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Comment by jamincan | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the issue that Facebook/Google don't just share the link, they share the content behind the link as well?

No, the entire complaint about Facebook and Google is the links themselves. It's not anything about embedding articles (which I don't think either company does). They just show the headline and article metadata provided by the news publishers.

There are places where they embed the news itself, but that’s a separate issue that’s already been resolved - they pay the publishers for that. Ironically, one of the results of bill C 18 is that those existing deals will get cancelled.

The title is part of the article, isn't it? Especially when people tend to read headlines without reading the actual article

The text of the bill includes "indexing" and "ranking" as equivalent to displaying. So even making them searchable (with just links) would cost FB/G.

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.

and there are platform-specific head tags that give publishers control over how it appears it various contexts

Don't they use this? https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet

Yes. These advertising companies extract the excess wealth created by the labour of the news-reporting media without compensation. The people of Canada decided that this is unfair and not in their best interest. The advertising companies decided it is not in their best interest to pay the cost of leverage that resource for their wealth-extraction strategies and are going to discontinue it.

Everyone wins.

> These advertising companies extract the excess wealth created by the labour of the news-reporting media without compensation.

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.

Close. Sharing it on Facebook means you’ll comment on the story on Facebook and not on the linked website hosting the comment. Facebook gets the linger time to show you more ads but the organization doing the actual reporting misses out.

If someone didn't read the article, then why would you expect them to spend time on your website?

This seems really odd to me.

Should HN owe money to the National Post for the very same reason? The argument is stupid and the only way the government could push for this solution is by guaranteeing they will restrict it to big corporations few people like.

> Isn't the issue that Facebook/Google don't just share the link, they share the content behind the link as well

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 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.

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