I had the same visceral reaction to this law as most old-school internet dwellers, but I’ve changed my tune. My view now:
Yes, it’s ridiculous to charge someone money for linking to your content, but it’s less ridiculous than the status quo.
We’re at a point where foreign corporations are extracting most of the profit from local journalism simply by hosting links to the content, while the people who actually produce that content at considerable expense are going broke. This situation is the result of those foreign corporations building a virtual monopoly on news by out-competing / crowding out all the old places we were exposed to headlines: from newsstands to flipping through the channels to media homepages to RSS feeds.
And sure, hosting links to those news stories is mutually beneficial, except that almost no one clicks the links. The headline, teaser and photo are scraped and displayed on the third party app, and that’s all anyone cares to look at. We’re all to blame for not clicking, but those same tech companies are especially to blame for fostering this culture of five-second attention spans.
This law will probably not be effective in the short term, and might even backfire due to Facebook’s content blackout. It’s easy for them to give the middle finger to small markets like Australia and Canada.
But major players like California are considering similar laws, and you can bet Facebook will suddenly find they can pay content producers when the alternative is losing the world’s fifth largest economy.
I’m going to keep with the old-school internet dweller opinion on this law.
And sure, hosting links to those news stories is mutually beneficial, except that almost no one clicks the links. The headline, teaser and photo are scraped and displayed on the third party app, and that’s all anyone cares to look at. We’re all to blame for not clicking, but those same tech companies are especially to blame for fostering this culture of five-second attention spans
News organizations have all the control in how their links are displayed. They can opt out of the teaser and photo, etc. They don’t because nobody would click on the link if there wasn’t a photo and teaser. Nobody would read the article at all now if there wasn’t some way to find them – this is a service provided to them. It’s like charging news stands for people reading the headlines as they walk by!
Hating Facebook is one thing but siding with the corporate media monopoly that is using regulatory capture to keep their failing businesses afloat is not the solution.
The only reason foreign corporations are extracting the most profit from journalism is that the price of journalism is so low that the only way anyone can make money is aggregating it together by the millions. Why should I pay for some random person’s opinion when I can just read your opinion for free. I can get real time video of situations from hundreds of people all at the same time. The market has fundamentally changed and it true Canadian tradition, a small monopoly of Canadian corporations have lobbied the government to keep them alive for another quarter. I’m not saying journalism is dead but, in the past, it was mostly profitable because of the monopoly of attention – if you wanted to the read the news, you had maybe 2 local choices that got delivered to you in the morning. Now you’re one click away from everything everywhere.
foreign corporations are extracting most of the profit from local journalism simply by hosting links to the content,
I don’t believe they are getting particularly much revenue from journalism. I think that’s why their reaction to this is just to block the links being posted: it won’t really affect their bottom line. A blip. Even if Cali does it, people will just post memes or screenshots of headlines or w/e.
And sure, hosting links to those news stories is mutually beneficial, except that almost no one clicks the links. The headline, teaser and photo are scraped and displayed on the third party app, and that’s all anyone cares to look at.
Indeed, few of us spend much time reading the news. Especially actual investigative journalism and not just what amounts to entertainment content. Saw an article recently saying that Canadians level of interest in news media is even going down from what was presumably a fairly low baseline (see how easy it is to get by without links?)
I think there is a silver lining to this though: it doesn’t cost that much to make the kind of news that’s important. It’s certainly not free but you mainly need to pay a few talented and driven people enough salary to support them while they doggedly pursue the truth. You don’t need a massive printing press and a delivery fleet like in past. So news doesn’t need to be corporate. News doesn’t need to be Reddit, news can be Lemmy.
If something is happening, those of us who pay attention should be linking to it when it’s important. And should be linking to quality sources.
I live in Toronto, recently some protected lands were going to lose their protection and the circumstances around it were suspect. The most in depth journalism on the topic was this piece from a very small donor-funded org that investigates environmental issues: https://thenarwhal.ca/ford-ontario-greenbelt-cuts-developers/
Indeed, the federal government has an excellent program that supports this model (and that very publication) – it allows news orgs to be recognised as tax-deductible charities if they meet certain criteria, effectively amplifying the impact of those of us who think it’s worth paying for news to exist:
I do value journalism, and I do think more people should care and I think we should be linking to it everywhere we think we might be able to engage our fellow citizens with what’s going on around us.
