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> governments want to avoid doing the actual hard thing which is convincing taxpayers that this should be part of what we support through broad based support as societies.

I think it’s a level beyond that, to the point that I’d just call it pure corruption. A government-mandated fee that a company has to pay isn’t any different than a tax. They’re taxing big tech, which is fine, and most people wouldn’t have a problem with that.

But then instead of booking that as revenue and deciding what to do with the money as part of the normal budgetary process, they’re short-circuiting procedure to send that money to news companies. If the government wants to fund news companies, it should be done in the normal way that all the other government funding gets decided upon, not in a special allocation just for news companies that is excluded from the federal budget.

News companies are always interacting with politicians, always criticizing the government. The logic is to distance as much as possible the monetary help from the government. So you don’t have the appearance of collusion. Media companies themselves want it that way.

i'm not sure if you're trying to back up my point or disagree, but yeah. they're trying to hide the money as much as possible. that's why it's so bad. it is collusion, so if there's no appearance of it that's a problem.

if the government is going to be paying the media to report on them, that needs to happen in the open.

You think a law that forces tech companies to sign deals with Canadian media companies is more problematic than taxation and a check with the country’s flag on it?

I beg to differ. Media companies need as much hands-off from the government as possible.

Next they'll sue for monopoly on eyeballs and they'll have a strong case, as evidenced by how these two companies were able to starve an entire country's news medias by merely ignoring them.

I think what the Canadian govt is legislating is silly but it's not like there's no problem: foreign governments in the US-sphere are losing a ton of tax revenue to US entities that are capturing all the value. This essentially strips the residents of wealth, further putting them at a comparative disadvantage in all other fields. Eyeballs are at the center of the largest commercial entities on the planet. There's a lot of value here being sent to the US with no obvious return mechanism.

Not recognizing this will prevent any mutually agreeable solution from being found. Canada isn't keeping up with the US and things aren't looking up either.

If they simply acknowledged that and said "we are making a tax on tech social/search companies" and then that they were distributing the proceeds of that to news/media? I'd be fine with it. It's the theatrics that are the problem - pretending the underlying issue is social/search "stealing" content from news media.

This isn't benign - setting precedents that linking to something is stealing it is toxic to the whole concept of the internet itself. It may take a while to seep through but that precedent is going to get built on by every other aggrieved party who sees an opportunity there eventually.

Theatrics are a part of politics. Do you think you're the only one who sees through them? Who cares what they call it?

>This isn't benign - setting precedents that linking to something is stealing it is toxic to the whole concept of the internet itself

this is why we need to care. doing theatrics to hide their dirty spending is one thing. but they should at least do their dirt in a way that doesn't have the side effect of breaking how the internet works.

Newspapers and magazines thrived for more than a century on ads, subscriptions and the like.

The calculus will have to change in the digital era. There are effects like zero marginal cost that are genuine challenges. But the targeted adtech period is such a great economic and social distortion it makes a difficult problem almost impossible.