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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Most Canadian media is owned by asset-stripping American private equity firms, just like American newspapers. They just want to get paid, and have figured out a particular way that Canadian, Australian, German, and Californian legislators can be duped into it.

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Globe and Mail is apparently owned by a Thompson (one of Canada's wealthiest families), and the CBC is run by the government. CTV is owned by Bell Media, part of Canada's telecom oligopoly. Global news is owned by Corus, a Canadian company. National Post is owned by Postmedia which is a publicly traded Canadian company, with majority ownership from an American PE firm. Is that what you mean?

Chatham owns dozens of Canadian newspapers via Postmedia, and dozens of U.S. newspapers via McClatchy. Their operating mode is the same in both countries: fire all the writers and editors.

I thought that Blackstone owned Globe and Mail but it seems they sold it in 2021 so your info is the current info.

To be fair, a significant number of Australian legislators are practically owned by a particular AU/US media firm, so it's no great surprise that they can be duped/ordered into trying this.

Duped would be a ... charitable ... label.

I don't see how this gets them paid, more like wiped from the internet entirely?

Well, their fantasy wishlist is that Google and Meta are forced to index their junk, rank it at the top, feature it prominently, present it to any and all visitors, and pay for both the cost and the privilege.

A fair number of people search on google specifically to get news on recent events - Google currently captures a decent portion of those users and keeps them from ever actually visiting the original sources. Users want that information though, so unless Google can tell me why the building two blocks down is currently throwing out a huge plume of smoke I'll eventually land on the actual content creator to read the information.

more like they shmoozed them to do it vs being duped.

Yeah Google never ever does this. They do not want money they just work for kisses and they are not evil at all.

Every company tries to earn money, that's not a problem. The problem is when a company tries to legislate themselves to be owed money, or eliminate competition via various means, that it becomes a problem.

Companies should earn my by building good competitive products.

One reason to advocate for a government with minimal power is to avoid the temptation to legislate preferential treatment. If the government has been granted more expansive powers, it is inevitable, and arguably rational, for those affected to try to steer regulations in a way that benefits them.

There is no vacuum in power. If it is not the government enforcing one mechanism, it will be another player leveraging another. The fantasy that if it wasn't for the government, everything would be sunshine and roses should be brought behind the barn and finished for good.

How do you define ‘power’. The unique aspect of government controls is that we grant the government a monopoly on force (imprisonment, seizure of property, etc). That is not the case with private actors and that is a significant and consequential difference in ‘power’.

The other unique aspect of government is that you can remove power by voting them out in the next election. In contrast, a private monopoly can continue to use it's influence, money, and power, without recourse forever.

Once you remove physical violence as a mean of interaction, you gain something else which would be violence by any other name. Government minimization is favored the most by those who would gain from the lack of counterbalance.

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.

Ok, now explain how free market economies have improved the quality of life and lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in history.

Energy. Last few hundred years humanity unlocked new sources of energy. Free markets are a good distribution mechanism, but by themselves they fail at the point when there is no new input in the system. As I said above, there are some other prerequisites like free entry, free participation, plus enough information. Otherwise, the market collapses. free markets are not self-sustaining and if you want for the system to work, you should maintain it.

What do you think a monopoly is? It is almost absolute power especially in industries where barrier to entry is super high.

Monopolies can only exist with government support via protection from competition. Expansive government power makes monopolies more likely and more stable than minimal government power.

This is a really naive way to look at things. For some reason you seem to believe that people that run corporations have better intentions that people who are in the government/politics.

Nope, I'm actually pretty cynical about intentions. But the government can detain me, arrest me, tax me, fine me, etc. A corporation can't do any of that.

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.

The issue isn't companies doing it as much as it is state-enforced regulatory capture that prefers specific companies over others.

Political influence is directly proportional to amount of money a corporation spends on lobbying etc.

Google would be perfectly free to 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.

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".

That's not what the law says at all. You've just made it up. The actual definition for what's in scope is:

> (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.)

I don't think that would exempt them under the law? Have a look: https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...

There's a ton of international case law saying that a mere link is not illegal.

We're talking about a new Canadian law. How would case law be relevant?

(Laws can make previously legal things illegal.)

Laws can also be challenged in court.

Why isn't this within the remit of the Canadian legislature? Why would the court reject it?

Does the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ring a bell?

Are you proposing that the entire concept of a non-human-curated search engine should be illegal? Seems kind of silly.

It honestly doesn't seem outrageous to me. Just because this is the direction society has decided to go in doesn't make the alternative absurd. If you'll recall in the early age of the internet hand-curated link boards were actually extremely popular i.e. "I'm Billy and here's a bunch of really interesting information about sewage treatment" and then just a spam of links.

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.

Did you miss the part where I said people are conflating indexing a story on a search engine with "borrowing" other people's content for your own news site?

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?

Showing the title is "borrowing" content? How are you supposed to refer to the site without the title? The raw URL? Imagine if book publishers sued bookstores for showing titles of their books.

> How are you supposed to refer to the site without the title?

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.

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