LadyAutumn

I'm Canadian, so no need for hypotheticals. I can browse my news sites directly. No trouble for me.

Also, and this is a novel idea, maybe Google et al. should abide by the rules of the states in which it operates without forms of petty protest. This is a battle between a capitalist conglomerate and the Canadian state. I'm virulently anti-capitalist, so I don't particularly care about the profit incentives of any of these corporations or even of the private for profit news sites. The bill to be clear would ensure the news sites get paid, and that Google and Facebook do not profit off of the content their editors are writing. But Google and Facebook don't like that, because they're fucking capitalists who control enough GDP to fucking buy Canada. So they can fuck off then, that's fine. Like I said before, you won't see my crying for them.

Jun 30, 2023 at 4:44amWeb
Show threadritswdJun 30, 2023

I don’t disagree with anything you just said, I also couldn’t care less about the business loss it would be for Google/Meta. But I think people’s surprise is not about that, it’s about how this business relationship was potentially actually beneficial for the Canadian news outlets who pushed for this, since a lot of their actual traffic was coming from what Google and Meta had built, whether those Canadian editors like it or not. If that’s the case, then they’re basically shutting down an effort that was providing them free advertising, potentially shooting themselves in the foot.

They also can’t claim that they wouldn’t know it would happen, since that’s what Spain did a while ago, and that’s exactly what happened. If the issue is about reusing copy, some other countries passed laws allowing Google to provide the free advertising by showing users links and titles, but without providing any summary, and Google abided. But the Canadian law here was written to ban even the parts that may be beneficial.

If you personally go straight to news websites, then yeah, there’s no loss for editors from your usage. But the thought here is that a ton of users don’t do it like you do, and the Canadian news outlets that made this law happen are about to suddenly lose all traffic from those users.

Show threadstyxJun 30, 2023
For news aggregation and summary, I totally agree with you. For just search indexing and referring, though, I think paying just for a link that is no more than 10 words is not justified.