After watching this play out in Australia, it doesn't feel like there are many new arguments to be made. It's just sad to watch.
As a Canadian, it bothers me that our politicians are willing to jump through mental hoops to avoid considering the most obvious solutions.
If news companies don't want people accessing their content through the web, shouldn't they simply take down their web sites? If they aren't willing to do that (because, say, the benefits outweigh the costs), then perhaps this isn't an issue that warrants legislation...
The problem here is that people are not, at scale, hitting the news company website. Users of social media platforms see headlines, sometimes an alt text/description followed with a picture, and that is it. They start jumping to a discussion on said topic with whoever posted the news piece.
People are not reading the articles in full (and therefore being presented with ads, or a subscription paywall), but they are engaging on the social media platform that in turn is making money with ads and other features thanks to the engagement produced by the shared news article.
News companies are being cannibalized by social media companies who get all the engagement (and ad revenue), while people at scale are not signing up for paywalls or even visiting the news site to read the article in full.
I believe this will hopefully make news companies get back to a profitable business, while making conversations on social media platforms a lot healthier.
> If news companies don't want people accessing their content through the web, shouldn't they simply take down their web sites?
That's clearly not the issue. The news companies obviously do want people to access their sites over the web and pay for the privilege. This argument is both incorrect and disingenuous.
The problem is that search and social media companies have been permitted to appropriate and monetize other people's content in different ways. They're parasitic. I don't think that links are really the problem and I'm not surprised that the Liberals have missed the forest for the trees. They do that. The real issue is providing the significant part of the content without requiring people to go to the actual site.
I scanned through the bill (at third reading [1]). On the face of it, it seems to be intended to "level the playing field" between powerful search engines and social media platforms and Canadian news organizations, allegedly because "there is a significant bargaining power imbalance" between the platforms and the journalists.
But if you have lived in Canada for any length of time, you will know that this is a country ruled by a small number of highly profitable corporations, which are largely controlled by a few wealthy families. For instance:
- Corus Entertainment is 80% controlled by the family of JR Shaw.
- Rogers Communications is controlled by the family of Ted Rogers (via a trust)
- Quebecor is controlled by Pierre Péladeau
Indeed, only BCE (the company that owns Bell Canada) is truly a diversely controlled public corporation.
So really, this bill could be considered as the government acting to protect the interests of three wealthy Canadian families.
Good. Payment for links is a really dumb policy, and if it works for news it will leech into other areas until the internet is a minefield of tolls and taxes for anyone who wants to aggregate information in a useful way -- including sites like HN and Wikipedia.
Seems like the news companies are shooting themselves in the foot, but it sounds good to me.
I would love a world where google and facebook are full of links to primary sources instead of news articles.
Imagine a world where you search "supreme court decision X", "California covid policy", or "FDIC action today" and the top result is the responsible agency statement followed by blogs.
Under C-18 it also includes "indexing", and Google has indicated they will also remove them from search results, this isn't just shooting in the foot, its suicide.
I would love a world where google and facebook are full of links to primary sources instead of news articles.
That's great if you have time to read whatever it is and/or have the knowledge to parse through the language. Most folks aren't going to read the paper nor the overall decision. Time constraints, stress, and simply not being educated in the field (or understanding legal terms) keep folks from doing this.
On top of that, there are definitely times that the news is the primary source. Where else are you going to learn about war, drought, weather, protests, food recalls, and other such things? You'll probably find weather, but nothing on protests. Sure, you can go to "sources", but you have to actively find them.
News might not be the same as it was, but it isn't like it doesn't still have a use.
I'd really like to have rules about headlines/reporting accurately portraying things, but that's a conversation for another time.
Tech companies said the same in Australia. They are all now paying. Because as soon as their ability to bully content companies due to their monopoly scale is taken away, turns out they still making a ton of money scraping news content, even if they have to pay for it now.
I think that is highly wishful thinking. In reality the links will just go to misinformation sites that are not on the up-and-up and thus not classified as actual news sources.
Rupert Murdoch literally forced google and facebook to pay him money for directing traffic to his sites.
> Imagine a world where you search "supreme court decision X", "California covid policy", or "FDIC action today" and the top result is the responsible agency statement followed by blogs.
That would be ideal but ultimately, the social media companies always cave. Shows you the power of news companies and what they truly are when they can bully the likes of apple, google, facebook, microsoft, etc.
You would think that news publishers like news corp or the nytimes or cnn are no match for the tech giants. But history has proven otherwise.
Over here (New Zealand) the newspaper websites never link to anywhere. Especially not the webpage a story is talking about. Pictures get grabbed off websites[1] and credited to "Supplied".
