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.