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.
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.
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...
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.
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."
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.