Some reflections on the Australian experience and what they might mean for Canada.
After Google’s move on Thursday, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez sent a written statement calling the companies’ moves “deeply irresponsible and out of touch … especially when they make billions of dollars off of Canadian users” with advertising.
Australia’s regulatory experiment – the first of its kind in the world – also got off to a rocky start, but it has since seen tech companies, news publishers and the government reach a middle ground.
If you are relying on Google and Meta/Facebook for news you are already not doing news correctly.
Is something like lemmy or Reddit any better?
Google and Meta are not the internet. They think it belongs to them and act like it’s their kingdom. But they’re wrong.
In some countries, Facebook is used as a synonym for “the Internet” because large portions of the population access the web through Facebook.
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What on earth are you taking about??
They want to make an example of Canada… When companies have enough power to even think about trying and make an example out of a country then they need to be dismantled or, even better, nationalized because it means they’re important enough to be considered utilities.
Reminds me of the classic Onion headline
“Facebook to discuss plans to regulate government over fears it has become too powerful.”
At this point I would support not backing down purely to set an example of our own.
Exactly. There are obvious problems with this conundrum and the government’s move is not ideal but then the situation we’re in is also not ideal. The implications of leaving it unmitigated are eating into our democracy and without a functioning democracy, there’s no functioning world wide web. And so as a firm supporter of the WWW, I find myself having to stick for our government and our media oligopoly (🤢) on this one even if it’s not ideal from the WWW lens. It feels a bit like chemotherapy. We have to do it even if we harm some systems because otherwise many more systems will go. 🤷
If the Canadian government were smart, they’d start a massive campaign to encourage Canadians to move to using RSS readers for all their news – Google and Meta would lose their freaking minds, as it would let people read headlines and news summaries without even visiting their landing pages (less ad impressions) … hit 'em where it hurts!
Edit: Clarifying my thinking … maybe the Canadian government could propose to let Google et al. serve Canadian media outlet’s stories through their search sites… but only if they committed to supporting RSS/Atom feeds of the same articles. This would force them to open up their data a bit and make alternatives to visiting their sites more viable.
There is no way the general public would adopt RSS. The barrier to entry is just too high right now. Technology that delivers news needs to be idiot-proof and require basically 1-2 steps
Eg:
- click on the blue-green swirl
- type “Facebook”
Or:
- turn TV on
- change channel to news
Don’t get me wrong, RSS is great, but it’s also used exclusively by the computer-literate and it has been that way for basically 25 years.
RSS does not necessarily mean clunky UI and difficult to use. There are some pretty beautiful podcast apps with great content discovery features out there :)
No reason a news app that reads RSS needs to be more complicated than opening Facebook.
I use Feedly on iOS to follow all my favourite sites and it’s great! I combine it with Pocket to read stuff offline too and it’s a killer combo. Never liked social media’s “push” content and preferred having the freedom to “pull” what I want.
“Pocket casts for blogs and written news” would be killer
You just click on an RSS link and it opens in your reader where you can subscribe or just consume directly. How hard is it to work a hyperlink?!
The government should be providing basic communication services. It’s criminal that private companies like Twitter are the de facto alert and information system for life saving government services. That kind of infrastructure needs to be socialized. Likewise we should have channels for publishing journalism that are not controlled by private capital.
I 100% agree with you.
It’s crazy that our gov is even using Facebook or Twitter for advertising their message. Why not use the fediverse instead ?!
Or just RSS and a blessed set of clients for consuming it
Especially now that I can’t even click on a twitter link without being asked to create an account and log in. It’ll be chaos if some big situation is going on and people without twitter accounts are scrambling to find critical information from other sources.
This is what I did on Friday. Took 20 minutes and set up a feedly account. It’s just like I did with Reddit a few weeks ago. Set up a Lemmy account, and moved on with my life. We can easily adapt.
Interesting, this is the first I heard of feedly. I did the same thing. Lemmy and I used some RSS reader from fdroid. Feedly app has pretty bad ratings… How are you liking it?
So far I have no complaints. It’s only been a week or so though.
Google and Meta will cave just like they did with Australia.
This whole situation is really showing me how weak Canada and Canadians are. Yes, this is a dumb law, and Google and Facebook are right to be angry about it. But the hyperbole about how Canadians just won’t be able to find any news afterward is embarrassing. It just comes off as lazy, entitled people whining about how their spoonfeeder has weaned them off and now expects them to spoonfeed themselves. Are we really a nation of children? Cmon.
The law makes sense to me. He says, regarding Google, that “Linking is what a search engine does.” But Google, as we know, is gleaning information from users, who are its product, to sell to advertisers (for more targeted advertising.)
So, links are not its business. Links are props to attract the product (us, its users) to it, to prepare us to be sold. Like all other businesses (IE, pubs) that have props (IE, barstools), Google should pay for some of its props.
There’s also the interesting aspect that they can control what search results appear in what order, if it all.
Everyone thinks corporations pay Google to have their name at the top, but rarely do people think that corporations pay Google to keep their name at the bottom.
God I hope we can stand our ground. We need a domino effect of countries to turn the tide, the first few will always be the hardest though.
Isn’t the EU preparing something similar?
I get it if those doing the linking also host enough of the content (or all of it) so that users don’t have any need to go to the site. For example if a post here on lemmy or on reddit has the link to the article with the headline, but then the top comment is a copy/paste of the entire thing.
What I don’t get is why news are any different than any other search result in this context? On my phone for example if I look at the android default feed that shows news and other content based on my interests, it’s just headlines and thumbnail images. If I want to actually see the content I have to click on it, thus going to the news publisher’s web page. Is this what they’re mad about?
