Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
nationalpost.com
nationalpost.com
There's nothing unreasonable or irresponsible about this decision at all, what's unreasonable is passing a law trying to squeeze money out of the only places in the world left that still make you relevant and then getting mad when they don't want to be abused.
> Act provides that any such agreements must not allow the freedom of expression and journalistic independence enjoyed by news outlets to be undermined by corporate influence.
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_...
Says who?
Lots of journalists have been laid off in the past decade because of media consolidation -- some of them found other jobs or went independent, but most had to find another field because _the money isn't there_.
The media companies will get paid one way or another, but the companies are not journalists.
> But the Liberal government’s decision does not extend to the party. Liberal Party of Canada spokesperson Parker Lund said in a statement that the party would continue to advertise on Meta-owned platforms. According to the company’s ad library, the party spent nearly $15,000 on over 1,000 ads in the past month.
So: we would not deal with FB because it's evil, unless of course it could help us personally to win the elections, in which case of course we'll deal with them. Taxpayer money is another business, this is what you use for posturing.
Contrast this with the last Conservative government, which made all of its publicly funded announcements from "The Harper Government" instead of "The Government of Canada."
https://www.canada.ca/en/news/archive/2012/06/harper-governm...
Canada actually used to give federal funds to all political parties, including opposition parties, as long as they reached a certain level of votes in the last election. This leveled the playing field for campaign money. Again the last Conservative government got rid of this to try to starve the other parties, another example of what happens when this division is not maintained properly.
Almost like is has nothing to do with what's right or just and everything to do with them angry about not having authority....
Weirdly enough the news was in loop on radio but nobody mentioned what Meta had to say. No empty statement saying it’s for the greater good.
I feel bad about the journos/web teams who have to suffer as a consequence of the current gov and the rich Canadian media aristocracy who pushed this through. But I can't say it's going to immediately impact my life. I'm not a particular fan of any of the Canadian media sites besides maybe the hyper local ones like CP24. Nor would I touch the Canadian subreddits with a ten foot pole to go discuss them (some of the worst parts of Reddit).
Canadians are already obsessed with American news/politics anyway. They will just be fed slightly more of that than before on social media.
The reason why the current liberal government looks quite monstrous even on the CBC tho is because they really are quite monstrous in reality and it’s finally starting to show. Just look at Bill C-18, who’s interests are they looking out for? Not everyday Canadians that’s for sure.
This is a government that on one hand says Meta is an evil foreign owned corporation interfering in our democracy and therefore will end all ads on Meta platforms, but on the other hand, made an exception for itself such that the Liberal Party of Canada will actually continue running ads on Meta because after all nothing is too evil if it helps get them elected. Rules for thee but not for me. A classic Canadian liberal party dynamic. Story as old as time.
[1] https://www.nationalnewswatch.com/2023/07/05/cbc-news-retrac...
https://academicmatters.ca/harpers-attack-on-science-no-scie...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/canadian-scien...
They silenced Truth so they could push lies in order to maintain a war that was literally Criminal. They did the same to prop up the oil industry in the province Harper held history with and from which he personally profited and continues to profit.
They said "You're either with Us or with the Pedos" when people criticized an over reaching "justice" bill.
Again, those who oppose Trudeau now are almost exclusively those who were willfully ignorant and silent during the Harper years, mostly because they profited from the injustices which far exceeded those of Trudeau's government.
I left out the G20 protest response where they brutalized people who were being 100% peaceful, in complete opposite to the treatment of far right insurrectionists that were the convoy cucks...
I was there and hurt so it felt too personal to include as I presumed self bias, but on reflection it definitely should have been included.
Where were all these conspiracy theorist shit heads back when there was a real problem to fight against?
Oh that's right, they were trading heroes for gold, mistaking hot air for a cool breeze and exchanging a walk on part in the war for a lead role in the cage....
While there is still some degree of bias, that seems like a reach to me, and I'm nothing but a lousy centrist.
The same thing happened in Australia and as soon as Facebook blocked links they cried uncle. Maybe if these news articles actually did research rather than focusing on clickbait headlines they would have learned about that.
