Meta leaving Canada entirely would be a win in my books as we see the influence of weaponized stupidity crossing the border.
“Meta’s practices are clearly designed to discipline Canadian news companies, prevent them from participating in and accessing the advertising market, and significantly reduce their visibility to Canadians on social media channels,” the CBC said in a joint statement with the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and News Media Canada, a trade organization that represents newspapers.
Isn’t the argument for C-18 that the advertising market isn’t doing the news organizations much good anyway?
And as far as their visibility on social media channels, the news organization created this problem for themselves in the first place by encouraging people to share their work on social media; if they’d focused on making sure people know where to find them instead of posting all their work maybe their sites would be getting more traffic. They tried a business strategy, it didn’t work out, and now instead of coming up with a better strategy they’re trying to force Meta and Google to give them money and make the bad strategy work.
Canadians expect tech giants to follow the law in our country.
The law says Meta and Google have to pay to carry news; it doesn’t say they have to carry news. Maybe the law should have been written without that gaping hole?
Canadian news companies: Lobbies government to mandate royalties for news being shared on social media platforms.
Social media platforms: Stops sharing the news created by Canadian news companies.
Canadian news companies:
I think it’s worth noting that news organizations are struggling not because less people are reading news but rather because advertising is so cheap now. When newspapers were the only advertising source they could charge high prices. Then TV came out which hurt them, but this was balanced by TV spending some money on journalism. Now with the internet the prices newspapers can charge for advertising is sooo much less than they could previously.
Anyway, I think it’s worth noting this because there’s this narrative that news organizations helped build up social media (and maybe deserve a cut). I mean really, how many people decided to make an Instagram account or Facebook account because CBC happened to have a page they could follow? Of the people I know who use Facebook or Instagram, none use it for news. This also means that utilizing social media to drive traffic may still be a good strategy - if the government hadn’t effectively blocked that.
Isn’t the argument for C-18 that the advertising market isn’t doing the news organizations much good anyway?
The officially stated reason for Bill C-18 is to give news organizations in Canada balanced negotiating power with entities like Facebook.
Which, I guess, was successful. Facebook has been pushed away from the bargaining table as it no longer feels like it holds dominance over it.
But now the news companies are saying that’s not good enough. They want more power than Facebook has.
I am so tired of the competition bureau, they are so fucking useless. Can’t they investigate the literal cartels we have that are sucking all of our money with outrageous prices? Like the same cartels that everyone has to use because they are essential in 2023? Groceries and telecoms?
This action/article is for PR purposes, nothing more.
CBC’s lawyers already know that Meta’s approach to compliance with Bill C-18 does not violate the Competition Act. They also know that the Competition Bureau does not have the power to compel this change in business practice, largely because the same owners of Canada’s media conglomerates (and other small-pond corporations like Weston, etc.) have lobbied governments for decades to render the Bureau powerless.
Here is the Competition Bureau’s actual powers. All they can do is request (not demand/compel) compliance from Meta for the purpose of gathering information, which they turn over to the Public Prosecution Service of Canada for consideration. However, Meta has removed links to Canadian news sites from its private platforms in order to comply with the impending legislation. There’s no case for prosecution here, in other words.
Furthermore, not only do Canadians distrust our news media, but we’re also increasingly not reading news on social media. The only beneficiaries of Bill C-18 are legacy media companies accustomed to the Canadian government bailing them out. Remember the $600m taxpayer-funded bailout in 2019, which media companies like CBC, Postmedia, etc. have already squandered? Remember when the Competition Bureau allowed American hedge funds to purchase Postmedia, load it with debt, and then gut its newsroom and fire journalists to continue delivering quarterly returns? If the Competition Bureau does not regard these practices and similar examples across the country’s media landscape as harmful to Canadian media, then nothing is sacred.
CBC, Postmedia, etc. only have themselves to blame for this mess.
Lol, what do they expect to be done about this? Is the government supposed to force Facebook to show their content, yet also pay to do it? I hate Facebook but I’m so glad they’re doing this because link taxes are fucking stupid.
Yeah, I am not Canadian so I’m sure there’s some information/nuance I don’t understand here, but from what I can tell from looking at a few articles from different sources:
-
Canadian government passes a law that would require Facebook to pay and/or share ad revenue for every link out (posted by the media outlet, not by Facebook) to an external news website
-
Facebook says they don’t want to do that, and will stop showing news links to comply with the law
-
Canadian government says “no not like that” and now wants to force them to allow links to news outlets, which de facto forces them to pay/share revenue with those media outlets
Like I said, I’m assuming there may be something I’m missing here, so please any kind Canadians who can help fill in the blanks would be appreciated
You’ve got the just of it. Their argument is that meta benefits as the post w/ the the link and preview is content they use in their feed to keep users engaged. Presumably in said feed they’d also insert ads.
