Not a Metà fan, at all, but I don’t understand why they are being called “unreasonable” and “irresponsible” for blocking news from Canadian newspapers.
As they (currently) don’t have an agreement with Canadian newspapers, or perhaps don’t want one, which also seems like a legitimate position to me, the only responsible thing is not to use or link to articles from said newspapers, isn’t it?
The Canadian government thought they could just force these companies to subsidize their failing news industry, and instead, when the outcome is "alright, fine, you win, we won't pay you in order to make you relevant, we won't 'profit' off of your news any longer, have fun in the dumpster" they're "blocking news."
There's nothing unreasonable or irresponsible about this decision at all, what's unreasonable is passing a law trying to squeeze money out of the only places in the world left that still make you relevant and then getting mad when they don't want to be abused.
They had made agreements with torstar prior to this bill passing. They abandoned those agreements when the bill passed. Its hard to avoid the conclusion that they are specifically taking issue with being legally compelled to make such agreements.
Ah, a perfect exemplar of the kind of independent journalism free from corporate influence as stated in the bill.
> Act provides that any such agreements must not allow the freedom of expression and journalistic independence enjoyed by news outlets to be undermined by corporate influence.
> Journalists, as well as "journalists", are going to get paid one way or another.
Says who?
Lots of journalists have been laid off in the past decade because of media consolidation -- some of them found other jobs or went independent, but most had to find another field because _the money isn't there_.
The media companies will get paid one way or another, but the companies are not journalists.
Also in addition: PostMedia (owners of the National Post) and Nordstar (owners of the Toronto Star), are apparently in talks to merge, meaning there would be even less competition and fewer major news orgs in Canada. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/toronto-star-nordstar-talks...
> But the Liberal government’s decision does not extend to the party. Liberal Party of Canada spokesperson Parker Lund said in a statement that the party would continue to advertise on Meta-owned platforms. According to the company’s ad library, the party spent nearly $15,000 on over 1,000 ads in the past month.
So: we would not deal with FB because it's evil, unless of course it could help us personally to win the elections, in which case of course we'll deal with them. Taxpayer money is another business, this is what you use for posturing.
Honestly, it's pretty reasonable. This is what it looks like when you really treat your party as separate from governance. They are not using public funds for their advertising.
Contrast this with the last Conservative government, which made all of its publicly funded announcements from "The Harper Government" instead of "The Government of Canada."
The point is not public funds. The point is, in public they behave like FB is so horrible no reasonable person can use their services, but when it comes to using the services not for public benefit, but for their personal benefit, turn out FB is not so bad after all. Evidently, using FB is beneficial for them. They are OK with benefitting themselves, but withhold same benefits from the public in the name of political posturing.
Political parties work quite a bit differently in Canada. The party structure, the part that purchases ads and such, is not the government. They can have opposing goals. One is governing, the other is trying to get elected. That's how we like it.
Canada actually used to give federal funds to all political parties, including opposition parties, as long as they reached a certain level of votes in the last election. This leveled the playing field for campaign money. Again the last Conservative government got rid of this to try to starve the other parties, another example of what happens when this division is not maintained properly.
Yep. If they believe these platforms are cost-effective ways to advertise, then actually choosing not to use them for public funded advertising would be an abuse of public funds, unless they can explain how it is different, which I'm sure they can't.
Right. For better or worse, Meta currently gives cost-effective targeted advertising. Would be interesting to see a graph over time of Canadian govt advertising spend, split by channel (newspaper, TV, radio, online social media, email) and by outlet. I imagine OSM (and email) have cannibalized the older channels.
I was driving thought Ontario today, I kept thinking that it was posturing as well.
It’s pulling ads from the official government body, it represent maybe 1% of Meta activity in that country.
Weirdly enough the news was in loop on radio but nobody mentioned what Meta had to say. No empty statement saying it’s for the greater good.
As a Canadian, I find the current government's policy on the internet to be very 1990's. I fully support Google's and Meta's decision to remove Canadian news from their platforms. This is a complete "own-goal" by the government.
I feel bad about the journos/web teams who have to suffer as a consequence of the current gov and the rich Canadian media aristocracy who pushed this through. But I can't say it's going to immediately impact my life. I'm not a particular fan of any of the Canadian media sites besides maybe the hyper local ones like CP24. Nor would I touch the Canadian subreddits with a ten foot pole to go discuss them (some of the worst parts of Reddit).
Canadians are already obsessed with American news/politics anyway. They will just be fed slightly more of that than before on social media.
I feel similarly, but I do actually like CBC content usually. It's deeply ironic in my mind that one of the meme mantras of the PCs is defunding the CBC, good job literally every other voting MP except the PCs
Meh, I've heard this claim but it escapes me how that's true. If anything it seems closer to the opposite. Most of the CBC content I see makes the current Liberal government look quite monstrous. Fifth Estate, Marketplace, current events, and almost every debate or interview with a Liberal representative.
Simply take a look at the CBC’s latest debacle [1], where the CBC published an incredibly defamatory article against the premier of Alberta in the middle of an election. They of course just recently retracted it, but they will suffer no consequences. The CBC literally tried to pick the premier of Alberta themselves. This is just the tip of the iceberg. See also the Rosemary Barton lawsuits during the 2019 campaign for further evidence of CBC bias towards the current governing party.
The reason why the current liberal government looks quite monstrous even on the CBC tho is because they really are quite monstrous in reality and it’s finally starting to show. Just look at Bill C-18, who’s interests are they looking out for? Not everyday Canadians that’s for sure.