Australia didn't blink, Google and Meta did .. after that brief shutdown of Facebook news feeds in the country, both Google and Facebook agreed to pay:
Since the News Media Bargaining Code took effect, the tech firms had inked more than 30 deals with media outlets compensating them for content which generated clicks and advertising dollars, said the Treasury department report, published late Thursday.
"At least some of these agreements have enabled news businesses to, in particular, employ additional journalists and make other valuable investments to assist their operations," said the report.
"While views on the success or otherwise of the Code will invariably differ, we consider it is reasonable to conclude that the Code has been a success to date."
https://www.reuters.com/technology/australia-says-law-making...
Australia pressured Google and Facebook to pay for journalism. Is America next?
https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/australia-pressured-goo...
The legislation, known as the News Media Bargaining Code, has enabled Australian news organizations to extract more than $200 million (almost $150 million US) in the year since it went into effect.
As a result, the public Australian Broadcasting Corporation can place at least fifty new journalists in underserved parts of the country, while the McPherson Media Group, which publishes such papers as the Yarrawonga Chronicle and the Deniliquin Pastoral Times, expects tech money to fund up to 30 percent of editorial salaries.
Perhaps if certain HN commenters did research they would not be making false statements.
Perhaps you've strengthened certain HN commenters' arguments that incentive exists with a proven case.
I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story.
Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something?
There's a similar issues with some news sites basically copying or rephrasing the content of a newspaper story. I've seen news stories by third-parties, where the story lists their source as "The New York Times"
It's tough to figure out a way to compensate the people who create the news, and the people who disseminate the news.
Don’t those news sources have ads too ? How are they making income from local views?
If newspapers would be able to charge people for referencing an article, then why shouldn't Lamborghini be able to charge people who talk about the Aventador?
In journalism, articles are generally written following an "inverted pyramid" pattern. The most critical information is put at the top (the headline, and the first paragraph). As you move further down, the information becomes less and less critical to the overall story. The idea being that most people only want the broad strokes (X candidate won an election, Y submarine went missing in the Atlantic).
It is harmful to the news orgs because people used to have to buy their newspaper or magazine, or see ads on their website or TV channel, in order to get any of this information. Now people get 90% of the relevant information from their social media feed, where Facebook or Reddit or whoever rakes in all the ad revenue.
I'm not endorsing Canada's solution to this problem, but I don't think it is very helpful to pretend this isn't a problem at all. Good journalism is expensive, and the fact that nobody is willing to pay for it is why it seems like a lot of the news that is left is either clickbait or propped up by corporate or political interests. We need some way to continue funding quality independent journalism or it will cease to exist in a sea of clickbait and AI-generated nonsense.
So the only profitable stories are very narrow, or the click-bait type that might be picked up by Facebook, assuming that Facebook doesn't just extract and show the core of the story.
This isn't a new problem. A friend of mine used to do articles on historical issues and post them on his blog. They were good enough that there were other sites that would just copy them and change the byline to themselves. Grounds for a lawsuit, but the cost of the lawsuit and the tiny amount of damages made it impractical. Now he does the articles but tries to sell them to publishers. His income from that is now so tiny that it's no longer cost effective.
Local papers now are money-losers, and the centralization of those many papers in the hands of a few corporations seems more to provide political influence than make money from news. In our recent election, the 160 papers owned by one corporation all made the same political endorsements.
Australia's moves to charge for local news was a first, I think, and at the time there was comment that it could be the wave of the future. Google/Facebook have financial incentive to try to head off the same action in other countries.
CBC tried to head this problem off by disabling comments on all their Facebook posts so people would comment on CBC.ca.
If my friend and I go a cafe, see a newspaper headline, and have a discussion about that headline without ever opening that newspaper should the cafe have to pay for that discussion? Why should any media adjacent interaction anywhere happen without payment? If the cafe is playing music, they're paying licence fees for that. Why not everything?
Even on Facebook, if I comment on a headline it's still just me making that comment. I, singular, provide some value to Facebook by being there and no value to newspaper because I didn't click though. If Facebook didn't exist, the value I bring to the newspaper by not reading it is the same.
If Meta wants to pay 100% tax on their ad revenues to fund journalism, all they have to do is say so.
Therein lies the difference.