A for-profit business is seeking profit first. That necessarily distorts journalism. Especially when the business model is based on ads. I’d rather support a smaller, more focused sort of news gathering. And it’s better if more of us donate, they should beholden to a large sampling of the minority of us who think it’s important journalism happens and not to shareholders.
I’d like to support the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail but they have paywalls so I’d have to log in to read them and then they’re associating my reading habits with my identity and selling it to advertisers. That business is gross. Much like what Facebook and Google do. I don’t want to support that. Plus I can’t link people to the paywalled news. And I think it’s important to be able to do that: it’s all the more important to have it there for the few people who will click through and become informed precisely because, as you said, most people won’t. And I don’t see pay-for-links helping; if the platforms eventually cave and start supporting that scheme, won’t it just encourage vapid Buzzfeed style clickbait as they try to get as much link juice as possible?
So I want to pay not for access to the news, but for the news to exist for everyone because I believe it’s important. And I think it would probably be good for society if ad-funded news died. Any other publications I should be supporting and linking to?
True, I do value public broadcasting and support it through my taxes so ya, CBC and TVO. I was mostly just thinking of things I had to opt into paying and brought that up in the larger context that you don’t need a state or a massive corporation to produce quality journalism. And so if our state fails to extract a bailout from American tech companies to satiate our bloated media corps I’m pretty confident we’ll be okay.
I’m not very optimistic about the future state of journalism. The money is gone. Anything that remains will likely be biased. It’s funny that we’ve gone full circle back to the need for a public broadcaster, but here we are.
I don’t believe they are getting particularly much revenue from journalism. I think that’s why their reaction to this is just to block the links being posted: it won’t really affect their bottom line. A blip. Even if Cali does it, people will just post memes or screenshots of headlines or w/e.
They’re ad supported, which means they make more money the longer people spend on their site. If people have to leave their site to read the news, then that’s less time people are on their site which translates into less revenue.
This is a power play, plain and simple. They are doing this to put pressure on the Canadian government to back down.
This is transnational corporations trying to use their control over information to bully a democracy so they can avoid paying taxes.
Question: as someone who lives outside of Canada and wants to keep up with certain news and events, what do I do if this disappears from google search? I am the, apparently rare, person who will search for a topic or browse news, but actually click on the link and read things (I’ve been on fark.com for over 15 years now clicking on links).
Secondarily, does this have broader implications for cultural exports or tourism or anything?
I think the issue is that most people aren’t going to go back to searching a variety of sites manually to see what’s going on, particularly those not living in Canada whom may not be aware of this law to think about getting such a list of other media.
It’s all the old arguments of workers rights, capitalist exploitation and socialist ideas being played all over again from the 1800s.
Millions of workers and writers produce all the content and conduct the most labour to create the content we all consume … yet they see none or very little of the benefit of their work. All there efforts are rewarded with little to no pay to the point where they have to leave their job or go on working with very little return. the ones producing the work eventually leave the work and the next poor Joe who takes his position is then forced to work for even less.
Meanwhile … all the work that is being produced by low paying workers is only benefiting wealthy owners who do nothing but simply claim ownership over everything.
I’m not a communist, nor do I espouse any of their totalitarian ideas of society … but I am a democratic socialist who believes that workers and writers have to be justly compensated, honoured and respected for their work … especially if their work directly contributes to our functioning democracy.
They won’t even for California. And they shouldn’t. News organizations need to figure out how to make money in this system. If all people do is read headlines then don’t put headlines out for free. Put it behind a pay gate and ask Google and Meta to pay for access.
This law is indeed ridiculous and embarrassing. It’s completely unnecessary. But the end result is the same. News sites effectively asked for Google and Meta to pay, and they declined.
That’s business. It’s unfortunate but such is life.