This is a government that on one hand says Meta is an evil foreign owned corporation interfering in our democracy and therefore will end all ads on Meta platforms, but on the other hand, made an exception for itself such that the Liberal Party of Canada will actually continue running ads on Meta because after all nothing is too evil if it helps get them elected. Rules for thee but not for me. A classic Canadian liberal party dynamic. Story as old as time.
Meh, that doesn't look good, but it does seem like due process was more or less followed, and it's not really unreasonable to think it wasn't a conspiracy imo, it's no National Post or Toronto Star, and they even posted a rather favourable piece on Pollievre last year.
While there is still some degree of bias, that seems like a reach to me, and I'm nothing but a lousy centrist.
What were the instances of similar and worse under Harper though? There's nothing comparable to the current liberal government - to say nothing of the $600 million slush fund for media organizations (so much for an independent press eh)
They silenced Truth so they could push lies in order to maintain a war that was literally Criminal. They did the same to prop up the oil industry in the province Harper held history with and from which he personally profited and continues to profit.
They said "You're either with Us or with the Pedos" when people criticized an over reaching "justice" bill.
Again, those who oppose Trudeau now are almost exclusively those who were willfully ignorant and silent during the Harper years, mostly because they profited from the injustices which far exceeded those of Trudeau's government.
I left out the G20 protest response where they brutalized people who were being 100% peaceful, in complete opposite to the treatment of far right insurrectionists that were the convoy cucks...
I was there and hurt so it felt too personal to include as I presumed self bias, but on reflection it definitely should have been included.
Where were all these conspiracy theorist shit heads back when there was a real problem to fight against?
Oh that's right, they were trading heroes for gold, mistaking hot air for a cool breeze and exchanging a walk on part in the war for a lead role in the cage....
Instead of defunding it the Liberals created a situation where the CBC will essentially need gov gibs to survive in it's current state, which will certainly be deemed essential for publicly funded Canadian culture projection (that essential part of modern society). Economic self-owns via gov policy driven by the same small set of private school kids in Ottawa and whining about Americans is Canadian culture 101.
I'm also Canadian and feel the same. I don't like Google or Meta but this is just the media trying to be greedy. If the incoming likes from Google were harmful they would have configured a robots.txt. They are just trying to lobby laws to get extra money. But they were too full of themselves to realize that they need Google and Meta at least an order of magnitude more than Google or Meta needs them.
The same thing happened in Australia and as soon as Facebook blocked links they cried uncle. Maybe if these news articles actually did research rather than focusing on clickbait headlines they would have learned about that.
> The same thing happened in Australia and as soon as Facebook blocked links they cried uncle.
Australia didn't blink, Google and Meta did .. after that brief shutdown of Facebook news feeds in the country, both Google and Facebook agreed to pay:
Since the News Media Bargaining Code took effect, the tech firms had inked more than 30 deals with media outlets compensating them for content which generated clicks and advertising dollars, said the Treasury department report, published late Thursday.
"At least some of these agreements have enabled news businesses to, in particular, employ additional journalists and make other valuable investments to assist their operations," said the report.
"While views on the success or otherwise of the Code will invariably differ, we consider it is reasonable to conclude that the Code has been a success to date."
Australia says law making Facebook and Google pay for news has worked
The legislation, known as the News Media Bargaining Code, has enabled Australian news organizations to extract more than $200 million (almost $150 million US) in the year since it went into effect.
As a result, the public Australian Broadcasting Corporation can place at least fifty new journalists in underserved parts of the country, while the McPherson Media Group, which publishes such papers as the Yarrawonga Chronicle and the Deniliquin Pastoral Times, expects tech money to fund up to 30 percent of editorial salaries.
> Maybe if these news articles actually did research rather than focusing on clickbait headlines they would have learned about that.
Perhaps if certain HN commenters did research they would not be making false statements.
Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income?
I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story.
Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something?
There's a similar issues with some news sites basically copying or rephrasing the content of a newspaper story. I've seen news stories by third-parties, where the story lists their source as "The New York Times"
It's tough to figure out a way to compensate the people who create the news, and the people who disseminate the news.
> Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources?
No. The law would apply even if Google and Facebook showed no ads on a same page as a link to a news article, and made no money from them. (And in fact, e.g. Google News does not show any ads.)
> Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something?
Not really, no. Australia passed a law but didn't actually make it apply to anyone. (Yes, seriously, the law is defined to apply to a set of companies that the government designates at their whim, and they've so far not designated any companies). The deals that Google/Meta made with Australian news companies are the same kinds of deals they've made in countries all over the world without such a law, including Canada.
Those Australian deals will reportedly terminate if Google/Meta are designated as being in scope of the law, so now any news company with a deal has an incentive to argue against their designation while a company without a deal will argue for. In a similar vein, the deals in Canada are apparently going to be terminated due to this law.
My understanding of the core issue is people aren’t clicking through to read the article, but they’re commenting on Facebook based on the headline. Facebook gets ad views and user-generated content/comments, and the organization doing the reporting sees nothing of the economic value generated in this scenario. (Hacker News is specialized in audience and news orgs generally aren’t posting all their stories here)
CBC tried to head this problem off by disabling comments on all their Facebook posts so people would comment on CBC.ca.
My issue with this, is this a problem that needs to be solved? Do we need to guarantee monetization of every human interaction?
If my friend and I go a cafe, see a newspaper headline, and have a discussion about that headline without ever opening that newspaper should the cafe have to pay for that discussion? Why should any media adjacent interaction anywhere happen without payment? If the cafe is playing music, they're paying licence fees for that. Why not everything?
This is a perfect example of how people confuse causality and responsibility. They are not the same.
Trying to monetize and compensate for every externality is absurd.
