The Online News Act passed last Thursday and would force platforms like Google and Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, to strike deals with Canadian media publishers for sharing, previewing and directing users to online Canadian news content.
In what world does that make sense? Did the author of that bill and everyone who voted on it never use the internet? How is that enforcable in any way?
From what I understand, it's not just linking to the article. It's when the news is summarized on Google, to the point where you learn everything you need right from the search page rather than clicking the link to the article. So the company that hosts the article is losing as revenue because people are just reading the summary and not looking at the article itself.
@Etnies419 no, if you read the article even linking requires payment. That's why they're removing results entirely, rather than just removing summaries like they did in other countries
But to the point, in those countries leaving the links but removing the summaries also resulted in significant reductions in traffic for the news orgs.
(2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if
(a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or
(b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.
Indexing includes showing a basic result in search. Plus you can't show a normal search results without pulling at least a portion of the news content. I can only assume the author and those that voted for this have literally never searched for a news article online before.
The best solution is to stop reading Canadian media. Those companies knew exactly what was going to happen, enough of them supported it, and they deserve to lose their readers.