1. People come and hang out - can't effectively do this on Meta sites, though their VR push seems aimed at trying to fulfill this need. I would also put "read the newspaper" under this category.
2. Have discussions - for varying definitions of "discussion", this is where Facebook is heavily monetized.
3. Order some coffee - again, can't effectively do that on any Meta sites.
Given that parks exist without coffee shops, we can infer that 3 is what coffee shops are monetizing, while 1 and 2 act as an additional enticement.
The newspapers suffer because, even though YOU may only comment on the headlines, there are plenty of people who go to the coffee shop and don't think twice about buying the paper to read or do the crossword puzzle. The newspaper is able to monetize 1 and 2 and the coffeeshop monetizes 3 - everyone is equitable and happy. On Facebook, Facebook monetizes 2 and claims (without much proof) that they are providing 1 as a service to customers. No coffee is ever served - everyone but Meta is unhappy.
Newspapers are very much secondary to both businesses. They enhance the experience but are not fundamental to it. They also both provide a service to those newspapers by providing a point of distribution. People might, as part of their experience in the cafe/Facebook, read the newspaper.
Why not? There isn't a physical table but folks came and hung out on USENET, BBSes, etc. before Facebook came along. And folks appear to hang out on Social Media sites the same today.
One of the other solutions proposed was taxes on media aggregators. This is similar to the taxes on entertainment aggregators currently in place that pay into a fund that supports domestic entertainers. These approaches have lots of complications.
If the intention is to get Canadians to focus more on local news, making Facebook pay to link to local news is completely backwards. Facebook will (and apparently has) simply transition to showing cheap international news. Instead, Canada should be making Facebook pay when linking to foreign news, or paying Facebook when linking to local news.
When the market for classifieds disappeared, there was no longer any financial support for local news.
You could even argue that newspapers were only viable businesses because they had a monopoly over the local distribution of information. It was never the news itself that was profitable but being the local gatekeeper of that news. The Internet destroyed that entirely.
Not to worry, several US states still have draconian laws to keep the local newspaper in business. In NYS, when you start a LLC or corp, you have to publish an announcement in 2 papers in the state announcing it and get certificates from the paper proving it. Of course there are ever so convenient "business papers" to leech off it. Some law makers tried to change that a few years ago and queue the lobbyist outrage.
I feel that if there is still a market for news then the market will figure it out. We should make laws encourage smaller players and avoid monopolies. Instead of making laws that transfer money from one giant corporation to another giant corporation. But that'll never happen because giant corporations have all the influence.
I'd really love for there to be a local newspaper that tells me a new bakery opened in town, or that the elementary school passed a new measure for students, or that there's going to be an art exhibit presented by some local artists. I want to know when there are some foster kitties looking for temporary homes, and a little articles about people who go all-out on halloween decor. The internet doesn't give this to me, not without a load of muck.
More than once local media near me has literally just published a story that was first posted as text to Reddit.
I guess you just have to get everyone together in one place -- but that place could still be on the Internet.
It started off looking very promising for that sort of thing -- but when people fled for the likes of large social media properties, that killed things dead. Facebook, Reddit, etc., are very bad at encouraging local community.
I'm a member if many local communities on Reddit and Facebook.
Where I live, Facebook Marketplace is _the_ place to go to buy and sell used goods. And it is absolutely hopping in my community. So much waste is averted from landfills due to the platform Facebook provides, which has good search, and a reasonable UX.
If all we had were the old school classifieds in the newspaper, I doubt nearly as much activity would happen.
HN just loves to shit on social media and lament the fall of old school local news, but I think that's just rose coloured glasses.
Through Facebook I do local second hand shopping, I discovered and am and member of several local niche sports and activity groups. And I see local news through the eyes and mouths of locals talking about it rather than what the one or two employed local journalists think.
If all you do is scroll /r/all or your Instagram feed than sure you're not getting local info, but you get what you consume.
And I say this as someone who doesn't like Meta/Facebook and would delete it in a heartbeat if there was a viable alternative, but the matter stands it _does_ support and encourage local communities and content in some places.
Facebook and Reddit are the only ones I'm familiar with for this, though, and they both have the same problem -- they are dominated by a very small number of people.
