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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.