I had the same visceral reaction to this law as most old-school internet dwellers, but I’ve changed my tune. My view now:
Yes, it’s ridiculous to charge someone money for linking to your content, but it’s less ridiculous than the status quo.
We’re at a point where foreign corporations are extracting most of the profit from local journalism simply by hosting links to the content, while the people who actually produce that content at considerable expense are going broke. This situation is the result of those foreign corporations building a virtual monopoly on news by out-competing / crowding out all the old places we were exposed to headlines: from newsstands to flipping through the channels to media homepages to RSS feeds.
And sure, hosting links to those news stories is mutually beneficial, except that almost no one clicks the links. The headline, teaser and photo are scraped and displayed on the third party app, and that’s all anyone cares to look at. We’re all to blame for not clicking, but those same tech companies are especially to blame for fostering this culture of five-second attention spans.
This law will probably not be effective in the short term, and might even backfire due to Facebook’s content blackout. It’s easy for them to give the middle finger to small markets like Australia and Canada.
But major players like California are considering similar laws, and you can bet Facebook will suddenly find they can pay content producers when the alternative is losing the world’s fifth largest economy.
I’m going to keep with the old-school internet dweller opinion on this law.
News organizations have all the control in how their links are displayed. They can opt out of the teaser and photo, etc. They don’t because nobody would click on the link if there wasn’t a photo and teaser. Nobody would read the article at all now if there wasn’t some way to find them – this is a service provided to them. It’s like charging news stands for people reading the headlines as they walk by!
Hating Facebook is one thing but siding with the corporate media monopoly that is using regulatory capture to keep their failing businesses afloat is not the solution.
The only reason foreign corporations are extracting the most profit from journalism is that the price of journalism is so low that the only way anyone can make money is aggregating it together by the millions. Why should I pay for some random person’s opinion when I can just read your opinion for free. I can get real time video of situations from hundreds of people all at the same time. The market has fundamentally changed and it true Canadian tradition, a small monopoly of Canadian corporations have lobbied the government to keep them alive for another quarter. I’m not saying journalism is dead but, in the past, it was mostly profitable because of the monopoly of attention – if you wanted to the read the news, you had maybe 2 local choices that got delivered to you in the morning. Now you’re one click away from everything everywhere.
I don’t believe they are getting particularly much revenue from journalism. I think that’s why their reaction to this is just to block the links being posted: it won’t really affect their bottom line. A blip. Even if Cali does it, people will just post memes or screenshots of headlines or w/e.
Indeed, few of us spend much time reading the news. Especially actual investigative journalism and not just what amounts to entertainment content. Saw an article recently saying that Canadians level of interest in news media is even going down from what was presumably a fairly low baseline (see how easy it is to get by without links?)
I think there is a silver lining to this though: it doesn’t cost that much to make the kind of news that’s important. It’s certainly not free but you mainly need to pay a few talented and driven people enough salary to support them while they doggedly pursue the truth. You don’t need a massive printing press and a delivery fleet like in past. So news doesn’t need to be corporate. News doesn’t need to be Reddit, news can be Lemmy.
If something is happening, those of us who pay attention should be linking to it when it’s important. And should be linking to quality sources.
I live in Toronto, recently some protected lands were going to lose their protection and the circumstances around it were suspect. The most in depth journalism on the topic was this piece from a very small donor-funded org that investigates environmental issues: https://thenarwhal.ca/ford-ontario-greenbelt-cuts-developers/
Indeed, the federal government has an excellent program that supports this model (and that very publication) – it allows news orgs to be recognised as tax-deductible charities if they meet certain criteria, effectively amplifying the impact of those of us who think it’s worth paying for news to exist:
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/charities-giving/other-organizations-that-issue-donation-receipts-qualified-donees/other-qualified-donees-listings/list-registered-journalism-organizations.html
I do value journalism, and I do think more people should care and I think we should be linking to it everywhere we think we might be able to engage our fellow citizens with what’s going on around us.