This seems to mean that fewer Canadians will be engaging on Facebook, and that news articles from outlets that meet the official standards of Facebook and the government will have a smaller audience.
In terms of improving the quality of public discourse, how is this not win-win?
I don't get people who don't understand www make these laws. The concept of linking something is core to the idea of web. It is beautiful and useful and no one should need to pay for adding an hyperlink.
If media publications want others to not get access to the content, they can choose to not add OG tags or just not let the Google or social media bots scrape the information.
It's not about not understanding the web or the concept of linking. It's a reaction to a fundamental way that users are engaging with content.
User behavior has changed online, people are conditioned to tiktok / twitter length information snips, having off the cuff reactions, being the first to be outraged, etc.
It used to be that if someone linked something the BULK of the people who saw that link and were interested would click it and if they wanted to engage, they likely engaged on the site hosting the content first... now the bulk to the people don't click the link to read and instead engage only on their social media platform of choice.
This leads to:
* Increasingly divisive click bait titles
* Less informed populace (although they FEEL more informed)
* Echo chambers where people get re-enforced on their view of the TITLE (not content) because they are sharing and commenting with likeminded people rather than getting opposing opinions on the source website.
Not saying this bill is the solution but I disagree that it's being considered because people don't understand how linking on the web works.
Oh no. Users will have to interact with content other than largely low-quality, reposted, copied news articles. This will surely be the downfall of general public discourse online, as social media sites simply don't have a purpose beyond resharing news.
Good riddance. News sites lose, facebook loses, this feels like a net gain for sanity online.
Yes, exactly my first thought. Too many people get their news from FB headlines.
There was a user here who said something about people reading an obviously unresearched news article in a newspaper, knowing it is saying bullcrap BUT kept reading other pieces from that paper. Because one bad article doesn't make the whole newspaper worthless.
Find yourself a couple of newspapers and read them. Scan the front page. Get a wholer picture of the news. It's sad really printed newspapers have vanished so extensively.
Meanwhile on FB, people read a headline and that's it.
It's actually a bit concerning that I am unable to find any details on the proposed Online News Act. Will HN or Wikipedia be designated as digital platforms? Are digital platforms allowed to link to non-Canadian news sources? What are the enforcement mechanisms for web sites with no Canadian operations?
How stupid and self-defeating. Sharing links with your friends is the best way to get free advertising for your newspaper. Denying it will cut the revenue from newspapers, and I hope they all die from their short-sightedness. They may think I'll turn around and subscribe, but I'll just forget about them entirely.
Didn't they say the same thing to Australia when they tabled their version of this bill? And then did not Facebook cave? How is this statement at all credible in light of this?
The bill seems rediculous. Imagine the non internet version where you weren't allowed to discuss the days headlines with a friend without buying the paper.
The great forces of those interested in suppressing the spread of news and those interested in being paid for their stories to be read are pretty much insurmountable but there is a way past this that neither will like: Simply deliver their conclusions, reasoning, mistakes, and an accurate report through Fair Use, &c.
I wouldn't be surprised if the benefactors of this tripe are even more upset about that. Maybe they will take the uphill fight and challenge fair use, and so on and so on. The foundation they stand on will evaporate beneath them over time and they'll rely on lobbying and ever more pretentious foundations than they had before.
We all wonder how the newsrooms and newspapers of yesteryear were so well funded and so able to nail an absolute home run in a time long gone but the answer is right in front of us. So much of the "news" is just a conduit of public relations, from the advertisers and worse, straight to the audience. At the same time, so much news made by actual reporters is not great for advertisers, the government, important people, etal.
There are absolutely answers but nobody wants to pay for them with money or other means.
Allowing quotes from news or summary re-wording of articles (which are pretty darn hard to prohibit) without allowing URLs to sources... is not so great for reliability and trustworthiness and fact-checking of news shared online.
I get what they are trying to do. I don't think there's a way to do it that isn't going to make everything much worse.
I'm going to say it: news articles are bad (and always have been) and AI will make it better.
The problem is that they usually provide too much context, or not nearly enough. So you either get bored reading it, or don't have the right information to know what's really going on. ie, it's not personalized.
Let's take the stuff going on with SVB right now. Your typical news article is going to start with new information, provide some additional context briefing the reader on how it happened, then go further into depth on what the new info its providing, or just ramble on with additional filler. But the reader doesn't know if its going to actually provide more useful info to them. And that's an actually interesting and complex story. How many news articles do you come across thats pretty much all filler, especially on social media?
