TechDirt: As Canada Passes Corrupt Link Tax, Meta Says No More News Links In Canada
TechDirt: As Canada Passes Corrupt Link Tax, Meta Says No More News Links In Canada
Two weeks ago, Canada’s Heritage Minister, Pablo Rodriguez, who has been the main Canadian government official pushing for C-18, the bullshit link tax bill, that is just a corrupt wealth transfer f…
TechDirt’s Mike Masnick gets it exactly right in covering Canada’s C-18 bill:
If you believe in the open web, if you believe that you should never have to pay to link to something, if you believe that no one should have to pay to provide you a benefit, then you should support Meta’s stance here. Yes, it’s self-serving for Meta. Of course it is. But, even if it’s by accident, or a side-effect, it’s helping to defend the open web, against a ridiculous attack from an astoundingly ignorant and foolish set of Canadian politicians.
And just generally points out the huge holes in Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez understanding from the Power & Politics Interview.
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Y'know, I'm not nearly as against this concept as this suggests. News is... clearly unprofitable in the modern era, and the quality of the average news outlet has fallen drastically in the past few decades. So I'm down for some drastic attempts to recapture that value and reward good reporting.
Obviously this isn't perfect, it might even be full-out stupid, but I don't think perfect exists here, and it's worth trying something here.
Wouldn't Facebook having to pay news agencies for clicks to their articles result in the problem of low quality clickbait style articles/headlines worse? I get the point you're trying to make, but I think the way the government is going about things is a bit silly and doesn't seem apt to make things better. To me it seems like the government fell prey to the lobbying efforts of Bell/Rogers/Telus trying to squeeze more $$$.
Yeah, true. If the definition of "news" here is really as poor as "posted by a "News" site", then you're likely right that that would incentivize much of the same behaviour.
Even still though... even companies like Buzzfeed will occasionally fund "hard hitting journalism". Handing them money blindly like that, though obviously inefficient, may still serve to make more "real journalism" financially viable. And I think there's still people out there with a passion to do that, provided they could survive doing that.
Agreed in general though, even as a first pass at the idea, this is an awkward and subpar stab at it, with some obvious issues.
Isn't Vice going out of business and Buzzfeed dying? Both of them got into the clickbaiting culture war topics and both seemed to fail because of it. I still think real journalism is the way to go but it seems to be falling apart and I don't think this will fix it.
This feels more like a lobbying/corruption filled bill more than anything. The intention doesn't seem to be really to fix things, but more just to make the big corps more money.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what corps stand to make a lot of money here? This sounds like it'll cost the social media networks a fair bit of money, and the benefactors are Canadian news networks, none of which are worth a fortune, as far as I'm aware. Seems to me that Meta would've been lobbying against this a lot harder than any news sites could've afforded to lobby for it. Heck, even news sites seem shaky on it, at least based on the CBC reporter quoted in the article.
Happy to be corrected, I'm just finding it hard to figure out who the "big corps" are that would stand to benefit from this.
Well a lot of the media across Canada is owned by Bell, Rogers, or Shaw. With their current CRTC "connections" and lobbying I'd say they have a lot of power to get their way on these deals. I wouldn't be surprised hearing the CBC not as in favour since they don't need to rely on these sorts of funding sources that these other corporations may be hoping to secure.
Ah, that _is _interesting. Thanks for the heads up, I had no idea!
Yes what is a big company in these times? Google is a trillion dollar company I mean that is absolutely insane. People don't really grasp the vast difference between million and billion and now we have trillion dollar companies.