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.
You should not have to pay to link anything. That does not mean the content of the link has to be free. However I am not about to pay $10/month each to hundreds of sites. What would make sense to be able to buy views on any site and have a proxy system distributing payment to the sites when an article is read. This would reward good/economic news sources and bad/expensive sources would get little income from this scheme. Importantly, I get to decide how much I am will to pay per month. IHO C-18 is a bad bill imposing a less than ideal solution. The problem is not with Google or Meta, its that the news orgs have not been inovative enough to come up with a solution and have and are lobbying governments to implement bad laws.