AI would make articles interactive. "Tell more more about fractional banking", "does the Fed's statement mean this is a bailout?", "what does this mean for the broader economy?", "what are economists/politicians saying about the government's actions?" are all questions you could ask and get reasonable responses.
[+] [-] tobyjsullivan|3 years ago|reply
As a Canadian, it bothers me that our politicians are willing to jump through mental hoops to avoid considering the most obvious solutions.
If news companies don't want people accessing their content through the web, shouldn't they simply take down their web sites? If they aren't willing to do that (because, say, the benefits outweigh the costs), then perhaps this isn't an issue that warrants legislation...
[+] [-] brunoborges|3 years ago|reply
People are not reading the articles in full (and therefore being presented with ads, or a subscription paywall), but they are engaging on the social media platform that in turn is making money with ads and other features thanks to the engagement produced by the shared news article.
News companies are being cannibalized by social media companies who get all the engagement (and ad revenue), while people at scale are not signing up for paywalls or even visiting the news site to read the article in full.
I believe this will hopefully make news companies get back to a profitable business, while making conversations on social media platforms a lot healthier.
[+] [-] ipcress_file|3 years ago|reply
That's clearly not the issue. The news companies obviously do want people to access their sites over the web and pay for the privilege. This argument is both incorrect and disingenuous.
The problem is that search and social media companies have been permitted to appropriate and monetize other people's content in different ways. They're parasitic. I don't think that links are really the problem and I'm not surprised that the Liberals have missed the forest for the trees. They do that. The real issue is providing the significant part of the content without requiring people to go to the actual site.
[+] [-] andrei_says_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wstrange|3 years ago|reply
Their business model is under stress because of the internet. Link taxes won't fix this and they set a terrible precedent.
Quoting from Candaland[0]. "In Australia, an estimated 90 per cent of negotiated revenues flowed to the three largest media companies."
That hardly bodes well for independent journalism. This is just a shakedown.
[0] https://www.canadaland.com/canadas-online-news-act-must-be-t...
[+] [-] ttul|3 years ago|reply
But if you have lived in Canada for any length of time, you will know that this is a country ruled by a small number of highly profitable corporations, which are largely controlled by a few wealthy families. For instance:
- Corus Entertainment is 80% controlled by the family of JR Shaw. - Rogers Communications is controlled by the family of Ted Rogers (via a trust) - Quebecor is controlled by Pierre Péladeau
Indeed, only BCE (the company that owns Bell Canada) is truly a diversely controlled public corporation.
So really, this bill could be considered as the government acting to protect the interests of three wealthy Canadian families.
[1] https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/third-r...
[+] [-] twblalock|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|3 years ago|reply
I would love a world where google and facebook are full of links to primary sources instead of news articles.
Imagine a world where you search "supreme court decision X", "California covid policy", or "FDIC action today" and the top result is the responsible agency statement followed by blogs.
[+] [-] choilive|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badRNG|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|3 years ago|reply
That's great if you have time to read whatever it is and/or have the knowledge to parse through the language. Most folks aren't going to read the paper nor the overall decision. Time constraints, stress, and simply not being educated in the field (or understanding legal terms) keep folks from doing this.
On top of that, there are definitely times that the news is the primary source. Where else are you going to learn about war, drought, weather, protests, food recalls, and other such things? You'll probably find weather, but nothing on protests. Sure, you can go to "sources", but you have to actively find them.
News might not be the same as it was, but it isn't like it doesn't still have a use.
I'd really like to have rules about headlines/reporting accurately portraying things, but that's a conversation for another time.
[+] [-] 908B64B197|3 years ago|reply
However, traffic originating from Facebook has to represent a sizeable portion of incoming traffic for news site.
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThePowerOfFuet|3 years ago|reply
I would love a world where Facebook doesn't exist, and Google is but one player in a healthy search ecosystem.
A boy can dream.
[+] [-] tensor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brwck|3 years ago|reply
No. They are using their political power to extort money from social media companies.
"Facebook to pay News Corp for content in Australia".
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56410335
Rupert Murdoch literally forced google and facebook to pay him money for directing traffic to his sites.
> Imagine a world where you search "supreme court decision X", "California covid policy", or "FDIC action today" and the top result is the responsible agency statement followed by blogs.
That would be ideal but ultimately, the social media companies always cave. Shows you the power of news companies and what they truly are when they can bully the likes of apple, google, facebook, microsoft, etc.
You would think that news publishers like news corp or the nytimes or cnn are no match for the tech giants. But history has proven otherwise.