I don’t especially value corporate manipulation and lobbying which is what I see from things like Postmedia, which owns way too many newspapers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Canada
A for-profit business is seeking profit first. That necessarily distorts journalism. Especially when the business model is based on ads. I’d rather support a smaller, more focused sort of news gathering. And it’s better if more of us donate, they should beholden to a large sampling of the minority of us who think it’s important journalism happens and not to shareholders.
Currently I contribute to: Canadaland, The Local, The Narwhal, and The Tyee. I also pay for The Guardian because they don’t have a paywall.
I’d like to support the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail but they have paywalls so I’d have to log in to read them and then they’re associating my reading habits with my identity and selling it to advertisers. That business is gross. Much like what Facebook and Google do. I don’t want to support that. Plus I can’t link people to the paywalled news. And I think it’s important to be able to do that: it’s all the more important to have it there for the few people who will click through and become informed precisely because, as you said, most people won’t. And I don’t see pay-for-links helping; if the platforms eventually cave and start supporting that scheme, won’t it just encourage vapid Buzzfeed style clickbait as they try to get as much link juice as possible?
So I want to pay not for access to the news, but for the news to exist for everyone because I believe it’s important. And I think it would probably be good for society if ad-funded news died. Any other publications I should be supporting and linking to?
I think you left out CBC. As traditional companies go under I think it’s important we keep CBC as a trusted news source.
True, I do value public broadcasting and support it through my taxes so ya, CBC and TVO. I was mostly just thinking of things I had to opt into paying and brought that up in the larger context that you don’t need a state or a massive corporation to produce quality journalism. And so if our state fails to extract a bailout from American tech companies to satiate our bloated media corps I’m pretty confident we’ll be okay.
I’m not very optimistic about the future state of journalism. The money is gone. Anything that remains will likely be biased. It’s funny that we’ve gone full circle back to the need for a public broadcaster, but here we are.
They’re ad supported, which means they make more money the longer people spend on their site. If people have to leave their site to read the news, then that’s less time people are on their site which translates into less revenue.
This is a power play, plain and simple. They are doing this to put pressure on the Canadian government to back down.
This is transnational corporations trying to use their control over information to bully a democracy so they can avoid paying taxes.
Precisely.
Question: as someone who lives outside of Canada and wants to keep up with certain news and events, what do I do if this disappears from google search? I am the, apparently rare, person who will search for a topic or browse news, but actually click on the link and read things (I’ve been on fark.com for over 15 years now clicking on links).
Secondarily, does this have broader implications for cultural exports or tourism or anything?
Eh… Take your pick?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Canada
I think the issue is that most people aren’t going to go back to searching a variety of sites manually to see what’s going on, particularly those not living in Canada whom may not be aware of this law to think about getting such a list of other media.
It’s all the old arguments of workers rights, capitalist exploitation and socialist ideas being played all over again from the 1800s.
Millions of workers and writers produce all the content and conduct the most labour to create the content we all consume … yet they see none or very little of the benefit of their work. All there efforts are rewarded with little to no pay to the point where they have to leave their job or go on working with very little return. the ones producing the work eventually leave the work and the next poor Joe who takes his position is then forced to work for even less.
Meanwhile … all the work that is being produced by low paying workers is only benefiting wealthy owners who do nothing but simply claim ownership over everything.
I’m not a communist, nor do I espouse any of their totalitarian ideas of society … but I am a democratic socialist who believes that workers and writers have to be justly compensated, honoured and respected for their work … especially if their work directly contributes to our functioning democracy.
They won’t even for California. And they shouldn’t. News organizations need to figure out how to make money in this system. If all people do is read headlines then don’t put headlines out for free. Put it behind a pay gate and ask Google and Meta to pay for access.
This law is indeed ridiculous and embarrassing. It’s completely unnecessary. But the end result is the same. News sites effectively asked for Google and Meta to pay, and they declined.
That’s business. It’s unfortunate but such is life.
Business is also operating in the confines of the laws and oops, it’s not going their way this time! 🤷
Business is also paying taxes, which they don’t, in Canada or the USA (where they have their headquarters)
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/01/amazon-facebook-and-other-tech-giants-paid-almost-100b-less-in-taxes-than-they-claimed-analysis_partner/
So, no, they don’t need you defending them.