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Comment by monsieurgaufre | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: Am Canadian.

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).

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I don't see the problem. News outlets can now negotiate individually with Google if they still want the free traffic. Google will be paying $0 to them. Other outlets who don't want the free traffic from Google can choose to not receive it, as they can right now via robots.txt.

Traffic is generated by the content which is not free (most of the time) to produce. Google without content is what except an empty library?

I'm not sure why people here are defending GOOG so much.

Canadian here as well.

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 already go directly to the websites. Have always done that.

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.

Speaking for myself, on the merits, Google's position makes more sense. On an emotional level, I dislike media news companies companies more than I dislike Google...which is a lot.

We share a similar dislike for media news companies.. and Google. Like i said, i find the media companies boring and they abdicated a while ago being the "fourth" power. I might also not understand all the consequences of the bill as well.

As you say, Google without content is an empty library. But it works in the other direction too. News websites without Google/Social Media are ghost towns. Few people go to them directly.

News outlets have to compete within Google's search results. Google is, at least currently, the de facto search engine and their competition over providing all results is minimal. So Google is benefitting from the overall relationship far more than the outlets are. Not saying Google owes them, but there is a clear difference in competition between the two sides.

News websites worked fine before Google. People did go to them directly.

It depends on whether you consider a headline and part of a sentance the content or not, I I guess.

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.

Google is stopping to show results for news outlets, so everything is fine, right? What else do you criticize them for?

Canadian citizens are completely free to type a url into a bar and visit a newspaper

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