Govt of Canada proposes a 4% Link Tax
michaelgeist.ca
michaelgeist.ca
It’s not Google’s fault that Canadian media oligopolists have no interest in paying for good journalism. Their only interest is in continuing to profit from lackluster offerings while holding down the pay of journalists by ensuring they have very few employment options in the country.
Meanwhile, I was pleasantly surprised to see the CBC app festooned with links to low-bandwidth versions of content for regions under wildfire advisories. I appreciate that they understood that emergency situations call for something a bit different than "we have 23 extra pixels, can we cram another banner ad in?"
As-if there's any practical difference between a billionaire-owned publication and a millionaire-owned publication within this context.
> This is a few rich, mostly billionaire-owned telecom/media companies working as hard as they can to keep out competition.
There's many holes in this particular argument, such as non-billionaire owned publications - are they incapable of astroturfing and gatekeeping? Absolutely not, of course.
I agree, the link tax idea is bad already - we do not need to add cliché talking points into the mix.
As an aside, I personally find it interesting how this mantra started off as "millionaires and billionaires" being evil, until the movement's leader became an overnight millionaire himself. Now, apparently, it's just billionaires that are evil.
Not sure who you're referring to, but I think it's more likely that, thanks to inflation and other "growth", a far larger portion of the population have reasonable expectations to be "millionaires" on paper in their lifetimes. Even by now the word covers much of the upper middle class by the end of their career (the median US net worth at end-of-career age is ~$250k [0]). All else held equal the median peak wealth could reasonably cross $1M in the next 40 years, and of course half of the population will be above that.
Maybe the more apt word is "oligarch", but the West prefers to deny having those.
His base didn't seem to notice, and slid right into the modified "billionaires are evil" mantra. The hypocrisy is amazing to see.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2019/04/12/how-ber...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/13/bernie-sanders-says-milliona...
It's a fundamentally different lifestyle, culture, and philosophy.
We can tell the difference between "Inherited Grandpa's house in Los Angeles, net worth $1.4M, hobbies include PC gaming and woodworking" from "Owns the lion's share of a mining conglomerate, net worth $680M, hobbies include holding Congress hostage to preserve his future revenue streams."
At the time, the "millionaires and billionaires" thing went global, and subsequently, when he dropped billionaires from his screed, so did the rest of the world.
So much of global political trends follow the US. See the various Trumpesque figures that popped up seemingly in every country, and note that despite the country of origin, you will only hear about evil billionaires these days.
So let's discard the billionaire card, and discard the government's equally clique angle: we are against Facebook so we are right and don't look any closer.
IIRC, a few big Canadian youtubers like Linus and Mutahar, who went into details on this, threatening to leave Canada. Yeah it's definelty bs that reeks of corporate protectionism.
Crap journalism is not a uniquely Canadian problem. I would argue that like in most things we lag a bit behind the states (US journalism leads the pack in volume of crap per unit of time).
The internet and specifically advertising (and classifieds) is absolutely a big part of what caused a massive reduction of quality journalism. Google is also definitely part of this problem as most people's gateway to the internet and basically the largest advertising company in the world. Inevitable though for sure (if not Google, then someone else). I don't know about the rest of your post, but this statement at least is a bit distracting.
I should add that I think the Canadian link tax idea is doomed before it even begins. It's also kind of funny that our (Canadian) answer to everything is to just tax it... sigh.
I gave up and left to seek my fortune elsewhere.
“Yay Government! You stand up to those big tech bullies! Boooo Facebook and boooo Google!”
I wonder if the real issue is “people don’t want to do things the way I want to do things!”
The balancing act is quite difficult: voting advantage to less populous areas may improve land stewardship (protecting against tyranny of the majority ruining large areas of land due to a minority of people who would have to live with the consequences there) but it would be quite negative to enhance votes to wealthy land owners in particular while doing so (given that a good chunk of the few who live in rural areas own huge amounts of land and thus capital already).
I honestly do not know the best solution, and I agree that "citizens in less densely populated areas get more or stronger votes" by itself does little to solve it, but I also guarantee that "everyone gets one vote issue over" also does not solve it.
In these cases, usually the simplest solution is best, because none are perfect and trying to "engineer" perfect in politics (and economics) is doomed since there is no objectivity.
1 person == 1 vote
Looking at Canada's population distribution, you could win an election with just 82% of the votes in Quebec and Ontario or 67% of those + British Columbia.