If I make coffee at home that causes a coffee shop to lose out on Revenue. Surely I'm not responsible for paying the coffee shop for the Lost Revenue.
If I do go to the coffee shop, should the coffee shop have to share their revenue with the car company because it gave me a reason to drive my car?
In this case, social media makes money because people talk about news online instead of actually read it. This doesn't make social media companies responsible for the fact that no one wants to read a news article.
If the persons who grew the coffee beans/roasted/brewed gave the beans away without asking for compensation because they hoped to obtain ad revenue, most people wouldn't go out of their way to pay the bean producers.
Canadian news media (unlike the vast majority of US news media besides NPR and PBS) is very significantly government subsidized, so this bill is really a stealth tax on Meta and Google.
At the end of the day, the question remains : do we want local news?
Meta and Alphabet are not gonna run news room in Manitoba and Northern Ontario.
If we don’t, fine. Local news can die and be replaced by influencer I guess ?
Then if we do, who is paying for it.
In your analogy, Meta & Alphabet are installing a patio in front of the coffee shops, and offer samples of the most popular latte of the day for free and you can get as many as you want.
> In your analogy, Meta & Alphabet are installing a patio in front of the coffee shops, and offer samples of the most popular latte of the day for free and you can get as many as you want.
Nah, the right analogy is Meta/Google drive a large bus of customers (only a fraction with tickets) to the coffee shop and not everyone goes into the shop. News orgs are then asking Google to pay them for Google driving the bus.
I agree. The people giving away the samples, in this case the news media themselves, are enticing you to their articles with the headline, maybe a blurb, and maybe an image. If you take the sample and don't care for the rest, that's fine. Nobody should have to pay for that. The whole point is that it's advertising. If nobody wants the product then nobody wants the product.
Charging someone for the "free" samples is no solution.
Someone comes up with the headline, and gives it away for free.
If they dont want to give it away for free, they dont have to.
If they want to charge for the headline, that is fine too.
What they don't get to do is say, you must buy this headline from us, if you want it or not.
This is all beside the point because the object at issue here is links, which don't even necessarily contain content.
>Why is asking Fangs to give an obole to local news so insulting ?
It is insulting because if anything, local news should be paying FANG. They get much of their web traffic from social media and search.
They dont need the governments help to ask for money. They can simply stop letting their headlines and links be indexed. The fact is they don't want to do that because it benefits them. They could try to negotiate with GOOGLE/Meta, but GOOGLE/Meta would rather drop them than pay.
Nobody wants to pay for what they have so they have to resort to bills to force companies to buy something they would rather not have.
> If I make coffee at home that causes a coffee shop to lose out on Revenue. Surely I'm not responsible for paying the coffee shop for the Lost Revenue.
At least in the US, the federal government can punish you for it.
tl;dr Whether or not an action is interstate commerce, if it _affects_ interstate commerce in any way (broadly defined), then the federal government has jurisdiction and can punish you under their massive and capricious laws.
yeah, Wickard_v._Filburn is terrible too, but it is specific to the government's ability to regulate.
These proposals are like the Wickard_v._Filburn on steroids or the Obamacare mandate. Forcing the purchase of a product that the buyer would choose not to.
No, but if you're a government seeing your media industry shrinking because they can't make a profit to sustain themselves, meanwhile others are profiting off their work, then you want to try something, and I guess this is their attempt.
One of the other solutions proposed was taxes on media aggregators. This is similar to the taxes on entertainment aggregators currently in place that pay into a fund that supports domestic entertainers. These approaches have lots of complications.
The real threat to local news is Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. Local newspapers were mostly funded by their classifieds section. The news is merely to bring eyeballs to those ads.
When the market for classifieds disappeared, there was no longer any financial support for local news.
You could even argue that newspapers were only viable businesses because they had a monopoly over the local distribution of information. It was never the news itself that was profitable but being the local gatekeeper of that news. The Internet destroyed that entirely.
I actually don't think the Internet has been a good substitute for a local distribution of information. It's too global and too big. There's people who aren't from a neighborhood talking about it and skewing information about that neighborhood. Portland's supposed to be literally a BLM-flagged wasteland or something, y'know?
I'd really love for there to be a local newspaper that tells me a new bakery opened in town, or that the elementary school passed a new measure for students, or that there's going to be an art exhibit presented by some local artists. I want to know when there are some foster kitties looking for temporary homes, and a little articles about people who go all-out on halloween decor. The internet doesn't give this to me, not without a load of muck.
I've tried this strategy but often r/somecommunity is either never used by people who live there/is too small to be useful, but the bigger neighborhood/city is absolutely astroturfed by people who don't live there.
> I actually don't think the Internet has been a good substitute for a local distribution of information.
It started off looking very promising for that sort of thing -- but when people fled for the likes of large social media properties, that killed things dead. Facebook, Reddit, etc., are very bad at encouraging local community.
I'm a member if many local communities on Reddit and Facebook.
Where I live, Facebook Marketplace is _the_ place to go to buy and sell used goods. And it is absolutely hopping in my community. So much waste is averted from landfills due to the platform Facebook provides, which has good search, and a reasonable UX.
If all we had were the old school classifieds in the newspaper, I doubt nearly as much activity would happen.
HN just loves to shit on social media and lament the fall of old school local news, but I think that's just rose coloured glasses.
Through Facebook I do local second hand shopping, I discovered and am and member of several local niche sports and activity groups. And I see local news through the eyes and mouths of locals talking about it rather than what the one or two employed local journalists think.
If all you do is scroll /r/all or your Instagram feed than sure you're not getting local info, but you get what you consume.
