6 ms·

Meta starts process to end news access in Canada over law on paying publishers

42 points by acecreamu 3y ago

gumballindie 3y ago
This is excellent news. For one, there will be a significant drop in fear mongering click baiting news, and then news publishers will be starved of traffic. The industry needs a hard reset. Would love for this to happen in the UK as well.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > For one, there will be a significant drop in fear mongering click baiting news. The industry needs a hard reset. While most news orgs need schooling, what a hard reset typically means is some action that would expand the growing news vacuum absolutely. What we see filling the existing vacuum is worse than worthless content. It is patently false content (often posing as local news), specifically crafted to advance harm-based agendas. That would seem to indicate a hard reset isn't the way forward.
- tredre3 3y ago
  > For one, there will be a significant drop in fear mongering click baiting news This will do no such thing. News from international orgs (just as capable, if not more, of clickbait and bias) will still be shown to Canadians.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
Rephrased: Meta starts process to leave Canadian news sites alone (eg: stop scraping sites for content). This has nothing to do with our access to news sites in Canada. Longer version: Meta has been copying content from Canadian news sites, to republish on it's own sites. News sites liked this because it referred free eyeballs & traffic to their sites. Canadian news biz got Gov to write a law. The law forces some platforms to pay cash if they scrape news (and send free traffic/users to the site). Meta is fine with sending free traffic but is opting out of sending free cash too.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  > Rephrased: Meta starts process to leave Canadian news sites alone (eg: stop scraping sites for content). Not sure what your purpose here is but when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL. It doesn't copy the article verbatim into feeds as you have described. Now it will just push through links as links. That seems fine as well. I like the fact that you can present or not present content, for whatever terms are negotiated.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > Not sure what your purpose here is To illustrate that a platform that withdraws from republishing news content doesn't end our news access. > but when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL This doesn't seem transformative to my point. Could you expound a bit?
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      They aren't inserting the bodies of the articles into the feed. It is like when I hit a paywall site and they tell me what I could get if I just paid for the subscription. If they were scraping complete articles and re-publishing those, that would be a totally different thing.
      - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
        >when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. That's the content of news articles. They were scraping content for republication and now they're not. From Meta: in order to comply with Bill C-18, passed today in Parliament, content from news outlets, including news publishers and broadcasters, will no longer be available to people accessing our platforms in Canada > Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL. They aren't inserting the bodies of the articles into the feed. That's how links are supposed to be and reflects what a well functioning internet looks like. I'm not saying that to be a techno-purist. I'm saying it's the most normal, usual and predicable way to handle a link. There's not a thing wrong with it. > It is like when I hit a paywall site and they tell me what I could get if I just paid for the subscription. I can't agree. Having 2% less choices isn't similar to having no choice at all. If Facebook doesn't offer the 50th copy of a news story, you still have 49 other sites that do (as well as the source). If the story is paywalled, your options are ~none.
dsir 3y ago
People in support of this need to consider how this type of legislation affects the integrity of the internet. This bill is not about supporting independent media like they claim. This is first and foremost a link tax, and the result of it is damaging to free press. Independent media sources depend on traffic from social media platforms to function. They themselves are often the ones sharing the links to their own content to drive traffic and readership from in which they monetize through ads. Furthermore, many of these local publishers leverage their social media following to share content on behalf of other local businesses through sponsored articles and posts. The Canadian government playing strong man here when repeatedly warned of the outcome is putting independent media companies in serious jeopardy of remaining solvent. Meta and Google are in the right here, and I hope they continue to stand their ground. If they cave on this issue, it sets a terrible precedent that jeopardizes the health of the internet as we know it. Companies should not have to pay the source whenever a link is shared on their platforms. It's just backwards. If you are talking about situations where they are scraping and displaying the contents of an article, that is a different issue, and seemingly not one that is the primary target of this bill.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Newspapers existed before social media. They will exist after social media deplatforms them. Big Tech should not be able to hold the integrity of the Internet hostage.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    News, even if it's only headlines, has value. Google knows this. If the news headlines had no value, Google wouldn't have launched Google News in the first place. Try scraping Google's content as a trillion-dollar company and see how long that lasts.
    - falcor84 3y ago
      What's "Google's content" in this context?
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
Platforms copy news stories because news sites explicitly allow it. News sites can revoke platform access at any time - and don't.
Gunax 3y ago
I have skim read a bunch of articles on this, and I still cannot understand what is actually being charged for and what this law mandates. I am trying to understand whether this charges for copying of news, or just linking to it. It seems to be implied that the content is being copied. But news is already copyrightable. Why were existing copyright protections not sufficient? Or does this law actually change for links? And what about users sharing links? So if I just send a facebook friend a link to a newspaper, does the newspaper receive money for that? Does Google need to pay for indexing news sites?
- dsir 3y ago
  This law is a link tax. It means the government wants Meta and Google to pay every single time a link to a Canadian news source is shared on their platform (from what I understand, including even in private messages to friends). As far as I'm aware, it will also apply to Google in that they will also need to pay to index/show links to Canadian news in their search results like you described.
  - soultrees 3y ago
    Which is hilarious because imagine a news site not being able to publish on google or Facebook. Short-sighted at best. Goodbye news site.
    - reaperducer 3y ago
      Short-sighted at best. Goodbye news site. The news sites already tried it Google's way for more than a decade, and it isn't working for them. It only works for Google. As someone clearly entrenched in the tech echo chamber, it will come as a surprise for you to learn that there are many news organizations that do not give their content away for free on the internet. Some have paywalls. Some require paid apps. Some are -shudder- only available as dead trees. Many of them are thriving. My wife pays upwards of $2,000/year for a publication that is not available in any form on the internet. It has offices and reporters in a dozen cities around the world, and continues to grow. It, and others like it, don't need to suckle at the teat of Google for pennies.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
Mediocre Canada once again focusing on the wrong things. Solve your housing and healthcare crisis instead of focusing on nonsense.
- ulrashida 3y ago
  Or, you know, function as a government that can tackle multiple issues simultaneously. With previous comment gems like "Canada's healthcare is so bad that if you are not immediately dying, you get no healthcare whatsoever" it's clear that you're not intending to be taken seriously.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    The truth is now a joke in Canada so I wouldn't expect otherwise.
ryanchoi51 3y ago
There is an election coming up in the next two years and this is the Liberal government’s preemptive effort to control and limit the broadcast of news.