Always. But maybe a factor is the size of the "community"? A hub city has X number of residents plus Y folks who work there plus Z folks who live in suburbs but are counted as part of the metropolis.
OTOH a small city is small, so the folks may share more in common -- and thus push out interlopers and ignore noise makers.
Craigslist is also very popular here. Does that count as social media?
I was going to make a joke about "Not since they removed the personal ads", but CL has threaded discussion forums, so it's definitely social media.
Local newspapers (at least in my US state) were mostly funded by their commercial ad placements, not by the classified section. Classified ad revenue and the purchase price of the paper were minority fractions of their revenue.
AFAIK the trend of the last 3 decades has been first Craiglist then Yahoo then FB and apps hollowed out local newspaper classified ads, especially in the US.
Here's data for 2013-2021 from US Census Service Annual Survey (SAS) for "Breakdown of Revenue by Advertising Type: Newspapers Advertising Space - Classified Advertising for Newspaper Publishers, All Establishments" [0]. Seems to show newspaper classified revenue is seriously sliding. If we only saw the numbers for local newspapers, probably even worse.
Trying to monetize and compensate for every externality is absurd.
If I make coffee at home that causes a coffee shop to lose out on Revenue. Surely I'm not responsible for paying the coffee shop for the Lost Revenue.
If I do go to the coffee shop, should the coffee shop have to share their revenue with the car company because it gave me a reason to drive my car?
In this case, social media makes money because people talk about news online instead of actually read it. This doesn't make social media companies responsible for the fact that no one wants to read a news article.
Canadian news media (unlike the vast majority of US news media besides NPR and PBS) is very significantly government subsidized, so this bill is really a stealth tax on Meta and Google.
Meta and Alphabet are not gonna run news room in Manitoba and Northern Ontario.
If we don’t, fine. Local news can die and be replaced by influencer I guess ?
Then if we do, who is paying for it.
In your analogy, Meta & Alphabet are installing a patio in front of the coffee shops, and offer samples of the most popular latte of the day for free and you can get as many as you want.
Simple, whoever wants the news.
> In your analogy, Meta & Alphabet are installing a patio in front of the coffee shops, and offer samples of the most popular latte of the day for free and you can get as many as you want.
Nah, the right analogy is Meta/Google drive a large bus of customers (only a fraction with tickets) to the coffee shop and not everyone goes into the shop. News orgs are then asking Google to pay them for Google driving the bus.
Charging someone for the "free" samples is no solution.
If people were actually consuming the news and reading articles, it wouldn't be an issue.
Nobody wants to drink the nasty coffee, they just want to talk about how bad it is.
If we want to be a hyperbolic about causality, both social media and news outlets should be paying the school shooters for creating the news
The shooter is usually dead, should be link to the victim’s obituary comment sections instead of a local news article ?
But someone has to write those too? LLM to the rescue!
Why is asking Fangs to give an obole to local news so insulting ?
Until those articles are writing themself, they don’t.
What they don't get to do is say, you must buy this headline from us, if you want it or not.
This is all beside the point because the object at issue here is links, which don't even necessarily contain content.
>Why is asking Fangs to give an obole to local news so insulting ?
It is insulting because if anything, local news should be paying FANG. They get much of their web traffic from social media and search.
They dont need the governments help to ask for money. They can simply stop letting their headlines and links be indexed. The fact is they don't want to do that because it benefits them. They could try to negotiate with GOOGLE/Meta, but GOOGLE/Meta would rather drop them than pay.
Nobody wants to pay for what they have so they have to resort to bills to force companies to buy something they would rather not have.
At least in the US, the federal government can punish you for it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
tl;dr Whether or not an action is interstate commerce, if it _affects_ interstate commerce in any way (broadly defined), then the federal government has jurisdiction and can punish you under their massive and capricious laws.
These proposals are like the Wickard_v._Filburn on steroids or the Obamacare mandate. Forcing the purchase of a product that the buyer would choose not to.
The failure of traditional news funding models, and their replacement with clickbait, has already caused devastating damage to...well, to society in general, honestly, but certainly to anyone trying to produce a balanced, informative news service. I can't blame publishers for trying to find something to keep them out of the Buzzfeed gutter.