And I say this as someone who doesn't like Meta/Facebook and would delete it in a heartbeat if there was a viable alternative, but the matter stands it _does_ support and encourage local communities and content in some places.
It might depend on the community, then. In my area, the big social media outfits are not useful in that way at all. (Except for selling stuff on Facebook, but that's not what I was talking about.)
Facebook and Reddit are the only ones I'm familiar with for this, though, and they both have the same problem -- they are dominated by a very small number of people.
Always. But maybe a factor is the size of the "community"? A hub city has X number of residents plus Y folks who work there plus Z folks who live in suburbs but are counted as part of the metropolis.
OTOH a small city is small, so the folks may share more in common -- and thus push out interlopers and ignore noise makers.
I live in a small city. I think the reason that social media hasn't really become central for community here is because we have a small free arts & entertainment newspaper that has served the role for longer than I've been alive. That's where everyone expects to find public announcements, events, buying/selling things, etc.
Craigslist is also very popular here. Does that count as social media?
> because they had a monopoly over the local distribution of information
Not to worry, several US states still have draconian laws to keep the local newspaper in business. In NYS, when you start a LLC or corp, you have to publish an announcement in 2 papers in the state announcing it and get certificates from the paper proving it. Of course there are ever so convenient "business papers" to leech off it. Some law makers tried to change that a few years ago and queue the lobbyist outrage.
Governments pick winners and losers. For all these laws, like this Canadian law and the one you mention, there are plenty of business models that disappear without anyone doing anything about it.
I feel that if there is still a market for news then the market will figure it out. We should make laws encourage smaller players and avoid monopolies. Instead of making laws that transfer money from one giant corporation to another giant corporation. But that'll never happen because giant corporations have all the influence.
> Local newspapers were mostly funded by their classifieds section.
Local newspapers (at least in my US state) were mostly funded by their commercial ad placements, not by the classified section. Classified ad revenue and the purchase price of the paper were minority fractions of their revenue.
I doubt it, esp. if you mean US newspapers; can you cite any source?
AFAIK the trend of the last 3 decades has been first Craiglist then Yahoo then FB and apps hollowed out local newspaper classified ads, especially in the US.
Here's data for 2013-2021 from US Census Service Annual Survey (SAS) for
"Breakdown of Revenue by Advertising Type: Newspapers Advertising Space - Classified Advertising for Newspaper Publishers, All Establishments" [0]. Seems to show newspaper classified revenue is seriously sliding. If we only saw the numbers for local newspapers, probably even worse.
The real threat to local news is national/international news. An organization selling a story to the entire anglosphere has an advantage over an organization trying to sell a story to just one town or country. Both stories cost about the same to write and distribute, but the story with [manufactured] international appeal has massively more earning potential. So newspapers with a focus on national news (NYTimes, WaPo) end up killing the local newspapers even in big cities like Chicago. And the same dynamic applies internationally; the organization which is best at manufacturing international interest for their stories will have an advantage over any organization that focuses on national news with national interest.
If the intention is to get Canadians to focus more on local news, making Facebook pay to link to local news is completely backwards. Facebook will (and apparently has) simply transition to showing cheap international news. Instead, Canada should be making Facebook pay when linking to foreign news, or paying Facebook when linking to local news.
> My issue with this, is this a problem that needs to be solved? Do we need to guarantee monetization of every human interaction?
The failure of traditional news funding models, and their replacement with clickbait, has already caused devastating damage to...well, to society in general, honestly, but certainly to anyone trying to produce a balanced, informative news service. I can't blame publishers for trying to find something to keep them out of the Buzzfeed gutter.
I don't think this idea actually helps at all. But I get why they're desperate.
In your example the cafe isn't monetizing the fact that you view the headline and comment, which inherently increases the advertising value of the cafe (i.e. more people won't come to the cafe because of the headlines and their need to comment on it) and which captures significantly more value than everyone else involved. You just read the headline, a few people buy the paper and everyone is equitable and happy.
If Meta wants to pay 100% tax on their ad revenues to fund journalism, all they have to do is say so.
This theoretical cafe is monetizing the fact that people come and hang out and have discussions and order some coffee. The place is filled with games and magazines and newspapers that anyone can open a view the advertising within. But I never bother, I just read the headlines and discuss those without ever looking inside.
> This theoretical cafe is monetizing the fact that people come and hang out and have discussions and order some coffee.
Therein lies the difference.
1. People come and hang out - can't effectively do this on Meta sites, though their VR push seems aimed at trying to fulfill this need. I would also put "read the newspaper" under this category.
2. Have discussions - for varying definitions of "discussion", this is where Facebook is heavily monetized.
3. Order some coffee - again, can't effectively do that on any Meta sites.
Given that parks exist without coffee shops, we can infer that 3 is what coffee shops are monetizing, while 1 and 2 act as an additional enticement.
The newspapers suffer because, even though YOU may only comment on the headlines, there are plenty of people who go to the coffee shop and don't think twice about buying the paper to read or do the crossword puzzle. The newspaper is able to monetize 1 and 2 and the coffeeshop monetizes 3 - everyone is equitable and happy. On Facebook, Facebook monetizes 2 and claims (without much proof) that they are providing 1 as a service to customers. No coffee is ever served - everyone but Meta is unhappy.
A newspaper doesn't monetize #1 (People come and hang out). Facebook is, first and foremost, a social media platform. People go there to learn about what other people they know are doing. So the cafe and Facebook have the most in common there. The cafe monetizes that hang out by selling you coffee and Facebook monetizes that by showing you ads.