42 points by acecreamu 3y ago

This is excellent news. For one, there will be a significant drop in fear mongering click baiting news, and then news publishers will be starved of traffic. The industry needs a hard reset. Would love for this to happen in the UK as well.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> For one, there will be a significant drop in fear mongering click baiting news. The industry needs a hard reset. While most news orgs need schooling, what a hard reset typically means is some action that would expand the growing news vacuum absolutely. What we see filling the existing vacuum is worse than worthless content. It is patently false content (often posing as local news), specifically crafted to advance harm-based agendas. That would seem to indicate a hard reset isn't the way forward.
tredre3 3y ago
> For one, there will be a significant drop in fear mongering click baiting news This will do no such thing. News from international orgs (just as capable, if not more, of clickbait and bias) will still be shown to Canadians.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago

Rephrased: Meta starts process to leave Canadian news sites alone (eg: stop scraping sites for content). This has nothing to do with our access to news sites in Canada. Longer version: Meta has been copying content from Canadian news sites, to republish on it's own sites. News sites liked this because it referred free eyeballs & traffic to their sites. Canadian news biz got Gov to write a law. The law forces some platforms to pay cash if they scrape news (and send free traffic/users to the site). Meta is fine with sending free traffic but is opting out of sending free cash too.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
> Rephrased: Meta starts process to leave Canadian news sites alone (eg: stop scraping sites for content). Not sure what your purpose here is but when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL. It doesn't copy the article verbatim into feeds as you have described. Now it will just push through links as links. That seems fine as well. I like the fact that you can present or not present content, for whatever terms are negotiated.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > Not sure what your purpose here is To illustrate that a platform that withdraws from republishing news content doesn't end our news access. > but when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL This doesn't seem transformative to my point. Could you expound a bit?
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    They aren't inserting the bodies of the articles into the feed. It is like when I hit a paywall site and they tell me what I could get if I just paid for the subscription. If they were scraping complete articles and re-publishing those, that would be a totally different thing.
    - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      >when you share an article on facebook, you usually get "the title", a leading picture, and occasionally a summary. That's the content of news articles. They were scraping content for republication and now they're not. From Meta: in order to comply with Bill C-18, passed today in Parliament, content from news outlets, including news publishers and broadcasters, will no longer be available to people accessing our platforms in Canada > Now you'll just get an unprocessed URL. They aren't inserting the bodies of the articles into the feed. That's how links are supposed to be and reflects what a well functioning internet looks like. I'm not saying that to be a techno-purist. I'm saying it's the most normal, usual and predicable way to handle a link. There's not a thing wrong with it. > It is like when I hit a paywall site and they tell me what I could get if I just paid for the subscription. I can't agree. Having 2% less choices isn't similar to having no choice at all. If Facebook doesn't offer the 50th copy of a news story, you still have 49 other sites that do (as well as the source). If the story is paywalled, your options are ~none.

