CBC, media groups ask Competition Bureau to investigate Meta's move to block news in Canada
CBC, media groups ask Competition Bureau to investigate Meta's move to block news in Canada
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Lol, what do they expect to be done about this? Is the government supposed to force Facebook to show their content, yet also pay to do it? I hate Facebook but I'm so glad they're doing this because link taxes are fucking stupid.
Yeah, I am not Canadian so I’m sure there’s some information/nuance I don’t understand here, but from what I can tell from looking at a few articles from different sources:
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Canadian government passes a law that would require Facebook to pay and/or share ad revenue for every link out (posted by the media outlet, not by Facebook) to an external news website
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Facebook says they don’t want to do that, and will stop showing news links to comply with the law
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Canadian government says “no not like that” and now wants to force them to allow links to news outlets, which de facto forces them to pay/share revenue with those media outlets
Like I said, I’m assuming there may be something I’m missing here, so please any kind Canadians who can help fill in the blanks would be appreciated
It's not the government that wants to force them, it's the media outlets that lobbied for this law in the first place that are trying to claw back a win after they called a bluff and lost.
Yes, the government is also upset about the outcome despite being warned about it beforehand, but they know that Facebook hasn't broken any laws.
You’ve got the just of it. Their argument is that meta benefits as the post w/ the the link and preview is content they use in their feed to keep users engaged. Presumably in said feed they’d also insert ads.
This would also apply to any user posting a link to an article, not just the news agencies.
(Not arguing with you, just with the concept of the bill)
Doesn’t the news outlet benefit from the traffic and clicks generated from that user engagement?
What’s the government’s rationale for social media platforms to subsidize media outlets monetarily in addition to driving people to their content?
I would hope it's on the basis of the news sites not actually receiving any user engagement due to users summarizing the article and therefore allowing people to "read" it without reading it.
The other option is they want news companies to have their cake and eat it too. Apparently, that worked out for Australia though—albeit in an asinine and behind-closed-doors sort of way.
Because most people don't click, they just read the summary of the article in their feed. They're claiming that aggregators don't share revenue from summarized articles.
Yet all the major news sites I checked provided Open Graph content.
In case you don't know, Open Graph was created by Facebook to give publishers control over what information is displayed on Facebook when a news resource is introduced into their system.
If you don't want Facebook to display that content, knowing it means you won't see the traffic, why explicitly provide and denote it for their use? Open Graph content isn't naturally occurring. These news companies are going out of their way to tell Facebook exactly what they want shown.
Is this simply a case of the top brass spending too much time in Ottawa and not enough time talking to the technical people?
Oh no offense taken, I also don’t get it. Like you said, I think amounts to forcing private companies to subsidize an industry
It's more about forcing private companies to pay for the use of other private companies work.
What's the problem with private companies subsidizing an industry? They're taking advantage of our population to make money and often offshoring profits to avoid paying taxes.
I do believe some Canadian industries should be subsidized by private interests because they're just selling our own resources back to us, and they should pay for the privilege (while still receiving some profits). Telecom, utilities, energy, farms over certain capacities etc.
News Probaby shouldn't be one. I'm more than happy with government funded news so long as its independent of government and held to a higher standard than "entertainment" like we have with our neighbours to the south. This forces private news to compete with a competent news source, and it's not like the business model for news has really changed by much, selling ad space next to information, or offering subscriptions is as old as information sharing.
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I don't like the idea of link taxes myself.
But even setting aside the question of whether link taxes are a good idea, I don't understand why they're making a -- what to me sounds dubious -- antitrust argument. It seems like a simply bizarre angle.
If the Canadian government wants news aggregators to pay a percentage of income to news companies, I would assume that they can just tax news aggregators -- not per link to Canadian news source, but for operating in a market at all -- take the money and then subsidize Canadian news sources. It may or may not be a good idea economically, but it seems like it'd be on considerably firmer footing than trying to use antitrust law to bludgeon news aggregators into taking actions that would trigger a link tax by aggregating Canadian news sources.
This is the real problem. Corporate taxes are frighteningly low and Canada can no longer afford to subsidize domestic industries out of corporate tax revenue.
I think you're onto something here.