Newspapers are very much secondary to both businesses. They enhance the experience but are not fundamental to it. They also both provide a service to those newspapers by providing a point of distribution. People might, as part of their experience in the cafe/Facebook, read the newspaper.
> People come and hang out - can't effectively do this on Meta sites,
Why not? There isn't a physical table but folks came and hung out on USENET, BBSes, etc. before Facebook came along. And folks appear to hang out on Social Media sites the same today.
I believe the problem is that the situation you describe occurs on a much bigger scale. It’s no longer you and your friend in the cafe; it’s millions of people looking at the headline on the screen.
The scale has always existed. Thousands of cafes filled with millions of people.
Even on Facebook, if I comment on a headline it's still just me making that comment. I, singular, provide some value to Facebook by being there and no value to newspaper because I didn't click though. If Facebook didn't exist, the value I bring to the newspaper by not reading it is the same.
Correct. Essentially the root of the issue is that the news sites believe that the value is in their article, but in reality for the majority of users the value is in the headline, which the news sites give away for free along with the link so that they can be indexed.
In my opinion, the answer here is for the news sites to not show any headlines for free, and require a login to access all content. Then, they are free to negotiate with google and meta and others if those companies want access to the content. It wouldn't require any new laws.
They would need to solve users being able to post links, but a link shortener of sorts forcing the user to write their own headline in the post would probably do the trick. Most people would still want to see the actual headline, and then they'd be forced to login or at least view the page.
> My understanding of the core issue is people aren’t clicking through to read the article, but they’re commenting on Facebook based on the headline.
If this is the meat of the matter, then how does asking Facebook to pay for links/headlines address the problem? Whether or not facebook pays for linking to news stories, the discussion on facebook remains vapid and the public isn't properly informed.
Unless the idea was to make Facebook remove the links/headlines and drive traffic back to the news websites, which is what happened.. so why are they complaining now that it has played out that way?
What's concerning to me is literally every single MP except the conservatives voted for the bill, including my local NDP rep, and not only is it's premise absurd, but they made a huge bet on it working and risked our access to public news sources. Therefore, every non-conservative member of parliament was in-favour of an idiotic bill that compromised a fairly important seri s contemporary ways to access even their own publicly funded content. If people were to be single-issue-voters at all—usually with their issue only ever representing some hypothetical tenuous outcome—now might be a more appropriate time than ever.
Oh god, comment threads on news sites are some of the worst things on the internet. Never well designed, properly threaded, each requires a different login, etc.
If that's the business they want to be in then they (and every other news site) completely sucks at it and there's a reason people want to talk on FB/Twitter instead beyond network effects.
> I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story.
How do you think University's and teachers feel? They teach millions of people who later go on to make lots of money off the efforts of the educational establishment and educator, although in this case I seem to remember Zuck dropped out.
Perhaps Govt taught him, if you are big enough, you can do wtf you like, so maybe he's a modern day Robin Hood like figure? Robbing from the rich to give to the poor?
Yes they do. But the income from one story doesn't pay the cost to generate all the other stories that the paper produces. According to our local paper that just shut down, their ads couldn't compete with the ads on Google/Facebook.
So the only profitable stories are very narrow, or the click-bait type that might be picked up by Facebook, assuming that Facebook doesn't just extract and show the core of the story.
This isn't a new problem. A friend of mine used to do articles on historical issues and post them on his blog. They were good enough that there were other sites that would just copy them and change the byline to themselves. Grounds for a lawsuit, but the cost of the lawsuit and the tiny amount of damages made it impractical. Now he does the articles but tries to sell them to publishers. His income from that is now so tiny that it's no longer cost effective.
Local papers now are money-losers, and the centralization of those many papers in the hands of a few corporations seems more to provide political influence than make money from news. In our recent election, the 160 papers owned by one corporation all made the same political endorsements.
Australia's moves to charge for local news was a first, I think, and at the time there was comment that it could be the wave of the future. Google/Facebook have financial incentive to try to head off the same action in other countries.
Because very few people click through to the article, they just read the headline, summary, and comments on Facebook. Facebook is capturing most of the economic value generated by these articles.
That happens with everything. People talk about movies without having seen them, discuss what woodworking tools are best with no intent to buy them, and the relative value of random sports cars without ever being able to afford them.
If newspapers would be able to charge people for referencing an article, then why shouldn't Lamborghini be able to charge people who talk about the Aventador?
The difference is that most of the value of a movie doesn't come from the title and a synopsis of the prologue. You need to actually watch most movies through to completion in order to speak about them with any competency.
In journalism, articles are generally written following an "inverted pyramid" pattern. The most critical information is put at the top (the headline, and the first paragraph). As you move further down, the information becomes less and less critical to the overall story. The idea being that most people only want the broad strokes (X candidate won an election, Y submarine went missing in the Atlantic).
It is harmful to the news orgs because people used to have to buy their newspaper or magazine, or see ads on their website or TV channel, in order to get any of this information. Now people get 90% of the relevant information from their social media feed, where Facebook or Reddit or whoever rakes in all the ad revenue.
I'm not endorsing Canada's solution to this problem, but I don't think it is very helpful to pretend this isn't a problem at all. Good journalism is expensive, and the fact that nobody is willing to pay for it is why it seems like a lot of the news that is left is either clickbait or propped up by corporate or political interests. We need some way to continue funding quality independent journalism or it will cease to exist in a sea of clickbait and AI-generated nonsense.
Eh, I’d content that most of the economic value is captured by users reading the articles. The comments and ads are near-zero-sum in the aggregate, if that.
I've never seen anyone appearing less qualified in parliament or interviews. Pablo Rodriguez isn't being roasted for his foolish responses and the Canadian media is losing credibility by taking sides. Seeing less national cartel linked media stories will do everyone good. The government not advertising on social media is positive.
