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.
I believe in democracy over corporations.
I believe in journalism over social media.
Honestly, look at the state of social media today. The libertarian ideal internet has clearly been a complete failure. The libertarian ideals in the technology field has just been an abdication of responsibility. And some horrible corporations and foreign adversaries have filled in that vacuum.
The old school internet libertarians refuse to accept the reality of this failure. So now we’ve reached the point where massive corporations are using the oligopoly power over information distribution to strong arm democratic countries to avoid having to pay taxes. And out of habit and denial the libertarians take the side of Mark fucking Zuckerberg.
All to desperately cling on to an ideology that’s so obviously been a failure. Painfully obvious.
When your ideology demands you defend a massive corporation trying to strong arm a democracy to avoid paying taxes, maybe you should consider the possibility that your ideology might be flawed?
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.
21 An operator must participate in the bargaining process with the eligible news business or group of eligible news businesses that initiated it.
39 An arbitration panel must dismiss any offer that, in its opinion,
(b) is not in the public interest because the offer would be highly likely to result in serious detriment to the provision of news content to persons in Canada; or
© is inconsistent with the purposes of enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contributing to its sustainability.
Sounds a lot like the named companies aren’t even allowed to say “no I don’t want to display links at that cost anymore.”. And it includes indexing for searching, even if you only included the headline with no preview link, or allowed people to like/upvoat posts with links to news sites in them.
So you have to negotiate if named, and the news sites reject your offer, you go to arbitration, and of the arbiter doesn’t like your offer (and by the text “I don’t want to show news anymore” MUST be rejected) then it goes to whatever the news corps offer was.
If it just said “hey, we decided your previews generate too much value and violate copyrights, you need to pay royalties or else show the bare links” well, that would be dumb but fair. But being forced to transact seems bad.
Sounds a lot like the named companies aren’t even allowed to say “no I don’t want to display links at that cost anymore.”
Are you saying news sites should be able to prevent linking to their site altogether? Seems like that would be giving too much power to the News sites, and then there would be complications if a user on the social media site were to link to their site somehow. What would the penalty be if a social media site linked to a news site that prohibited them from doing so?
Also doesn’t seem like something a news site would want to do.
No the opposite. Those sites (G/FB) will be forced to negotiate with the news sites over how much money they now owe them, and the tech companies can’t say “no I’m out I don’t want to pay X” as that seems to violate the rules passed to the arbiters saying they must reject an offer if it means Canadians get less news.
So meta pulling links is gonna get contested, and they will be forced to hand over a bag of cash to pay for all the linking they have done.
If they don’t want to pay, they don’t post news. Which is exactly what facebook is doing right now.
Same deal as for me and you really. If a news site charges a subscription I either pay the subscription and can see the news. Or I don’t pay it and don’t get the news.
Even if it’s ad supported, most news sites require me to disable the ad blocker to see the article. I can decide to disable the ad blocker and see the article (and they get paid that way), or I close the tab and not see it (they don’t get paid, but I don’t get the article).
Why do you think a massive corporation shouldn’t have to pay for the things me and you have to pay for?
Do you agree that indepedent Canadian media should also get paid?
I don’t think they should.
Most independent media is just worthless opinion columns, political activism made to look like news, and on some occasions just straight up disinformation.
Sure some of it may be ok, but if you try to write legislation that comes out as “all left leaning independent media gets money, all the right wing independent media can go pound sand” it’s just the government trying to use legislation to promote their party. That’s a really bad precedent.
So as much as I’d like to see the good independent journalism funded by this, it doesn’t seem feasible to do that without also funding disinformation.
My opinion on the corporate media that is the only one funded by this is the same as what you’ve just said. Just in a rich get richer approach to media in Canada. That’s (one of) the big issues I have with this bill.
Yes I understand a lot of people feel this way. But the fact is the News media is being starved out by social media.
What you’re terming as “corporate media” is actually media that has journalistic standards. with independent media, that’s not always the case.
And facts are facts. If a newspaper owned by the Thomson group, Bell media, Rogers, or the CBC quotes Justin Trudeau, or says that someone has been arrested on a charge or reports on legislation that has passed parliament, those are things that happened. What I’m seeing is a lot of people spending a lot of time reading opinions and thinking they’re informed on the news while being completely ignorant of the basic facts.
We can’t even agree on reality anymore because many people aren’t aware of even the most basic facts around a story. If everyone in the country took even five minutes to get the facts from what you term “corporate media” we’d be way better off then we are now. We’d at least be able to have discussions about actual facts.
The problem I see is that much of the new is heavily slanted with inflammatory language. And I’m sure that’s nothing new - that’s how newspapers work. They have a story they want to tell.
But when reading comprehension is on the decline, then these stories aren’t understood, regardless of whether they’re basic reporting on the facts or a straight up opinion columnist. It’s great to say that if we could all understand the basic facts then we’d be fine, but the basic fact of it is that we can get the same basic facts, but disagree about the why and how of those facts.
Easy example: for decades, we’ve had proof that the climate has been changing. That fact, most people are aware of and agree with. But a surprisingly large number of people will disagree with the why, and claim its because of natural temperature swings and humans aren’t really impacting it. I am pretty firmly the other way, but I’ve had these arguments with people, and even after showing them data like this XKCD, they refuse to understand or change their minds/actions.
Yeah they certainly have a gap in terms of science reporting. They reported on global warming as a debate, because the newsroom was dominated by arts majors, poli sci types.
But it has improved somewhat.
In recent times it’s been the independent media that reported the pandemic as a debate while most of mainstream media didn’t. There were still significant gaps, to be sure, but most of mainstream media reported on the pandemic much better than most of independent media did.
I have seen worse behaviour and bias from corporate media than independent. I think we perhaps have very different pictures of what this means.
My 20 years of seeing people denigrated as “bloggers” while opinion columnists are platformed and not held accountable hasn’t made me feel good about the information coming from corporate media.
And yeah we’re in a tough spot. We need much better discussion tools. I don’t think the CRTC is the right entity to do a good job here.
The CRTC is never the right entity. But since there’s no other entity that can do this kind of thing, they end up with the job.
Yeah the prominence of opinion is a problem everywhere. But just filter out that stuff. But I find when I do that there’s some articles left on mainstream sites. When I do the same for indy sites, there’s basically nothing there.
Journalism costs money. There’s only enough money there for there to be just a few businesses to have actual journalism. Those sites will inevitably be labelled as mainstream an biased by alternative sites.
I’ve yet to see any alternative to mainstream media that isn’t just political activism that’s making on like it’s news.
