> 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
"Making available" includes just links. In other words, there is no qualifier in the bill what-so-ever that requires that previews and snippets be extracted and provided. A single link with no text or any other content whatever qualifies as "making available."
Here is the entire text of the bill: https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...
That sounds like a simple link wouldn't count?
> "Making available of news content (2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if
(a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or
(b) 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 not only is there no qualifier saying that content needs to be reproduced, but (b) specifically says that "facilitating" access BY ANY MEANS counts as "making available."
Ranking seems harder to justify.
What if I create a search product that directs you to a site, based on information gleaned from another site?
Trivial example: a "Top 10 Topics in the News Today" list of Wikipedia links, based on scraping a news site's front page daily
On the one hand, "It's free info and scraping should be allowed." On the other hand, if everyone did that, it'd highjack all of the news site's visitors, depriving it of revenue and destroying the very resource it's built on.
Unless somebody loses a court case over hyperlinks, it feels extremely disingenuous to claim this law is going after hyperlinks when Google's content was blatantly more than hyperlinks (they provide excerpts).
Like, I can see Google pivoting to providing custom links and a script that runs in the users browser that will dynamically produce the snippets on the pages without the content technically going trough their servers...
1. Meta was the other "initial target." And so if we're in a mindset where we just dislike Google or "big powerful corporations that will stop at no end to ... whatever" then the application of the bill ALREADY hit a point where we can start to see how loosely the regulators will interpret Section 6. And according to the wording of that section, they just need to consider the "size" of the entity,"strategic advantage", and "prominent market position" in order to determine if they decide that the digital news intermediary has "a significant bargaining power imbalance."
2. With respects to what you think Google might do in order to try and "work around the law" ... I'm not a lawyer, but from what I've heard from lawyers, courts tend to be very intolerant towards people who try and apply a strict interpretation of the wording of a law in order to try and skirt around what it makes illegal. Common law, precedence and judicial interpretation really exists in large part to try and avoid that type of thing. Judges will look at things like the intent of the legislators, past court decisions and the intent of the accused in order to determine whether the accused is in violation.
In other words, Section 4 "Purpose", would be considered:
> Purpose 4 The purpose of this Act is to regulate digital news intermediaries with a view to enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contributing to its sustainability, including the sustainability of news businesses in Canada, in both the non-profit and for-profits sectors, including independent local ones.
As well as Google's intent. If the court were to gather that Google's intent was to try and work around the law, they go back to the Purpose, look at Google's actions and the EFFECT of their actions and will say "Sorry, you don't get to do shit like that to try and weasel your way out of the law. It still applies." And those types of actions can often be used as evidence of an intent to break the law, so any lawyer would likely advise their client to not even consider doing slimy shit like that.
I am however confused why you think the law being applied to the company having 91% of search in Canada is mission creep, you never actually say why claiming that Google has a "a significant bargaining power imbalance" is "loosely" interpreting the criteria....
And sure, the state might have a good chance of winning the court case about Google and Meta trying to avoid the law by not technically delivering the snippets themselves, but it'll take years for sure to go trough the courts. And why would you accept those several years where the damage the law is trying to prevent continues because you wanted the technical definitions to be narrow as when you already had criteria on company size.
I think you misunderstood my point.
I'm not talking about applying the law to Google, specifically. I'm not even saying that the government & regulators are "loosely interpreting the law." I'm saying that the criteria, as set out in Section 6 is itself intentionally loose to the point where it gives broad, sweeping and arguably arbitrary power to the regulators in order to decide who qualifies and why. That, if challenged in court, they only have to argue that a "significant bargaining power imbalance" exists because of some degree of consideration to "size" of the target, "prominent market position" and "strategic advantage." If that's not extremely broad and sweeping, I don't know what is.
Personally, I don't want my government and it's regulatory agencies having that type of unconstrained broad discretion. It allows them to:
- selectively target certain entities over others
- while in doing so, has the potential to create an unfair market environment while claiming that their goals are to achieve fairness
- it gives them a very broad paintbrush with which to select these entities
In your follow-up point about legal cases and years and cost of going through the court system .. if any target of this law wanted to challenge being targeted by the CRTC ... that's the exact type of lengthy and costly legal process that they would have to go through in suing the CRTC for exemption. It would be incredibly costly for the entity targeted, while having virtually zero consequences for the CRTC and the government if the courts were to rule in the entity's favour.
Just imagine how open to corruption this law is. The CRTC can "punish" certain entities while giving "favours" to others by choosing to leave them be and not target them.