Funnily enough the current environment minister Guillebeault was the previous heritage minister who crafted this bill. It didn't get through on his term and then Rodriguez took over.
That's really funny, I do remember that. My favourite video is him basically sweating bullets when interviewed by my favorite CBC host who typically hosts Marketplace. I believe it was about C-11. Seems shady.
There was another post that was on the front page earlier today that pretty much asked: if the [Canadian] government hates [Facebook] social media platform so much, why don't they just build their own? https://loeber.substack.com/p/10-why-is-there-no-government-...
And I agree with the author that it's sort of weird that for all the handwringing and grandstanding these governments are doing, none of them are willing to build a replacement platform for their users
Network effects aside, Governments can not build social media or any website competing with private markets (Even google with unlimited pockets gave up on G+). Government just trying to create a barebones micro-twitter straight from the rails tutorial will easily cost millions of dollars to the taxpayer.
Some in government are capable of that. It's the leadership building the team and designing the political and business requirements that make it impossible.
> Facebook has decided to be unreasonable, irresponsible, and started blocking news.
Are they acting unreasonably though? There is a product, and the government rules it has a price. Isn't Facebook allowed to go, sorry, I don't like that price?
If you analyze news as a product, it’s entirely reasonable for Facebook to refuse a price they don’t think is worth it. If you analyze news as something more like “a right to information” - “integral to the function of democracy”, as it was taught to me in school - then it does start to look unreasonable. The Canadian government is simply equivocating between these two analyses as it suits them (one could ask, if access to news is so important, whether it’s irresponsible and unreasonable for a government to try to charge a fee for it).
Even if you think newspapers are vital to democracy, that doesn't oblige other businesses to sell newspapers. These newspapers own their own distribution mechanisms (websites) that are unaffected by the decision of one third party website to part ways with them.
Okay, but facebook is really ubiquitous so that makes it different... How is this any different from... the one grocery store in town removing their newspaper rack? It's the one grocery store, everybody in town shops there so that makes it super important or something. But the newspapers are still free to mail their newspaper to everybody's front door. They still have their websites too, anybody who wants to read those newspapers can still do so.
It is, however, an interesting hypothetical to ask: if journalism itself is entirely unprofitable, such that all the newspaper companies eventually shut down, and private journalism stops being done — then what should we, as a public, do to retain our duty to be informed? Can there be such a thing as "non-partisan state-sponsored media"?
> Can there be such a thing as "non-partisan state-sponsored media"?
You can add enough layers of indirection and semi-elected committees and cultural expectations to make it mostly non-partisan (Think the process for awarding government-funded research grants)[1], but a government devoted to turning it into a partisan organ can, with enough effort, eventually corrupt any such system.
That's why you need to push back, and punish governments that are trying to shift cultural expectations that prevent weaponization of various public institutions.
[1] The incentives for corrupting this are far greater for media than they are for science, so I can't expect it will work well in practice. PBS, NPR, CBC, BBC are always a political football for this reason.
> If you analyze news as something more like “a right to information” - “integral to the function of democracy”,
I don't get it - in this analysis would my local coffee shop have to buy and provide free newspapers to me?
I'm all for access to free press being a fundamental right. Where you lose me is the part where a private corporation is supposed to subsidize the production of news for me.
Between 1949 and 1987, US private companies were forced to pay for and produce high quality news content under guidelines set by the federal government.
One of the conditions of ABC, CBS and NBC being given access to the airwaves was that they had to produce and distribute high quality news broadcasts. News was considered a public good.
From wikipedia:
The fairness doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows, or editorials. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing views but required that contrasting viewpoints be presented. The demise of this FCC rule has been cited as a contributing factor in the rising level of party polarization in the United States.
This is because the technology of the time severely limited the number of available channels. You’ve enumerated only three, but there weren’t many more than that. Clearly there are more than three points of view, so these laws helped balance things out until the technology for more channels arrived.
“The technology of that time severely limited the number of available channels (broadcast channels being six megahertz wide due to severe interference etc)” is actually very comparable to “the market forces of our time severely limits the number of available distributors (network effects mean everyone is on Facebook and Twitter)”. To a government this is genuinely a strong argument for fairness doctrines.
I personally don’t think the Canadian laws are like fairness doctrines, to me they are more like rent-seeking on valuable Canadian eyeballs, but if the Canadian government does see their laws as something like fairness doctrines, they have a pretty good case for it!
Canada is a pretty small market. Google and Meta have come in and (perhaps unintentionally) destroyed the tiny Canadian news media sector.
I don't think it unreasonable that these companies, (largest on earth), pay a tiny fraction of a percentage of their Canadian revenue to help support that sector.
Without our own news media, we are particularly vulnerable to the toxic influence of American right wing media, billionaire funded astro-turf media and any other foreign entity that wishes to push their agenda.
There's this understanding of rights that implies that the government/some other entity has to provide everyone willing with the object of the right.
Usually applied to healthcare, education and sometimes dwelling, errors out on right to bear arms.
Even still, typically that looks like - if you run a hospital you have to treat everyone who comes in. It does not usually mean you as a private citizen are required to run a hospital if you dont want to. You are still allowed to shutdown your hospital.
> errors out on right to bear arms.
Lol, in canada that is definitely not a right you have.
But your local coffee shop probably does have a newspaper rack, so why is Facebook removing theirs such a big deal? Grab a newspaper the next time you get coffee. I don't use any meta property at all and it hasn't impeded my ability to read the news.