The intent of these systems are for the people to be represented in and governed by their province, and their province to be represented in and governed by the federal government. Everyone and everything is equally represented to the governing body above them, but not necessarily to the level above that.
Tangentially, the federal government is meant to primarily rule over the provinces, not the people. Laws are supposed to be passed at that level by a majority of the provinces, not of the people. Quebec has every right to pass whatever law it wants to rule over its people, but what right does it have to use its large population to subject Manitoba or Prince Edward Isles to whatever rules it wants?
It breeds divisiveness. Why would Nunavut or Manitoba still want to be part of Canada if their votes don't matter in any conceivable way? Even banded together, they're 3.7% of the population and no politician is going to listen to them. Nunavut is 85% Inuit; it wouldn't shock me if their political inclinations are different than Quebec/Ontario both due to cultural differences and geographical differences. Why wouldn't they just try to go back to having their own tribal government, since the federal system has devalued their input to nothing?
Federal systems are meant to let provinces emphasize the needs of their own citizens, and to let provinces be unique as a result of their population.
The senate is meant to counterbalance the tyranny of the majority, but in Canada its a decorative institution.
The governing party got 33% of the votes country wide. They govern like a majority because of a supply of confidence deal with a party that got 15% of the vote. The party that got the most votes at 34% essentially had no power. This all worked out because the winning party won a lot of seats in Ontario.
...within the region the person lives so as to avoid a few large clumps of city dwellers living on 2% of the land area ruling it all over the 'rednecks' in the 98% 'flyover country'. Those city dwellers would not like to have countryfolk lording it over them either so why should the opposite be taken as a given? This may work for a small country like the Netherlands where a fast cyclist can cross the whole country within a day but it does not for a large one like Canada where there are provinces the size of large countries with a population less than a large town - Nunavut covers a larger area than Mexico with a population below 40.000.
A better solution would be to split the vote into a few parts, each relating to specific areas of government. National matters - national defence, international relations, more or less the core tasks of a narrowly defined "small government" - can go directly according to the 1 person/1 vote principle and as such will be shaped by city dwellers. Regional (or 'state' in USA terms) matters are a different story, here it makes more sense to let the people living in the region have enough of a voice to be truly represented without being outnumbered by the large voting blocks in a few large cities on the other side of the country. Local matters should be decided by those living in the directly affected area - city, town or county.
This ends up looking quite a lot like the structure theoretically used in the USA which also shows the problems which arise when such a model is used with larger governmental domains - national and state - expanding their powers by taking them away from lower levels.
I’ve heard the same said of capitalism.
PEI: 4 MPs for 176,000 people. = 1 MP per 44000 people BC: 42 MPs for 5.43 million people. = 1 MP per 129,000 people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canadian_federal...
Churchill was a marginally important political figure until he basically lucked into premiership in WW2.
Lincoln came to power over a particular issue, resolved that issue in a war and got killed.
Neither of those things are happening. And with Churchill its questionable how good he was other then basically deciding not to surrender.
Even if you look at FDR, he came to power during a great economic downturn but by the end of his second term, if not for WW2, he would be remembered very differently. The economy wasn't doing well. And his initial upswing happened mostly because he came into power when the Great Depression was very much ending.
Ornery times when leaders face long term issues like population, immigration and climate change will simply not produce such leaders. And the leaders who do handle these topics well are almost never actually popular and are not guaranteed to win many reelections.
This has direct outcomes on the legislation that the government produces.
In this particular case of this particular legislation, we have the government focusing strongly on an issue of particular importance in Quebec, because those seats are critically important for them remaining government.
If we had a proportional representation system then regionalism wouldn't be as important and we'd see the government focus on different policy objectives.
“Fully democratic” implies this is as good as it gets, yet no one is happy with it. The so called democratic process objectively sucks.
It's not the democratic process that's the issue, it's the first-past-the-post. Fortunately the party to win the 2015 election vowed: "To make sure that every vote counts, the Government will undertake consultations on electoral reform, and will take action to ensure that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.", so it must be fixed...
People here typically vote to avoid a particular party getting in power rather than for a given party. If we got rid of first past the post and adopted some form of proportional representation maybe we'd have a better time of it, but every government who promises to do that (including this particular one), break that promise. It's hard to blame the voters for the state of our voting system.
