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 actually agree with this law stopping Facebook or Google basically showing the entire article so you never leave facebooks site and facebook makes all the revenue while offloading the costs to serve and create the content to the news organisation. Seems ridiculous and parasitic. I agree just a link is overreach but something had to be done and maybe it can just be scaled back a bit. Making someone else incur the cost to create something you then sell and they have no way to stop you is just morally wrong.
Sure. Then it should also apply to independent media. Which the Canadian bill does not. The Canadian government is picking and chooseing who news media is.
I would be happy for the law to be modified and improved. The first draft isnt always the best. Just a step forward thats all.
This is past the third reading though, it’s far from a first draft .
The law of unintended consequences applies. If they take out links to established media, then what will fill the gap? In the case of some of my family, thinly veiled far-right ‘blogs’ substitute as news at the best of times. If media orgs that have some basis in reality are removed… What’s left?
Those snippets you see are provided by the news organizations. If they think showing those snippets is costing them clicks then they have the power to change the snippets. Those snippets are provided to convince people to click through.
In some cases Google does things like their AMP links which truly do steal clicks and ad revenue, or they’ll parse through a link to provide an answer to your search part way through, or if they show more than the provided snippet. Those are the kinds of things that might be legitimate to target.
Yeah for sure thats what I mean. Anything the news organisations cant control themselves is a no no for me.
It would actually be pretty interesting if we could put them in control of that but in an automated standard way.
Just like there’s the snippets, there could be a thing built into the article that details the cost of doing more than showing the snippets with all the needed details.
Then the bots could parse through the content and big tech could throw their AI at it to decide their own cost benefit analysis and either they show the free content and the site takes its chance at a click through or the consuming site pays the fee to show the extra content and potentially save their user the click for whatever reason.
The news sites could even alter the costs in real time depending on how much traffic they think it would drive or be worth as news unfolds.
