Comment by Transpire7487 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Transpire7487 | Hacker News Reader

As a Canadian, I’m glad that Meta is doing this. Google is going to be doing it soon as well from what I’ve heard.

The irony is the government says their intent was to “protect Canadian media by getting big tech to pay their fair share” and it is backfiring spectacularly. Having the opposite effect where there is less traffic going to these media sites, and will have a big impact on their bottom line from their innability to run ads on their own domains and make revenue that way.

Of course, this will just lead to another media bailout making them even more reliant on government subsidy - which the Liberal party will use as a wedge issue come election time because the opposition (which is leading and gaining in the polls right now) will want to defund them. Wether this would be successful as an election issue is yet to be seen, but there’s one thing that the Liberal party is good at is demonizing the opposition and if their gravy train is on the line I’m sure e media corps will gladly indulge him.

And of course this completely neuters independent media which is much more likely to actually be critical of the establishment. Leaving only pro establishment agencies in place to do the bidding of the hand that feeds them.

So the big players take a hit to revenue (and get bailed out), and every one else gets completely wiped out.

It’s absolutely sinister what Justin Trudeau’s government is doing. I used to think they were just stupid but it’s scandal after corruption scandal after corruption scandal with him. At some point you stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.

> Having the opposite effect where there is less traffic going to these media sites, and will have a big impact on their bottom line from their innability to run ads on their own domains and make revenue that way.

I think this happened to France early on. What they did was to force Google to pay no matter what. Optically, it looks like extortion and protectionist laws for incumbents too big to fail.

I’m not sure Canada can go that route though since they probably care about their relationship with the US unlike France.

I can’t find that anywhere. I see google was fined for not compensating publishers. But not that google blocked news or whatever in France and still owed publishers something.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/business/media/google-fra...

After Google decided to block all news, the French government accused them of "not operating in good faith."

I really want to see tech companies pull out of France and watch it collapse technologically overnight because of this. Ridiculous that the government can get away with acting like this.

It's all just consistent with Canadian economic policy since confederation and before. The preference here is for monopolies dating back to the Hudson's Bay Company, etc, and powerful protected interests in large part control the state here ... Both major parties are completely under their control, just with variance in the sectors. The federal Conservatives are dominated and controlled these days by western energy sector interests (and the provincial Ontario ones by real estate development). The federal Liberals by the Westons and Bell and, it seems, the shrinking media sector.

Nationalism is the sugar water they use to sweeten the deal to make it palatable to Canadians. People have a gut reflex to swallow this stuff because they are rightly or wrongly attuned to the threat of dominance from the US.

When Harper was prime minister, it was all about fossil fuel companies, defunding and silencing climate scientists, shoveling money into projects in the west and energy sector, etc. With Trudeau it's just a different pile of bullshit.

I'm sick of the dysfunction. It's a corrupt state, with corrupt, colonial foundations.

Try going to an actual corrupt state with colonial foundations. Canada is heaven on earth with zero problems in comparison.

One of the ways less corrupt countries keep it that way is by free societies calling out and addressing that corruption. When we refuse to, that’s when corruption festers, even if it looks like heaven on earth to an outsider, corruption is corruption.

We’re not North Korea or anything like that, but we have a pretty terrible legacy with residential schools and the destruction of indigenous people’s families, languages, and cultures, not to mention land.

Canada is also in the midst of the biggest housing affordability crisis we’ve ever had. We’re in 3rd place in the world behind Luxembourg and Portugal for the most unaffordable housing, relative to income.

The U.S. may have some serious affordability issues in the Bay Area, Seattle, and New York, but large swaths of the rest of the country aren’t so bad. Most Canadians are crowded into a few extremely unaffordable cities.

I know, and these are real issues.

But sometimes I talk to (born) Canadians - I’m an immigrant here - and they think of these issues as overwhelming, unsolvable crises that fundamentally undermine the viability of Canada as a nation.

And I think this isn’t a good problem-solving mindset, and isn’t the correct perspective either.

Or maybe I totally overinterpret their level of exasperation.

Well, like anything people's mindsets are relative to the situation. Most Canadians cannot possibly imagine what Ukrainians are going through. If we could, we would probably be a lot happier with the situation we have here.

But that doesn't change the fact that Canadian democracy is under a lot of pressure with polarization and influence by wealthy special interests. We would be a lot better off if we had a better electoral system and were able to move toward more Scandinavian-style social systems.

I take your point. I don't blame them for not knowing how bad it is elsewhere. But what I'm saying is that this lack of perspective leads many Canadians to underestimate the value of the system as it exists today.

First-past-the-post - FPTP - and wealthy interests have been here for a long time now. The system as it exists today works insanely great. This came to pass in spite of FPTP and the wealthy interest (hell, maybe even in part because of them).

Because the problems here are minor, the changes to the system should be mild, not radical. You don't give a complicated mechanism a big kick hoping to take it from 99% to 100% efficiency. You fine-tune it very carefully. Big kicks are for going from 0% to 50%.

Those of us born here have seen the decline. And are not happy about it.

I'm 50 next year, and have been politically conscious since I was a teen.. so have seen a half a century of it.

In particular the decimation of the health care system has just been slow and terrible to watch. Destruction of green spaces, sprawl, and difficulty of living in the GTA. Destruction of farmland, garbage on the beaches, overcrowding in almost every tourist or recreational area near Toronto. Nasty political polarization and viciousness. Racism and bigotry on the rise. And worst of all, that housing has become inconceivably expensive for working class people.

I wouldn't call the problems -- especially the trend line of them -- minor.

The expectation for previous generations was improvement of quality of life over generations. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case.

Again, I blame both major political parties. Liberals just happen to be wearing the hat right now federally.

I can see your point of view. Here's why I think these problems are "minor": there's a very richly-resourced system of capital, highly-developed and educated people, developed systems, and social trust (even if you think trust is declining, it's approximately one million times higher than the world average).

This system can take care of every problem you mention with a couple of tweaks. Now "tweak" doesn't mean it's easy or will work instantly; it might take decades and consume entire political careers. But there's no need for a total re-imagining, or a doom-and-gloom outlook.

Most bad things I've noticed in my time here (GTA + Calgary) can be fixed by cheap housing. This is a matter of political will - there's a ton of space and a ton of capital ready to triple our housing stock in a year if they're allowed to build. Toronto doesn't have to be the Center of the Universe. Even if we insist on putting every tourist and immigrant in this one city, there's so much space around it, it could in principle be one of the biggest on the planet.

I'm not arguing for complacency. I'm saying let's not throw our hands up in the air.

If all media outlets no longer receive traffic from big tech companies there's actually a decent chance that it will not affect their traffic much. If only some news outlets would be affected the others would profit, but if all are than there is a good chance that people just start accessing news more directly again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com