[+] [-] abigail95|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slyall|3 years ago|reply
[1] - Loophole in copyright laws for reporting
[+] [-] motohagiography|3 years ago|reply
In terms of improving the quality of public discourse, how is this not win-win?
[+] [-] CivBase|3 years ago|reply
I'd expect most users to continue what they were doing before, but now their feed of headlines will come exclusively from international sources.
I doubt I'd engage less with HN if they banned articles from US companies.
[+] [-] actuator|3 years ago|reply
If media publications want others to not get access to the content, they can choose to not add OG tags or just not let the Google or social media bots scrape the information.
[+] [-] monkeywork|3 years ago|reply
User behavior has changed online, people are conditioned to tiktok / twitter length information snips, having off the cuff reactions, being the first to be outraged, etc.
It used to be that if someone linked something the BULK of the people who saw that link and were interested would click it and if they wanted to engage, they likely engaged on the site hosting the content first... now the bulk to the people don't click the link to read and instead engage only on their social media platform of choice.
This leads to:
* Increasingly divisive click bait titles * Less informed populace (although they FEEL more informed) * Echo chambers where people get re-enforced on their view of the TITLE (not content) because they are sharing and commenting with likeminded people rather than getting opposing opinions on the source website.
Not saying this bill is the solution but I disagree that it's being considered because people don't understand how linking on the web works.
[+] [-] thefurdrake|3 years ago|reply
Good riddance. News sites lose, facebook loses, this feels like a net gain for sanity online.
[+] [-] drooopy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sourcecodeplz|3 years ago|reply
There was a user here who said something about people reading an obviously unresearched news article in a newspaper, knowing it is saying bullcrap BUT kept reading other pieces from that paper. Because one bad article doesn't make the whole newspaper worthless.
Find yourself a couple of newspapers and read them. Scan the front page. Get a wholer picture of the news. It's sad really printed newspapers have vanished so extensively.
Meanwhile on FB, people read a headline and that's it.
[+] [-] wolpoli|3 years ago|reply
I wonder if the lack of detail is intentional.
[+] [-] bentcorner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peanuty1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blindriver|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HappySweeney|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaltekk|3 years ago|reply
> the experience in Australia was that [Facebook's] removal [of news link sharing] had little impact on user engagement.
[+] [-] clouddrover|3 years ago|reply
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56165015
And Facebook knowingly and grubbily caused extra chaos as part of their effort to get their way:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-deliberately-caused-ha...
[+] [-] bawolff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmidwestranger|3 years ago|reply
I wouldn't be surprised if the benefactors of this tripe are even more upset about that. Maybe they will take the uphill fight and challenge fair use, and so on and so on. The foundation they stand on will evaporate beneath them over time and they'll rely on lobbying and ever more pretentious foundations than they had before.
We all wonder how the newsrooms and newspapers of yesteryear were so well funded and so able to nail an absolute home run in a time long gone but the answer is right in front of us. So much of the "news" is just a conduit of public relations, from the advertisers and worse, straight to the audience. At the same time, so much news made by actual reporters is not great for advertisers, the government, important people, etal.
There are absolutely answers but nobody wants to pay for them with money or other means.
[+] [-] nradov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tensor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwinnski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|3 years ago|reply
I get what they are trying to do. I don't think there's a way to do it that isn't going to make everything much worse.
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|3 years ago|reply
Media: "You have to pay us to link to us now!"
Tech: "Fine, then I guess we won't link to you."
Media: shocked_pikachu_face.jpg
[+] [-] chihuahua|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baron816|3 years ago|reply
The problem is that they usually provide too much context, or not nearly enough. So you either get bored reading it, or don't have the right information to know what's really going on. ie, it's not personalized.
Let's take the stuff going on with SVB right now. Your typical news article is going to start with new information, provide some additional context briefing the reader on how it happened, then go further into depth on what the new info its providing, or just ramble on with additional filler. But the reader doesn't know if its going to actually provide more useful info to them. And that's an actually interesting and complex story. How many news articles do you come across thats pretty much all filler, especially on social media?
AI would make articles interactive. "Tell more more about fractional banking", "does the Fed's statement mean this is a bailout?", "what does this mean for the broader economy?", "what are economists/politicians saying about the government's actions?" are all questions you could ask and get reasonable responses.
[+] [-] hedora|3 years ago|reply
With AI, propagandists will be able to feed you personalized disinformation in complete privacy.
If you think I’m overly pessimistic, recall what happened with Cambridge Analytics.
[+] [-] user3939382|3 years ago|reply
If all major corporate media and corporate social media companies disappeared tomorrow, except for the workers, I’d just smile and go about my day.