dsir 3y ago

People in support of this need to consider how this type of legislation affects the integrity of the internet. This bill is not about supporting independent media like they claim. This is first and foremost a link tax, and the result of it is damaging to free press. Independent media sources depend on traffic from social media platforms to function. They themselves are often the ones sharing the links to their own content to drive traffic and readership from in which they monetize through ads. Furthermore, many of these local publishers leverage their social media following to share content on behalf of other local businesses through sponsored articles and posts. The Canadian government playing strong man here when repeatedly warned of the outcome is putting independent media companies in serious jeopardy of remaining solvent. Meta and Google are in the right here, and I hope they continue to stand their ground. If they cave on this issue, it sets a terrible precedent that jeopardizes the health of the internet as we know it. Companies should not have to pay the source whenever a link is shared on their platforms. It's just backwards. If you are talking about situations where they are scraping and displaying the contents of an article, that is a different issue, and seemingly not one that is the primary target of this bill.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Newspapers existed before social media. They will exist after social media deplatforms them. Big Tech should not be able to hold the integrity of the Internet hostage.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  News, even if it's only headlines, has value. Google knows this. If the news headlines had no value, Google wouldn't have launched Google News in the first place. Try scraping Google's content as a trillion-dollar company and see how long that lasts.
  - falcor84 3y ago
    What's "Google's content" in this context?

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago

Platforms copy news stories because news sites explicitly allow it. News sites can revoke platform access at any time - and don't.

Gunax 3y ago

I have skim read a bunch of articles on this, and I still cannot understand what is actually being charged for and what this law mandates. I am trying to understand whether this charges for copying of news, or just linking to it. It seems to be implied that the content is being copied. But news is already copyrightable. Why were existing copyright protections not sufficient? Or does this law actually change for links? And what about users sharing links? So if I just send a facebook friend a link to a newspaper, does the newspaper receive money for that? Does Google need to pay for indexing news sites?

dsir 3y ago
This law is a link tax. It means the government wants Meta and Google to pay every single time a link to a Canadian news source is shared on their platform (from what I understand, including even in private messages to friends). As far as I'm aware, it will also apply to Google in that they will also need to pay to index/show links to Canadian news in their search results like you described.
- soultrees 3y ago
  Which is hilarious because imagine a news site not being able to publish on google or Facebook. Short-sighted at best. Goodbye news site.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    Short-sighted at best. Goodbye news site. The news sites already tried it Google's way for more than a decade, and it isn't working for them. It only works for Google. As someone clearly entrenched in the tech echo chamber, it will come as a surprise for you to learn that there are many news organizations that do not give their content away for free on the internet. Some have paywalls. Some require paid apps. Some are -shudder- only available as dead trees. Many of them are thriving. My wife pays upwards of $2,000/year for a publication that is not available in any form on the internet. It has offices and reporters in a dozen cities around the world, and continues to grow. It, and others like it, don't need to suckle at the teat of Google for pennies.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

Mediocre Canada once again focusing on the wrong things. Solve your housing and healthcare crisis instead of focusing on nonsense.

ulrashida 3y ago
Or, you know, function as a government that can tackle multiple issues simultaneously. With previous comment gems like "Canada's healthcare is so bad that if you are not immediately dying, you get no healthcare whatsoever" it's clear that you're not intending to be taken seriously.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  The truth is now a joke in Canada so I wouldn't expect otherwise.

ryanchoi51 3y ago

There is an election coming up in the next two years and this is the Liberal government’s preemptive effort to control and limit the broadcast of news.