As for elsewhere, aside from possibly some places in Europe, Canada is pretty damn good in my eyes. I suppose if you don't care about having healthcare for everyone and other social protections and instead just focus on making money there could be better places, but that's certainly not my cup of tea.
I was tempted to comment that the words "how" and "turned its forest into a carbon bomb" are extraneous.
It'll kill all independent/local media, but then that's the goal all along.
Is it desired? Probably not, but there could be silver linings. Fewer governments posting important information exclusively on social media, for example, and people being conditioned to look directly to news sources for their news.
Social media is a multi-source aggregator and then some.
I know there have been charges of social media creating echo chambers. But consider who made those charges to begin with. Typically traditional media.
And people who don't take conscious active measures to expose themselves to a broad point of view are just going to stick to their comfortable world-affirming sources anyway like they did before social media.
Something to consider is that when virtually every single person now carries around a video camera with them 24/7, with the ability to instantly upload footage to a potentially unlimited audience ... what use is there for traditional journalists in the majority of cases?
We still desperately need investigative journalism that uncovers events not widely exposed. But when there's a car accident, a fire, a weather alert? Why rely on your local NBC or Fox news outlet? What's the benefit to getting information plus spin when you can just get the raw first-hand footage from the people who were there? And not only do you get it without bias, you get it faster.
The only people I know who think getting news from fucking facebook of all places are boomers caught up in the doomscrolling dopamine treadmill who are also caught up in the milquetoast Canadian version of MAGA.
Forcing people to go outside their shitty echo chambers for news seems like an astronomical win.
The entire entity of Facebook (not meta) could go away tomorrow and the only people who'd care are probably the ones who voted this government in, property boomers and their forgotten gen x offspring.
The rest would just switch their messaging platform if they use messenger, and go back to Craigslist for classifieds.
Edit: To clarify, I'm still being hyperbolic. All kinds of people voted for all kinds of candidates, but in my city most of the extremely wealthy neighborhoods voted for Liberal candidates, so it's a bit fun to poke at. Likewise, the only people I personally know who still use Facebook directly for anything unrelated to selling stuff or direct messaging, are just quite a lot older
I know it's imused in some places as their primary messaging service or something, but it seems likely they're not doing much unique here.
So what is this harm you speak of?
Also, what is "news"? Do links to Hacker News count?
Would, let's say, a blog about cars based in another country get a tax bill from Canada if it ran ads and also included a link to a news site somewhere in its content? What if users post a news link in the blog's comments?
Do "real" news sites have to pay tax for links to other news sites?
The mind reels once you start thinking about all the potential gray areas in something so vague. But maybe it's simple and I'm just missing the core concept. What the hell is going on here?
> (Intermediary global revenue) × (Canadian share of global GDP [≈2%]) × (Contribution rate [4%])
Proxy for “Canadian revenue” Intermediary global revenue This figure refers to the annual global revenue of a digital news intermediary. It excludes other unrelated revenues from the company operating the intermediary.
Doesn't seem like a very fair or accurate way to implement it regardless of whether this is a good idea or not.
eg Google's profit was approx 25% 2022q3. So this would be a 16% of profit tax. Oof.
Not sure what your equation is besides randomly putting numbers on a line.
He's saying they're taking 16% of Canadian profit. Or maybe his numbers are off.
Just today I ran into a random hiker in the woods and the conversation turned immediately to political corruption and how the media won't touch it. The govt in Canada likely wants the internet and news restrained, as they need to pull some things and probably don't want the news to foment popular cross border support again. Sure, link tax, whatever, there is no expectation the media or government are anything but hollow facades for some minority interests that have captured them. The popular mood talking to people in the street is very dark.
The language of the bill is "makes available." It is intentionally broad.
> digital news intermediary means an online communications platform, including a search engine or social media service, that is subject to the legislative authority of Parliament and that makes news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada.
Of course, the reporter had zero copyright claim on the URL I posted. But that didn't matter at the end of the day. And expecting politicians to willingly understand this instead of doing big political posturing is serious wishful thinking, I'm afraid.
The idea clearly isn’t going to go away until somewhere feels the consequences that come with passing it.
Just like Google News failing to show French news sites due to a law. Of course France seems to decided to fine Google for not complying correctly with what they hoped would happen.
Despite chasing links (heh) for a while, I have been unable to find a description of what the Canadian act actually does, only page after page of "Whereas…" intent/caveat.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/3/22761041/google-news-rela...
