Meta starts process to end news access in Canada over law on paying publishers
reuters.com
reuters.com
This bill is not about supporting independent media like they claim. This is first and foremost a link tax, and the result of it is damaging to free press. Independent media sources depend on traffic from social media platforms to function. They themselves are often the ones sharing the links to their own content to drive traffic and readership from in which they monetize through ads. Furthermore, many of these local publishers leverage their social media following to share content on behalf of other local businesses through sponsored articles and posts. The Canadian government playing strong man here when repeatedly warned of the outcome is putting independent media companies in serious jeopardy of remaining solvent.
Meta and Google are in the right here, and I hope they continue to stand their ground. If they cave on this issue, it sets a terrible precedent that jeopardizes the health of the internet as we know it. Companies should not have to pay the source whenever a link is shared on their platforms. It's just backwards.
If you are talking about situations where they are scraping and displaying the contents of an article, that is a different issue, and seemingly not one that is the primary target of this bill.
Try scraping Google's content as a trillion-dollar company and see how long that lasts.
Don't let your dislike for social media blind you from the reality that the world has changed, for the majority of the people in the world. People will spend their free time on these sites/apps, whether or not they have news.
The old local news model is dead. Niche sites like the WSJ, FT, NYT can survive with paid subscriptions, the rest have to find a different business model. This is not a conspiracy by Big Tech or billionaires, as much as we might want to find someone to blame. It's a structural change in the ether of society, information and distribution. Anything with near zero marginal costs of distribution needs is now in competition with the whole world, and unless they have something unique that people are willing to pay for, their days are numbered.
While most news orgs need schooling, what a hard reset typically means is some action that would expand the growing news vacuum absolutely.
What we see filling the existing vacuum is worse than worthless content. It is patently false content (often posing as local news), specifically crafted to advance harm-based agendas. That would seem to indicate a hard reset isn't the way forward.
This will do no such thing. News from international orgs (just as capable, if not more, of clickbait and bias) will still be shown to Canadians.
I am trying to understand whether this charges for copying of news, or just linking to it.
It seems to be implied that the content is being copied. But news is already copyrightable. Why were existing copyright protections not sufficient?
Or does this law actually change for links?
And what about users sharing links? So if I just send a facebook friend a link to a newspaper, does the newspaper receive money for that?
Does Google need to pay for indexing news sites?
The news sites already tried it Google's way for more than a decade, and it isn't working for them. It only works for Google.
As someone clearly entrenched in the tech echo chamber, it will come as a surprise for you to learn that there are many news organizations that do not give their content away for free on the internet.
Some have paywalls. Some require paid apps. Some are -shudder- only available as dead trees.
Many of them are thriving.
My wife pays upwards of $2,000/year for a publication that is not available in any form on the internet. It has offices and reporters in a dozen cities around the world, and continues to grow.
It, and others like it, don't need to suckle at the teat of Google for pennies.
I'm of the view that it's Google and Meta that are in trouble here. If they don't want to pay for quality news sources their content continues to noticeably degrade and become less attractive for use. They're likely trying to play hard ball with Canada and Australia because the markets are comparatively small. If the EU or the US see merit in this approach the tech companies are really going to struggle.
With previous comment gems like "Canada's healthcare is so bad that if you are not immediately dying, you get no healthcare whatsoever" it's clear that you're not intending to be taken seriously.
This has nothing to do with our access to news sites in Canada.
Longer version: Meta has been copying content from Canadian news sites, to republish on it's own sites. News sites liked this because it referred free eyeballs & traffic to their sites.
Canadian news biz got Gov to write a law. The law forces some platforms to pay cash if they scrape news (and send free traffic/users to the site). Meta is fine with sending free traffic but is opting out of sending free cash too.
Not sure what your purpose here is but when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL. It doesn't copy the article verbatim into feeds as you have described.
Now it will just push through links as links. That seems fine as well. I like the fact that you can present or not present content, for whatever terms are negotiated.
To illustrate that a platform that withdraws from republishing news content doesn't end our news access.
> but when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL
This doesn't seem transformative to my point. Could you expound a bit?
If they were scraping complete articles and re-publishing those, that would be a totally different thing.
That's the content of news articles. They were scraping content for republication and now they're not.
From Meta: in order to comply with Bill C-18, passed today in Parliament, content from news outlets, including news publishers and broadcasters, will no longer be available to people accessing our platforms in Canada
> Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL. They aren't inserting the bodies of the articles into the feed.
That's how links are supposed to be and reflects what a well functioning internet looks like. I'm not saying that to be a techno-purist. I'm saying it's the most normal, usual and predicable way to handle a link. There's not a thing wrong with it.
> It is like when I hit a paywall site and they tell me what I could get if I just paid for the subscription.
I can't agree. Having 2% less choices isn't similar to having no choice at all.
If Facebook doesn't offer the 50th copy of a news story, you still have 49 other sites that do (as well as the source). If the story is paywalled, your options are ~none.
That content is provided by the publisher, via meta tags, specifically designed for that purpose. The publisher has full control.
It’s trivial for a publisher to even opt of search engine indexing entirely if they choose.
My best guess is that this is actually a collective action problem/prisoners dilemma. News sites would rather not have the summary (and get more traffic), but any one news site that drops it will lose traffic to those that dont.
Because news sites can't organize and collaborate effectively, they were stuck. In this sense, the law was a win-win. Either a hail mary shakedown, or a ban on all summaries.
It is like grocery stores passing a national ban on coupons.