I don't think this idea actually helps at all. But I get why they're desperate.
People have been not-reading and commenting since the early days of Slashdot. See also Reddit and HN. :)
If that's the business they want to be in then they (and every other news site) completely sucks at it and there's a reason people want to talk on FB/Twitter instead beyond network effects.
If this is the meat of the matter, then how does asking Facebook to pay for links/headlines address the problem? Whether or not facebook pays for linking to news stories, the discussion on facebook remains vapid and the public isn't properly informed.
Unless the idea was to make Facebook remove the links/headlines and drive traffic back to the news websites, which is what happened.. so why are they complaining now that it has played out that way?
In my opinion, the answer here is for the news sites to not show any headlines for free, and require a login to access all content. Then, they are free to negotiate with google and meta and others if those companies want access to the content. It wouldn't require any new laws.
They would need to solve users being able to post links, but a link shortener of sorts forcing the user to write their own headline in the post would probably do the trick. Most people would still want to see the actual headline, and then they'd be forced to login or at least view the page.
I'm very strongly against bill c18.
https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/CHPC/Brief/B...
And Jeff Elgie provides an informed view:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/village-medias-c-18-update-je...
How do you think University's and teachers feel? They teach millions of people who later go on to make lots of money off the efforts of the educational establishment and educator, although in this case I seem to remember Zuck dropped out.
Perhaps Govt taught him, if you are big enough, you can do wtf you like, so maybe he's a modern day Robin Hood like figure? Robbing from the rich to give to the poor?
No. The law would apply even if Google and Facebook showed no ads on a same page as a link to a news article, and made no money from them. (And in fact, e.g. Google News does not show any ads.)
> Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something?
Not really, no. Australia passed a law but didn't actually make it apply to anyone. (Yes, seriously, the law is defined to apply to a set of companies that the government designates at their whim, and they've so far not designated any companies). The deals that Google/Meta made with Australian news companies are the same kinds of deals they've made in countries all over the world without such a law, including Canada.
Those Australian deals will reportedly terminate if Google/Meta are designated as being in scope of the law, so now any news company with a deal has an incentive to argue against their designation while a company without a deal will argue for. In a similar vein, the deals in Canada are apparently going to be terminated due to this law.
And I agree with the author that it's sort of weird that for all the handwringing and grandstanding these governments are doing, none of them are willing to build a replacement platform for their users
Are they acting unreasonably though? There is a product, and the government rules it has a price. Isn't Facebook allowed to go, sorry, I don't like that price?
I don't get it - in this analysis would my local coffee shop have to buy and provide free newspapers to me?
I'm all for access to free press being a fundamental right. Where you lose me is the part where a private corporation is supposed to subsidize the production of news for me.
One of the conditions of ABC, CBS and NBC being given access to the airwaves was that they had to produce and distribute high quality news broadcasts. News was considered a public good.
From wikipedia:
The fairness doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows, or editorials. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing views but required that contrasting viewpoints be presented. The demise of this FCC rule has been cited as a contributing factor in the rising level of party polarization in the United States.
I personally don’t think the Canadian laws are like fairness doctrines, to me they are more like rent-seeking on valuable Canadian eyeballs, but if the Canadian government does see their laws as something like fairness doctrines, they have a pretty good case for it!
I don't think it unreasonable that these companies, (largest on earth), pay a tiny fraction of a percentage of their Canadian revenue to help support that sector.
Without our own news media, we are particularly vulnerable to the toxic influence of American right wing media, billionaire funded astro-turf media and any other foreign entity that wishes to push their agenda.
> errors out on right to bear arms.
Lol, in canada that is definitely not a right you have.
Okay, but facebook is really ubiquitous so that makes it different... How is this any different from... the one grocery store in town removing their newspaper rack? It's the one grocery store, everybody in town shops there so that makes it super important or something. But the newspapers are still free to mail their newspaper to everybody's front door. They still have their websites too, anybody who wants to read those newspapers can still do so.
You can add enough layers of indirection and semi-elected committees and cultural expectations to make it mostly non-partisan (Think the process for awarding government-funded research grants)[1], but a government devoted to turning it into a partisan organ can, with enough effort, eventually corrupt any such system.