You don't have links to French news websites?
Joking aside, this is "Succession" style bullcrap. They're scratching big news backs so they scratch back on the next election period.
The thing at issue is not URLs, it is these sites' ability to pull and serve above the fold content. I think that's something the term "link tax" is obfuscating.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/world/canada/canada-wildf...
Unfortunately, the business model of the Internet is at its core rabid capitalism: the one with the lowest cost for the end user usually wins the most eyeballs, which means free, ad supported tabloid/outrage bait. And as we've seen with COVID or with the conspiracy peddlers that ended up pushing the 45th to office, that can have serious side effects on society as a whole.
So, assuming that high quality journalism is essential to the survival of democracy (alone because journalism is vital in holding politicians and companies accountable), there are only a few options left:
1. the government pays for journalism and distributes it for free, either in the form of outright tax funding or via mandatory fees. This is the old "public broadcast" model, and it requires a lot of effort to keep it accepted as neutral by the general public, and it needs constant oversight to not become a government mouthpiece (an allegation that continues to rise in popularity in the case of the BBC, and something that has already happened in Hungary with disastrous effects). Also, independent media don't like it very much because obviously, they can't compete with "free and high quality".
2. the government bans or introduces strict licensing requirements to get foreign influence (such as propaganda content farms like in the Balkans [1]) under control. That raises serious constitutional issues in most Western democracies and legitimizes Putin doing the same in Russia.
3. governments go to those who actually make the money on the back of legitimate content creators and force them to hand over a part of the profit. Aka, a "link tax".
It's hard for me to sympathize with Google, one of the richest companies on the planet, and Facebook which has played a key role in tearing our societies apart by letting fake news and propaganda run rampant on their platform. Pay your goddamn bills.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-balkan-troll-farms-are-spr...
Relevant quote:
In 2015, Eric Holder ended the policy of "adoptive forfeiture", which occurred "when a state or local law enforcement agency seizes property pursuant to state law and requests that a federal agency take the seized asset and forfeit it under federal law" due to abuse.[21] Although states proceeded to curtail the powers of police to seize assets, actions by the Justice Department in July 2017 have sought to reinstate police seizure powers that simultaneously raise funding for federal agencies and local law enforcement.[22]
- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United... - [1] I've managed to find multiple sources that state the IRS spent ~700k USD on firearms and ammunition. Why do the country's accountants need guns or bullets?
I do hope that Civil forfeiture in the United States is vastly reformed, but again not really related to the idea that taxes == theft
It’s for pretty much what you’d expect: tax fraud, corruption, money laundering, and so on.
If you've actually inspected a reasonable subset of the multiple sources you found on this, you'd understand that these are purchases for their Criminal Investigations Division, a division with a narrow remit which has been armed for over a century.
The only reason why this is suddenly shocking news is because right-wing media has been increasingly hyping this up as some unprecedented and dangerous overreach since ~2020, cynically playing into the enduring paranoiac belief that govt stormtroopers are just around the corner (yet somehow never actually materializing). You're dancing to the tunes that your echo chambers choose for you.
As for the substance of this claim, the IRS has always had an armed law enforcement role. I suggest researching the origins of the American colloquial word “revenuer”.
"WH Press Room Contains Figurine of What Appears to Be Trump's Head Beaten Up" is not something I need to waste my time reading.
I find it useful in my daily life to know what each side is focused on and what their blind spots are. Call it information arbitrage.
How can people think that someone is producing free news and research without an agenda? Do you think Elon Musk gets his information from reading blogs and $2/month NYT subscriptions? Musk, and people like him, have teams that research current events for them, and Musk has a platform on which he can influence the free information that people get and manipulate them for his benefit.
You may also be surprised to hear that the DoE has paramilitary capabilities as well.
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/irs-confiscates-tens-of-th...
It's less insane than it used to be, because individuals have been fighting and debating for their rights in all imaginable ways for millennia now.
It used to be that monarchs were absolute rulers; gradually humanism developed; now we have rights and so on.
But it's imperative that each generation keep pushing for a more humane and less autocratic world, especially now as tech changes everything.
Media outlets, social networks nor users benefit from this bill. The only beneficiaries seem to be corrupt politicians.
It’s a strange math that someone there thinks an image of appearing to fight big horrible tech bullies is a better campaign strategy than actually fighting big horrible Arctic bullies.