This would also apply to any user posting a link to an article, not just the news agencies.
(Not arguing with you, just with the concept of the bill)
Doesn’t the news outlet benefit from the traffic and clicks generated from that user engagement?
What’s the government’s rationale for social media platforms to subsidize media outlets monetarily in addition to driving people to their content?
I would hope it’s on the basis of the news sites not actually receiving any user engagement due to users summarizing the article and therefore allowing people to “read” it without reading it.
The other option is they want news companies to have their cake and eat it too. Apparently, that worked out for Australia though—albeit in an asinine and behind-closed-doors sort of way.
Oh no offense taken, I also don’t get it. Like you said, I think amounts to forcing private companies to subsidize an industry
It’s more about forcing private companies to pay for the use of other private companies work.
I do believe some Canadian industries should be subsidized by private interests because they’re just selling our own resources back to us, and they should pay for the privilege (while still receiving some profits). Telecom, utilities, energy, farms over certain capacities etc.
News Probaby shouldn’t be one. I’m more than happy with government funded news so long as its independent of government and held to a higher standard than “entertainment” like we have with our neighbours to the south. This forces private news to compete with a competent news source, and it’s not like the business model for news has really changed by much, selling ad space next to information, or offering subscriptions is as old as information sharing.
Because most people don’t click, they just read the summary of the article in their feed. They’re claiming that aggregators don’t share revenue from summarized articles.
It’s not the government that wants to force them, it’s the media outlets that lobbied for this law in the first place that are trying to claw back a win after they called a bluff and lost.
Yes, the government is also upset about the outcome despite being warned about it beforehand, but they know that Facebook hasn’t broken any laws.
-
I don’t like the idea of link taxes myself.
But even setting aside the question of whether link taxes are a good idea, I don’t understand why they’re making a – what to me sounds dubious – antitrust argument. It seems like a simply bizarre angle.
If the Canadian government wants news aggregators to pay a percentage of income to news companies, I would assume that they can just tax news aggregators – not per link to Canadian news source, but for operating in a market at all – take the money and then subsidize Canadian news sources. It may or may not be a good idea economically, but it seems like it’d be on considerably firmer footing than trying to use antitrust law to bludgeon news aggregators into taking actions that would trigger a link tax by aggregating Canadian news sources.
Man, I hate Meta with a passion, but it’s hilarious watching the slow motion train wreck this amateur-hour legislation has become.
Lol not a fan of Facebook or Meta but forcing any entity to provide a service they don’t want to provide especially if it’s not being done in a discriminatory way seems dubious. Legacy media are reaping what hath been sown.
This is really pretty sad coming from the CBC, and highlights how badly they’ve lost the plot on social media.
The CBC’s always been a relatively early adopter of digital technologies, including social media, as they chase their mandate to offer as easy access as possible to Canadians. But somewhere in there, they went from being on social media to – like seemingly all of mainstream journalism today – becoming reliant on social media. They baked Facebook and Twitter into their actual operating strategies. Now, they’ve found themselves feeling mistreated by the tools they internalized, and seemingly unwilling to just let. The fuck. Go.
Facebook doesn’t need news media, but the news media doesn’t need Facebook, either. None of this would be happening right now if Facebook and Twitter were major generators of ad revenue for the media companies. Maybe they were, at one point in time, and they’ve since felt the pinch of enshitification, but that means the paradigm has shifted, and it’s time for them to get up off of their fucking knees and do something else.
Mastodon/Firefish/Akkoma are right there. RSS still exists. Some of these outlets are owned by absolutely massive media conglomorates that are, among other things, ISPs serving millions. They have the resources to change the way Canadians actually use the internet. They don’t need Facebook and Twitter.
They’re just addicted to them.
There is a word for forcing someone to work for you for free.
I dont want news on facebook. I signed up for facebook to keep up with friends, not corporations.
It’s a lose lose battle for News companies. You asked for it buddy. I’d feel sorry for you if you weren’t pushing some low-tier garbage “journalism” and propaganda for decades.
Yes, PLEASE think of our incredibly monopolized and bailed-out news corps, and the fact that I ONLY use Google
