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Comment by barbazoo | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why Meta seems to be so unwilling to participate in negotiations in good faith here. What's different here compared to Australia and Europe, the post doesn't explain that.

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> In fact, if Google follows suit, there will be even more cancelled deals, lost links, and absolutely no new revenues from the legislation given that those are the only companies subject to the law (former Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez’s insistence that there is value in links that deserve compensation while simultaneously excluding Microsoft, Apple, Twitter and other platforms from the law amply demonstrates how the argument stands on shaky grounds).

This law targets Facebook and Google specifically. Facebook has been willing to negotiate in other countries but where do you start when the premise is false?

This article goes more into depth about the differences [0]

As far as I can tell the basic point is "Australia changed the law to something these companies could accept before it passed, Canada didn't"

[0]https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/meta-australia-google-news-can...

What I'm hearing is that meta/google are threatening the government through public opinion on a piece of legislation that doesn't benefit them... How could anybody side with meta/google?

I’m on Google/meta’s side because link taxes are a bad idea for the internet as a whole. That anyone (even Meta, who I generally dislike) should have to pay to link to a news article is morally offensive to me.

I've skimmed the legislation multiple times, and the only thing close to a "link tax" is the theoretical ability of the government to create one if that's what's deemed fair.

I've yet to see anything that explains how a negatiations framework translates to a "link tax", but explaining it wasn't Google's goal when it coined the term to fight the bill.

Because one of the things the negotiating framework covers is how much money google and meta must pay to news providers when news content is “made available” to canadians, and “made available” specifically includes when “access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content”. So if the negotiated value is anything over $0 then, yeah, it’s a “link tax”.

From the CBC: australia made a deal to keep news on facebook, why couldn't canada?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/meta-australia-google-news-can...

tl;dr the government has not left any room to negotiate, and the law is signed.

Maybe the media lobbyists think people will flock to their news websites instead complete with paywalls.

And Social thinks they will keep traffic, or the media sites will die.

The post states that in Canada the Government has ultimate authority over all payment negotiations, it would seem that in the other countries facebook and media companies can establish their own content licensing contracts as independent businesses ought to be able to.

Ought to? I trust my elected representatives to have that decision making power 1000x more than Zuckerberg.

They’re taking the decision making power away from the news agencies, not Zuck. Government is essentially banning news agencies from setting their own prices and instead taking all that power for themselves.

Could just be an experiment. Canada isn’t terribly consequential to meta so why not see what happens if you don’t back down.

I saw an estimate that it would have been something like a -6X ROI in this case. Would be a reasonable nonstarter to set a bad precedent (from Meta POV)

They did post a long writeup if you want to hear straight from their newsroom: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/05/metas-position-on-canadas-...

Disclaimer: Meta employee programming games, unrelated to any of the ongoing discussions.

The Australian law got watered down to the point where it allowed Google and Facebook to have private negotiations with news companies on pricing, and come to mutually agreeable terms are not. The Australian landlord didn't force medicine Google to pay them or come to an agreement.

The Canadian law is different in that it did not leave any choice or negotiation up to the companies

The only good faith negotiating position in a shakedown is to offer nothing, which is exactly what FB has done here.

Doesn't work by design, because of Final Offer Arbitration baked into the solution. FB and news cartel are expected to enter negotiations and at the end set their respective "final" best offers and government gets to choose one of them that will take effect. Everyone knows what will happen.

The only winning move is not to play.

But I thought the talking point was that "the news orga are benefiting from meta/google more before the law than after"

If that's the case then why would media companies pursue deals that would lead to them getting removed from the site?

This is based on the idea of said negotiations being made in good faith in the first place, when in reality it's nothing more than the media conglomerates wanting to shake down tech companies.

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