We appear to be standing our ground!
Not my preferred choice of source but NatPo has more detail than some of the alternatives I saw. It includes some numbers as well as comments about the difference between Meta’s and Google’s approaches. Hint: they’re not the same, so there’s already cracks in the effort to make an example out of Canada.
Then all you have to do in order to see it through the other lens is to think content when you see link in this context. We know that the platforms don’t do linking as in
<a href=...>Click here</a>. They all embed titles, summaries, pictures and sometimes whole pages. I think the conversation about linking in this context is a straw man. It’s not about linking. Then overlay how profits are generated around it. The analogies fall apart and the problem emerges. In the end it comes down to profit or wealth redistribution and priorities. For a while money has been flowing away from news and into platforms. We need to shift money back from platforms to news. If the platforms paid reasonable taxes, maybe we could redistribute it from there to the news. Except platforms don’t pay reasonable taxes. In this case it’s either coming out of citizens pockets, a new net subtraction, or it’s gotta come from the platforms’ pockets. We seem to have made the right choice to take it out of the platforms. We’re going about doing that.Mind you, the conversation about the accessibility of quality news content across the classes of society is distinctly separate from this and worth having. Depending on how much we are able to get from the platforms back into the news, we may be able to decrease the cost of access for everyone. If you’re concerned about that, you should be rooting for higher numbers rather than lower.
There isn’t a trivial way to get those without media companies going out of their way to provide the information. If I go over to that article on nationalpost.com, I see multitudes of OpenGraph tags, such as
<meta content="Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram" property="og:title"/><meta content="https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/nationalpost/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Pablo-Rodriguez-1.jpg" property="og:image"/>. OpenGraph, to be clear, is a protocol created by Facebook to standardize how web pages appear on their platform. If National Post wants links to their content to look like your example, that is entirely in their hands. Heck, it’s less work.(Of course, they won’t do that, because that would be stupid. They’d rather make an embarrassing attempt to extort Facebook for free money because they have realized advertising is doomed and they don’t know what to do about it).
Advertising seems to be making tons of money for Facebook. Do you not have a guess why it no longer does for news?
With all the talk about “they’re free to paywall”, are we going to consider market power imbalance here or are we pretending it doesn’t affect these actions?
undefined> They all embed titles, summaries, pictures and sometimes whole pages. I think the conversation about linking in this context is a straw man.
I personally think it is the most dangerous aspect of the law and a major over reach and makes it costly poison for any popular site to link to Canadian news content even without a summary.
Other than CBC, news has always been a subscription / pay service… It seems people are not willing to pay for that now… Other than CBC our taxes SHOULD NOT be going to Bell, Corus, Rogers, Quebecor, double check and note that Canadian monopolies OWN nearly all the news outlets in Canada.
Essentially what you are proposing is Canadians give MORE to these Canadian monopolies both from tax payers and from other businesses (all popular web platforms that link to them as the law is written)
I’m obviously not proposing that. I said in plain language that we should move money from platforms to news, specifically avoiding taking it from Canadians’ pockets.
I see the title and picture on facebook, but I don’t see a summary or the whole page. I see a comment from the publisher, which sometimes gives away the article, but that’s up to the publisher.