And it should be pretty obvious that this is the case. If your interpretation was correct, Meta would not have removed Canadian news sources entirely. They'd just have removed the previews (hell, the news companies could have removed the previews themselves; they already have the controls for that).
Meta's actions prove absolutely nothing. I could similarly say that Google didn't remove any news, therefore the law has zero effect?
Meta has, for months in advance of anything coming into force, embargoed Canadian news and replaced it with an appeal to the reader. That is political action, and it seems to have failed given that the government didn't blink. Now that Google has an agreement, it looks especially silly.
If Meta continues their embargo of Canadian news, personally I consider that a good thing. The Canadian public accepting that Meta is not a good source or "homepage" for news is a wonderful outcome of all of this.
> (2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if
> (a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or
> (b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.
Is that wrong?
Sure, google currently has previews, and a law could be written to target previews, but I don't think this law targets previews.
A better criteria is: what fraction of people does it stop from visiting the source (because they got the information they were looking for from the summary). Yes, yes that system has it's own problems, but it is more holistic that string.length().
I'm no fan of Google these days, but I wish they had played hard ball on this. This is a total joke.
That's not true, however. It is also often including a summary and an image, which is certainly republishing or reposting the content. In no way is it "web-illiterate/ignorant" to refer to it as such, because it is more than just a link.
Facebook, yeah, that's something else. One thing that is legitimately bad about that is the way the content can be posted on whatever wall and then a pile of unmoderated public comments put on it, that the publisher has no control over.
A union strikes not because they want to withhold work from their company, but because even though both the company and the union members want to work, the strike shifts the power balance.
Similarly, Canadian journalists could have gotten together to withhold links from Google & Meta until they got a better deal. They'd both be worse off during the duration of the strike, but negotiations could get a better long term deal. And in this metaphor, Meta is doing a pre-emptive lockout.
The biggest difference is that the government is helping journalists combat the defector problem.
They could have done this but now they don't have to.
Basically while Reuters or AP are "on strike", Drudge Report, Jacobin, or Fox News would step in and become the de facto news sources across all of social media.
I suppose the issue is more that there's too much competition for news, rather than google making the competition unfair.
People have found that certain sites, topics, and words will trigger an outright shadowban on that post - your friends never see it.
The idea that facebook should have to pay a fee each time a user decides to share a link to news is stupid.
With the rise of rage and clickbait, that might be a really good thing to disincentivize many of the bad ways that media is produced and presented.
That's what happened in Australia's law from a couple of years ago. The law was ratified, but doesn't actually apply to any company, so what the law said was totally irrelevant.
The idiocy here is that most of these publishers are likely customers of Google's ad networks anyways, and the clicks through to the articles are yielding ad revenue to them, and they likely are getting analytics and tracking that identifies exactly where the inbound traffic is coming from.
It feels like a shakedown by people who are in other parts of the business totally disconnected from the web content / publishing arms, who likely know better?
It's true that the links only increase the revenue/traffic to their website though, so they should really be supporting the referrers rather than blocking them.
But you wouldn't do that if you want the link to resolve. If you don't want it to work, why would you go to all of the trouble of creating the link in the first place?
But also, the technical solution to bookmarks and small-scale sharing between friends is quite obvious. You don't need referrers to solve that problem.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
Negotiations between Google/Meta and the news organization when defining the service contract can explore alternative options (access token, for example) should it be an imperative, for some reason, that the referrer still be inaccessible. People are allowed to talk to each other.
What about bookmarks? I don't think clicking on a bookmark on your browser is going to send any Referer header.
Now, each successful entrance into an article via allowable referrer would come with an access token to allow future access absent of referral. When sharing in the small scale, the news agency can simply allow these links to be shared. But if the reach grows wide, suggesting that a major tech source has picked up the link and should be using their contractually settled upon authentication mechanism instead, then the token can be invalidated.
The access token plan is workable, though still causes annoying linking problems.
Views don't pay the bills. They only want viewers who are willing to pay to play (even if by proxy). C-18 ensures that payment is made, else user access is restricted by legal force. Which is the same outcome if it were done by technical force. They don't care about the restrictions on users who are eschewing payment in either case.
Making them leave and half give up, half come back via a paying search engine or social media site, is not going to be the most effective use of them.
Maybe that was true in the days before big tech, venture capital and advertising monetized the internet, but the internet has been vastly changed by those three groups, and not always for the better. They certainly do make a bunch of money though!
I do wish there was more distinction between a link and content display. I think there’s a very real concern that summaries lower click-through rates, which Google has been pushing for years and will be turbo-charged with LLMs summarizing content in the future. It would be interesting to see if there might be some future nuance around that.
> (b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.