It might be worthwhile to point out which bits of an analogy you take objection with when trying to refute an analogy. Meta is not my local coffee shop, but for the sake of the argument it might be fine to interchange them. If it's not fine to compare them as such, pointing out what aspects you think break the comparison is helpful, since it lets others in the discussion try to come up with a better argument/analogy and elevate the discussion overall.
Full disclosure, that's not the National Post saying this. That's a quote from Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez.
The way you are quoting the remark, some might assume this is the National Post saying this when it's really NP quoting someone else. This isn't to imply you are misrepresenting anything.
> Isn't Facebook allowed to go, sorry, I don't like that price?
It really depends on the laws involved. If the government decides Facebook accepting certain terms is the cost of business, then Facebook doesn't get a say in it. Kind of like taxes. If you want to operate in a country, you're taxed accordingly. In general, you don't get to not pay a tax just because you don't want to.
Basically, if the law allows, they can. Reasonability doesn't have a lot to do with things at the upper levels of government.
This isn't a tax though. This is mandating that company A sell company B's product, and also pay a set price, which may or may not be a fair price. Should a company be willing to happily go out of business because they are not allowed to sell at a fair market price?
This is actually a step further into absurdity since Facebook is not selling news articles, they are merely linking them. Its the equivalent of the Government telling me I need to pay Nike $5 every time I say the word Nike to someone.
A tax to fund a newspaper subsidy would make sense. This isn't a tax. It's mandated commerce. We usually restrict that for protecting protected classes.
No, the entire complaint about Facebook and Google is the links themselves. It's not anything about embedding articles (which I don't think either company does). They just show the headline and article metadata provided by the news publishers.
There are places where they embed the news itself, but that’s a separate issue that’s already been resolved - they pay the publishers for that. Ironically, one of the results of bill C 18 is that those existing deals will get cancelled.
The text of the bill includes "indexing" and "ranking" as equivalent to displaying. So even making them searchable (with just links) would cost FB/G.
Also, the thumbnail/blurb is usually in the html head tag for use like this. You can literally set it to "click through to learn more" instead of a summary and FB would respect that.
Yes. These advertising companies extract the excess wealth created by the labour of the news-reporting media without compensation. The people of Canada decided that this is unfair and not in their best interest. The advertising companies decided it is not in their best interest to pay the cost of leverage that resource for their wealth-extraction strategies and are going to discontinue it.
> These advertising companies extract the excess wealth created by the labour of the news-reporting media without compensation.
I can't tell if this is serious or sarcasm. If it is serious, can you explain how Facebook and Google are getting rich from including links to news web sites on their platforms? I haven't seen any evidence of this. On the contrary, platforms like Facebook drive a lot of traffic to news sites, which becomes ad revenue for the news publishers.
> The people of Canada decided that this is unfair
Is there some polling to support this assertion? People may want to "stick it to Big Tech" but most of the support for this policy has come from legacy media who think that it will bring in free money for them.
Close. Sharing it on Facebook means you’ll comment on the story on Facebook and not on the linked website hosting the comment. Facebook gets the linger time to show you more ads but the organization doing the actual reporting misses out.
Should HN owe money to the National Post for the very same reason? The argument is stupid and the only way the government could push for this solution is by guaranteeing they will restrict it to big corporations few people like.
> Isn't the issue that Facebook/Google don't just share the link, they share the content behind the link as well
The fundamental issue is they "stole" the classified section that paid for the content. (Secondarily, they commoditized the content by owning the discussion around it.)
All that said, this is a solution that only makes sense to folks in media. The right one is a tax that funds a subsidy for news.
> The right one is a tax that funds a subsidy for news.
The thing here though is that the Canadian government already does this. I really don't understand their logic with introducing this fee vs just raising the existing subsidy directly.
Me too. I think this law is ridiculous, but honestly I'm quite happy with all of its impacts. I view news link-sharing on social media as a negative for both news and social media. It drives news sites into hyping inflammatory and polarizing issues, and turns social media sites into a den of divisiveness and fearmongering. In the old days, Facebook was mostly photos, friends' statuses, event announcements, groups, and unsolicited poetry. If this is a step in that direction, then great!
And as for Google, if this helps people realize that other search engines actually exist, that's great too!
All unrelated to what the bill was actually aiming for, of course.
Specifically because it's meta, even though it's where a lot of people consume media? How else is the government supposed to inform people that don't watch TV or listen to radio?
Honestly, I'd bet that the overlap of FB's current demographics and people who listen to radio/TV is pretty high.
The gov't of Canada has ad spends on bus stops, billboards, cinemas, newspapers, Spotify... I've even seen them on mobile games. If I was Pablo, I wouldn't be very much concerned about the reach of Gov't of Canada ads.
Canadian political parties, when in power (and it's not a partisan thing, they both do it) see fit to "advertise" their party under a thin veil of pretending to advertise government programs. The example that immediately comes to mind (despite my distain for the current government) is the former government who circa 2008 had advertising everywhere for their "economic action plan" and how it was helping us. It was partisan garbage paid for by taxpayers. They all do it.
The government needs to get out messages to its citizens. If ads on facebook is more cost effective than sending out mailers or whatever, why shouldn't they spend money on facebook ads?
Because our government doesn't understand technology and generally gets fleeced anytime they encounter it.
Remember the Phenix pay system? It was an IBM project that was supposed to save us 70 million a year, instead they paid IBM an additional 2+ BILLION to try and fix the broken crap they'd delivered. Never even worked, they're currently taking bids to replace it already.
80% of public servants had pay issues, many were foreclosed on because they couldn't pay their mortgages, someone even killed themselves.