That's why you need to push back, and punish governments that are trying to shift cultural expectations that prevent weaponization of various public institutions.
[1] The incentives for corrupting this are far greater for media than they are for science, so I can't expect it will work well in practice. PBS, NPR, CBC, BBC are always a political football for this reason.
CBC and many other are backed by tax money. Some (many) Canadians think that we overspend on CBC and other media subsidies.
> Can there be such a thing as "non-partisan state-sponsored media"?
It supposed to be CBC. Some (many) believe it fails its goal.
Yet another confusing the definitions of "what is reasonable" and "what I think".
It really depends on the laws involved. If the government decides Facebook accepting certain terms is the cost of business, then Facebook doesn't get a say in it. Kind of like taxes. If you want to operate in a country, you're taxed accordingly. In general, you don't get to not pay a tax just because you don't want to.
Basically, if the law allows, they can. Reasonability doesn't have a lot to do with things at the upper levels of government.
A tax to fund a newspaper subsidy would make sense. This isn't a tax. It's mandated commerce. We usually restrict that for protecting protected classes.
This is actually a step further into absurdity since Facebook is not selling news articles, they are merely linking them. Its the equivalent of the Government telling me I need to pay Nike $5 every time I say the word Nike to someone.
The way you are quoting the remark, some might assume this is the National Post saying this when it's really NP quoting someone else. This isn't to imply you are misrepresenting anything.
I don't feature news on my website. Am I also an unreasonable, irresponsible news blocker?
Canadian govt: When someone posts a link to a news article on Facebook, that is like stealing from that news publisher.
Facebook: Your logic makes no sense, but okay, we will stop doing that.
Govt: No, we don't want you to stop posting the links, we want you to pay a fee every time someone posts a link.
Facebook: No thank you.
Govt: You're bullying us and behaving irresponsibly! We won't stand for it!
The fundamental issue is they "stole" the classified section that paid for the content. (Secondarily, they commoditized the content by owning the discussion around it.)
All that said, this is a solution that only makes sense to folks in media. The right one is a tax that funds a subsidy for news.
The thing here though is that the Canadian government already does this. I really don't understand their logic with introducing this fee vs just raising the existing subsidy directly.
Everyone wins.
I can't tell if this is serious or sarcasm. If it is serious, can you explain how Facebook and Google are getting rich from including links to news web sites on their platforms? I haven't seen any evidence of this. On the contrary, platforms like Facebook drive a lot of traffic to news sites, which becomes ad revenue for the news publishers.
> The people of Canada decided that this is unfair
Is there some polling to support this assertion? People may want to "stick it to Big Tech" but most of the support for this policy has come from legacy media who think that it will bring in free money for them.
Also, the thumbnail/blurb is usually in the html head tag for use like this. You can literally set it to "click through to learn more" instead of a summary and FB would respect that.
This seems really odd to me.
And as for Google, if this helps people realize that other search engines actually exist, that's great too!
All unrelated to what the bill was actually aiming for, of course.
The gov't of Canada has ad spends on bus stops, billboards, cinemas, newspapers, Spotify... I've even seen them on mobile games. If I was Pablo, I wouldn't be very much concerned about the reach of Gov't of Canada ads.
Most government advertising is brand/awareness advertising, which is pretty cheap when other brands aren't competing for the same keywords as you.
And the cost of running a government ad on CBC is non-zero. It could be occupying space used for a program people actually want to watch/listen to.
I'm just not sure that's a good forum for governments to try to get out a message.
* https://www.ontario.ca/page/support-quit-smoking
* https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/smoking-toba...
Why would you want to waste tax money on Zuckerberg's mansions.
Etc.
Remember the Phenix pay system? It was an IBM project that was supposed to save us 70 million a year, instead they paid IBM an additional 2+ BILLION to try and fix the broken crap they'd delivered. Never even worked, they're currently taking bids to replace it already.
80% of public servants had pay issues, many were foreclosed on because they couldn't pay their mortgages, someone even killed themselves.
And we expect the Canadian government to accurately determine ROI on digital ad spend? That's hard enough for skilled people in the space (some who have found it to have no effect altogether). Our government is simply going to be fleeced for every penny they have (and then some).