It just sounds to me like they’re wanting to make it harder for individuals to find them. Since it’s so accessible (don’t even need to open an app) this is often where i’ll see important headlines first thing in the morning, only later in the day will I bother to open apps, go to websites, check my RSS etc.
Not making an argument, just answering a question:
One way that news is different from other articles is that very often, consumers of the content only read the metadata. How many stories have you followed, but just by reading the headlines? And when you aggregate it, it becomes a new product. The metadata that they aggregate is clearly providing them a great deal of value. It’s drawing people to their site in the first place. They’re putting their own ads on other people’s content, etc.
I suspect it’ll just lead to A.I generated headlines in lieu of headlines taken from news publishers then. You can’t make any claims on the facts of the news. If there’s a big earthquake in Japan then there’s a big earthquake in Japan. An A.I can generate a headline saying as much, and the news publishers are cut out of the equation. At most they’d pay whatever subscription other news outlets pay for things like AP and other sources to get a stream of facts, then let the A.I go to town on that data.
And honestly as long as the info is accurate I’d much rather use something like that then have to deal with going to multiple websites, i’ll go to multiple sources manually if I need to research something, not for my morning news. This is where RSS feeds come in handy but the same publishers who whine about this issue often don’t publish a feed for the same reason. I’d personally prefer to not consume the content at all, if the only method was going to individual websites and checking for updates.
A.I generated headlines
…
as long as the info is accurate
Shoot, you’re refuting yourself before I even get there.
I am curious about what is that middle ground?
It’s called negotiation. What Canada is doing is not that. They are demanding unbounded amounts of money.
In Australia they ended up negotiating a price that worked for both sides. No doubt a predictable among each year too.
The proposed regulations haven’t even been published for consultation yet.
The bill received royal assent last week, but I guess it leaves it open for specific implementations. Google and Meta oppose the whole thing. https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/news/2023/06/online-news-act-receives-royal-assent.html
Yes, which is literally why Google said they are preparing to remove links. They are not going to incur completely unknown penalties. In Australia Meta and others also pulled links for the same reason. It was only after they negotiated a price that worked for both sides that they came back. If I ran Google or Meta I’d do exactly the same thing.
They are jumping the gun.
Retroactive establishment of penalties aren’t a thing in Canadian federal regulation.
The penalties can’t be implemented without a Gazetting period for the regulations, and Meta and Google will have the opportunity to formally comment on the proposed penalties then.
Retroactive penalties absolutely are a thing. I’ve known people who have gotten bit by that when tax laws change retroactively. Also, Google hasn’t yet blocked anything, but implementing a block like that doesn’t happen overnight. So yes, they do need to start writing the and testing the code to do the blocking now, not at the last minute. The announcement is also part of their negotiation, making it clear that this is in fact a possible outcome.
Hopefully we change this law. Trying to charge people for links is incredibly bad. There is no need for any law. If the news sites want to get money for links they can just put all their articles behind a login gate and make them not scrapable.
Trying to charge people for links is incredibly bad.
Good thing the law isnt charging people but the richest and most powerful corporations on the planet!
News sites used to generate a lot of ad revenue. Now, Google and Facebook combine to receive 80% of all ad revenue. If you see an ad online, it’s likely Google or Facebook got paid for it.
But why do they make so much ad money? Because they host links to what people want. They’re making tens of billions simply by hosting links to the content of others, who aren’t making money anymore because advertisers give their money to the link hosters and not the content creators. This “link tax” is a way to ensure the content creators get their fair share. Google and Facebook don’t create content, they link to it. Why should they get all the money?
I have no sympathy for ad driven businesses. Let me buy access to ad free news and I’ll be interested. Fundamentally this is because the traditional news business model stopped working and they never bothered to update to a model that does work. Instead, they want to legislate that they get paid without even trying to adapt or improve.
So the hotel concierge doesn’t actually 'do anything
@StillPaisleyCat I could not be less worried. Did anything really undesirable happen in Australia after similar legislation?
Some deals are made, some cash flows differently and soon enough things are pretty much the same as before.
That’s one of the points in the article - despite the dire comments from the two corporations, almost everyone expects it to settle down.
@StillPaisleyCat Yeah it makes total sense. I do wonder if that’s superficial analysis and there is really something important to do differently from Australia.
Hard to know the implications of Canada’s being integrated with the US markets in a way that Australia is not.
When does this come into affect? When I search generic news I’m still getting back Canadian new sources like CBC.
Bill C-18 will come into force later this year. It requires regulatory provisions that will need to be formally published and consulted through The Canada Gazette etc.
This seems to be Meta & Google flexing and doing their worst to local media before the proposed regulations are published.
Here’s a CBC breakdown from last Friday.
Reacting to Google’s announcement Thursday, Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez told CBC News conversations with the company are ongoing and the “clarity” it wants about the Online News Act will come as the government hammers out regulations.
Here’s the 44-1/C-18 information page for the Parliament of Canada.
At the end of the year. So 2024 onward unless something changes.
There’s Artifiact app that have a tab specifically for Canadian news
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It’s not too much government regulation that is going to see you watch your children die choking on a toxic atmosphere.
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You’re hoping Google “wins” a “fight” against the government of Canada for the regulation of its news business, and your rationale is that “government regulation of the internet” has contributed to “death”… and your example of that is North Korea?!!
That’s incredibly odd, sorry to say. It’s the strangest excuse for corporate bootlicking I have ever heard. It makes no sense at all to put all “governments” in the same category — Canada with North Korea and Russia, all in the same bag. And it’s even worse that you’re using these countries as examples when the news story here is about Canada making Google pay news publishers for use of their stories. Is this what North Korea does? North Koreans die by the thousands because their search engines have to pay the state news publisher?