And we expect the Canadian government to accurately determine ROI on digital ad spend? That's hard enough for skilled people in the space (some who have found it to have no effect altogether). Our government is simply going to be fleeced for every penny they have (and then some).
Remember, these are the same people who shut down the CRA website every night. Can't even access your tax info after hours.
> Remember the Phenix pay system? It was an IBM project that was supposed to save us 70 million a year, instead they paid IBM an additional 2+ BILLION to try and fix the broken crap they'd delivered. Never even worked, they're currently taking bids to replace it already.
Do you really believe that this was a result of bad in-the-moment decision-making at all levels, instead of a result of being trapped by previously-negotiated long-term vendor exclusivity agreements?
(In my experience, governments are generally good at cutting their losses — they're far more rational re: the sunk-cost fallacy than individual people are. So it would be surprising to me if this were true.)
The people don’t believe in paying for competence in government employees. Then they are shocked and outraged when bottom 10% compensation leads to bottom 10% performance. If you want to hire someone to do product management for a nine figure government project maybe you should pay more than $90k to the product manager if you want it to be managed properly. The government gets exactly what it pays for in these roles.
If social media platforms can identify certain demographics, like those who smoke cigarettes, then why wouldn't the government use that to (e.g.) target 'Would you like help to quit smoking?' program availability ads to them?
Social media companies are really in business of personal data collection. Based on younger generation being so switched on about news I think 'news' are really being force fed into your social feed (rather than you fetching the news). Governments spending tax payer money with these companies are really approving this sort of unethical behavior.
Goodness gracious how dumb can you be? "If you want to profit off of our news articles you have to pay us some of it!" and then, predictably, these news organizations become irrelevant overnight because nobody can see their news. Now, they want to claim Facebook is blocking news? Do these people hear themselves?
As much as I dislike Meta I'm 100% in agreement with them on this. They're being shaken down for money.
> “We’ve met both Google and Meta multiple times to better understand the concerns. We believe we have a path forward and we’re willing to continue talking with the platforms,” Rodriguez said. “We’re convinced what Google is asking at this moment can be done through regulations.”
This here is the most concerning part. The government is making shady back room deals with large corporations. If I had to guess the nature of the deals is "we won't enforce anything or make you pay anything if you agree to ensure that stories that paint the government in an unfavorable light don't stick around."
Even if that's not what the deal is like now that is what it is going to turn into.
If you believe in the force is only justified in response to force principle, what force is Facebook using against Canadian broadcasters to justify being forced to pay a ransom?
the retaliation is a bit... 2010s. don't they know people have moved on from this kind of thing?
if you're advertising dollars are being wasted and this is just your political song and dance, that's one thing. but if this somehow drops revenue for ottawa in the long run then google and fb will forever use this as a pitchfork to milk cash from any other city
Although I confess I haven't completely kept up with this development (meaning, what I am about to say may be entirely due to my own lack of relevant knowledge in this case), I have noticed that there are occasional references made to a similar law that was passed in Australia (last year?).
Well, I'm surprised that no one's brought up a similar case that occurred in the EU and which focused primarily on Google's news aggregation service, rather than Meta's.
One significant difference was that the publisher/holding company initiated and won the lawsuit against Google at the national level (see for example this EFF article from 2014: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/12/google-news-shuts-shop... ). From what I vaguely remember about the case, Google's ability to shut down its news service in Spain only (while keeping it running in neighboring countries) was what ultimately allowed it to demonstrate that the news aggregation service had benefitted the publishers rather than costing them revenue, because once they halted their aggregation service in Spain only, Internet traffic to the publications affected was substantially reduced. I assume the lawsuits in Australia and now Canada were initiated on a similar premise, i.e. that Google, et al. Were negatively impacting revenue, rather than bolstering it by referring additional traffic beyond what they would otherwise receive. In other words,
In the European case, what happened next was that publishers, realizing they couldn't win at the national level (actually, they couldn't reasonably win at any level, since their principal claim had already been invalidated at the national level) took it up to the EU level. They still wanted to be paid of course, regardless of the validity of their allegation, so they figured that if they could get a law (or amendment) passed at the EU Commission level, then this would be binding for all member states--and Google's only response would be to shut down their aggregation service completely in the EU, or accept the demand to play for each news article headline/summary that was hosted on their site.
The amendment that was ultimately passed was something quite byzantine as well, since it forbade any exceptions (to prevent Google from only hosting headlines that came from blogs or other, relatively unknown news services that were prepared to "forego" revenue (due to Google reducing their visitor count, as claimed), in return for the privilege of receiving tons of exposure for being hosted on Google's aggregator. The idea was (IIRC) was that there would be a pool of funds that would be disproportionately divided based on the relative portion of total traffic that each site received--which, needless to say, benefitted the big and well known publishers, while hurting the smaller ones (blogs) that didn't receive much money from this pool, but was still forced by law to participate in this scheme.
Which brings me to the final point: if the law that was passed in Canada has anything in common with the EU law (ie to force Google to pay their "fair share"), then the case against Meta/Facebook is a legal extortion racket, sanctioned by the government.
There were numerous articles, legal opinions, etc posted around that time, several by the EFF (again, based on my vague recollection).
What you quoted seems to refer to what the Liberal Party of Canada itself was spending, and the article makes it sound like they plan to continue buying ads going forward.
Farther down in the article, it also mentions recent spending by the federal government (rather than just the Liberal Party itself), and that amount is significantly larger.
Seeding control of the mainstream media narrative over this silly law is going to have hilarious implications for the future of the Canadian government.
Most importantly, it's now 10x harder to control the narrative and for the government to manufacture consent.