Remember, these are the same people who shut down the CRA website every night. Can't even access your tax info after hours.
Do you really believe that this was a result of bad in-the-moment decision-making at all levels, instead of a result of being trapped by previously-negotiated long-term vendor exclusivity agreements?
(In my experience, governments are generally good at cutting their losses — they're far more rational re: the sunk-cost fallacy than individual people are. So it would be surprising to me if this were true.)
And then we have, by three or four orders of magnitude, the great Sunk Cost Fallacy of all time, by anyone ever:
Not ending World War One in 1915, 1916, or 1917: "All those lives and treasure we've spent! We have to get something for it."
And so we had the Spanish Flu, which killed more than the combat deaths, and of course, the combat deaths.
https://www.history.com/news/spanish-flu
Not to mention World War Two.
The idea that there is something fundamental about governments that maeks them incapable of doing these things correctly is nonsense.
As much as I dislike Meta I'm 100% in agreement with them on this. They're being shaken down for money.
This here is the most concerning part. The government is making shady back room deals with large corporations. If I had to guess the nature of the deals is "we won't enforce anything or make you pay anything if you agree to ensure that stories that paint the government in an unfavorable light don't stick around."
Even if that's not what the deal is like now that is what it is going to turn into.
if you're advertising dollars are being wasted and this is just your political song and dance, that's one thing. but if this somehow drops revenue for ottawa in the long run then google and fb will forever use this as a pitchfork to milk cash from any other city
Well, I'm surprised that no one's brought up a similar case that occurred in the EU and which focused primarily on Google's news aggregation service, rather than Meta's.
One significant difference was that the publisher/holding company initiated and won the lawsuit against Google at the national level (see for example this EFF article from 2014: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/12/google-news-shuts-shop... ). From what I vaguely remember about the case, Google's ability to shut down its news service in Spain only (while keeping it running in neighboring countries) was what ultimately allowed it to demonstrate that the news aggregation service had benefitted the publishers rather than costing them revenue, because once they halted their aggregation service in Spain only, Internet traffic to the publications affected was substantially reduced. I assume the lawsuits in Australia and now Canada were initiated on a similar premise, i.e. that Google, et al. Were negatively impacting revenue, rather than bolstering it by referring additional traffic beyond what they would otherwise receive. In other words,
In the European case, what happened next was that publishers, realizing they couldn't win at the national level (actually, they couldn't reasonably win at any level, since their principal claim had already been invalidated at the national level) took it up to the EU level. They still wanted to be paid of course, regardless of the validity of their allegation, so they figured that if they could get a law (or amendment) passed at the EU Commission level, then this would be binding for all member states--and Google's only response would be to shut down their aggregation service completely in the EU, or accept the demand to play for each news article headline/summary that was hosted on their site.
The amendment that was ultimately passed was something quite byzantine as well, since it forbade any exceptions (to prevent Google from only hosting headlines that came from blogs or other, relatively unknown news services that were prepared to "forego" revenue (due to Google reducing their visitor count, as claimed), in return for the privilege of receiving tons of exposure for being hosted on Google's aggregator. The idea was (IIRC) was that there would be a pool of funds that would be disproportionately divided based on the relative portion of total traffic that each site received--which, needless to say, benefitted the big and well known publishers, while hurting the smaller ones (blogs) that didn't receive much money from this pool, but was still forced by law to participate in this scheme.
Which brings me to the final point: if the law that was passed in Canada has anything in common with the EU law (ie to force Google to pay their "fair share"), then the case against Meta/Facebook is a legal extortion racket, sanctioned by the government.
There were numerous articles, legal opinions, etc posted around that time, several by the EFF (again, based on my vague recollection).
This is just silly, this is the least of facebook's worries.
Oh no! Fifteen thousand dollars?! I'm sure Facebook is shaking and crying and will reverse their decision immediately.
What you quoted seems to refer to what the Liberal Party of Canada itself was spending, and the article makes it sound like they plan to continue buying ads going forward.
Farther down in the article, it also mentions recent spending by the federal government (rather than just the Liberal Party itself), and that amount is significantly larger.
Most importantly, it's now 10x harder to control the narrative and for the government to manufacture consent.