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Comment by bratao | Hacker News Reader

Brazil is currently considering a similar law that would require social networks to compensate content creators for each republication [1]. However, unlike the situation in Canada, the Brazilian lawmakers have taken into account this scenario. The law mandates that social networks cannot cease publishing the content and must negotiate compensation in "fair terms." Personally, I find this approach to be quite perplexing.

[1] Source: https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/politica/2023/04/50899...

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So if I understand correctly, those companies are now going to be forced into paying for products that they cannot just stop using?

Or fighting a legal battle (which they will hopefully fight and win), or leaving the jurisdiction and then saying "good luck with that, let's find out how much of your companies' revenue we were driving".

If they just showed the title and the link - like they used to - they it would drive revenue. But because they show a synopsis of the news, people very often don't click the link.

This doesn't happen automatically, it's something websites have to set up: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/c...

I'm skeptical that such explicit summaries are the only thing social networks display. Even if that is currently the case, it would be relatively trivial for a company the size of Meta to generate and show their own summary.

This is the way it's always worked. News orgs are asking social media companies to display the summary and image

https://css-tricks.com/essential-meta-tags-social-media/

They're not generating anything

It might be technically simple but it’s probably legally complicated to write a summarizer that doesn’t violate copyright. Using data they are explicitly given permission to use by the definition of the field it’s in is quite different though.

Google News does just show the title.

No, it also has the first ~140 characters of the article.

> good luck with that, let's find out how much of your companies' revenue we were driving

I really wish these big techs would do that to Brazil. They made enemies of the current administration when they opposed their censorship laws.

Someone might correct me, but I believe that’s what France did.

I think you are right. I vaguely remember French publishers losing revenue after Google News stopped referencing them.

I recall Google eventually doing a deal with the French publishers. You can find many articles like the following coming out around the same time

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/report-google-wi...

If they want to operate in the country. Is google going to leave whole countries just because of being required to use and compensate local news? Essentially it's a tariff.

Who decides what the tariff is?

The de facto government.

Honestly? Why not. Not every country in the world is going to pass a law this silly and for those that do, do you really want to be in a business environment where the National government puts you in a position of dictating what services you must also offer in order to continue doing business at all in the country? Like what if Google just decides for whatever reason at some point in the future they don’t want to continue to offer Google News anywhere. That would be their prerogative. Whether they spun it off, sold it or just shut it down are all valid business choices they can make.

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.”

Sounds like you can print money out of thin air by creating social media accounts who post your "news". It may force the social media companies for proper policing the against fake accounts.

Only fake accounts that post news links.

> “fair terms”

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.

The obvious way to beat that game is to stop carrying Brazilian news before the legislation is passed.

Would it have been better for these bills (CA/Brazil) to mandate revenue sharing, i.e. no flat fee per link from google, but a percentage of revenue from ads served associated w/ the link?

That would be fair enough but also wouldn't give the publishers what they want, because Google doesn't show ads in their News app or in Google News on the web:

https://news.google.com

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 law mandates that social networks cannot cease publishing the content

So, how does Brazil stop them from withdrawing from Brazil entirely?

Money. They will remain here as long as there's still profit to be made. Would be awesome if they had enough balls to tell the brazilian government to go to hell but they just aren't gonna do that as long as they're making money.

This is the same as increasing taxes then, except that instead of the taxes going to the government to vote for the redistribution, they go straight to news agencies bypassing the government.

When viewed with this angle, the next question is why news agencies get their own dedicated taxes and nobody else?

Because they're Lula's propaganda machine. Same reason he wants the internet censored with his fake news nonsense.

That's also what I'm getting from that, making it proportional to the views make it sure that independent investigation journalists won't get any of it.

I demand royalties for my shit posts!

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