The group of people that came up with this bill and it’s wording have no idea how the internet works. The idea that a site needs to pay to provide a link to another site is not well though out. The internet is built on links.

Canadian news companies shot themselves in the foot here. They want social media site to not summarize their news articles (this keeps users on the social media site). At the same time news companies also don’t want social media site to link to the news article (this directs users to the news site).

When news articles are summarized by social media sites it means that a individual can read the news article without going to a news site directly, thus a social media site gains financial with ad revenue directly from “content” it did not create.

What news sites wanted is user come to their sites directly to generate ad revenue on their platform. So a link would help users find this “content” and benefits news sites. Though news companies now also want to double dip and request that social site pay news companies for the link to their site.

In short, Canadian news companies wanted their cake and eat it too.

Maybe the internet being built on links is a problem?

You could run the same argument for ads and tracking

I’m not entirely sure how one could create a internet of interconnected computers and servers without links to one another and the webpages they serve.

Short of maybe making one “central hub” controlled by one state/entity. Though this would probably not turn out great.

I’m not entirely sure how one could create a internet of interconnected computers and servers without links to one another

One could always look at the history books, I guess. It is believed that the first real-world use of hyperlinks on the internet was in 1991. It is also believed that the Internet as we know it was born in 1983. That means we lived through eight years of this “unimaginable” internet.

aha the internet as you know it was not born in 1983 unless you are mostly interacting on lemmy with email and ftp

Lemmy was originally known as Usenet, but yes, you were using it as far back as 1979.

Lemmy was never known as Usenet.

It is the NiH syndrome attempt to recreate Usenet. One would think the audience is smart enough to read between the lines, but then again, the audience doesn’t understand the difference between the internet and services on the internet, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been so generous – not recognizing that I too am part of the same audience.