach with severe consequences.
Seems like we should be able to do better than that as a society.