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.
Doesn’t that “first they came for etc etc” totally apply then? This will definitely lead to news sites targeting smaller social medias then federated social media.
The law targets organizations with significant power imbalance against the news orgs.
That anecdote ends with “Then they came for me, and there was nobody left to speak for me.” The state doing stuff is not inherently bad. The state doing stuff that weakens those who protest injustice, and disperses networks of resistance is. Huge megacorporations will never care about anyone but themselves, because that’s what they’re structurally set up to do. I wouldn’t worry too much about this legislation yet.
