Canadian government suspends advertising on Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram
Canadian government suspends advertising on Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram
"Facebook has decided to be unreasonable, irresponsible, and started blocking news."
We appear to be standing our ground!
Not my preferred choice of source but NatPo has more detail than some of the alternatives I saw. It includes some numbers as well as comments about the difference between Meta's and Google's approaches. Hint: they're not the same, so there's already cracks in the effort to make an example out of Canada.
Now do Twitter. Not for this reason, but just because.
To the folks getting worked up about link taxing and proposing the solution of news paywalling themselves,
I'll speak for the like-minded side since I know I'm not alone in this. We were advocating against link taxes when we had this debate a decade ago when news threatened the survival of the emerging platforms. Back then the platforms weren't oligo/monopolies and the market power balance was very different. Today Meta has a monopoly on social media and Google does on search. Those are the two most common activities taken online. And with that the market power is firmly within the hands of the platforms. More importantly they have also monopolized the online advertising business. News do not have the required market power to paywall themselves and survive, especially not in Canada. The platforms, through little fault of their own have managed to take the revenue streams and to a large extend the position as platforms from news media. It's how things shook out. Unfortunately this platform success is self-destructive and we think in need of correction. A financial correction that can ensure the viability of news, which will ensure that platforms can keep profiting from it without destroying it, along our democracy with it. If we end up overcorrecting and as a result the platforms face the risk of failing, we'll have another discussion over that.
Link taxes only serve to strengthen the monopolies. News companies are now going to be dependent on Facebook and google (the only ones who have to pay) and news companies and governments will want to keep the status quo as much as possible.
A general tax on large tech companies going to something like the Canadian media fund is a lot more reasonable.
We can not afford to tie the sustainability of such a vital resource to the success of two specific monopolistic foreign corporations.
Yeah this is the problem with basing everything on ideology. Economic realities shift and suddenly someone's ideological stance on being against taxing links becomes support for oligopolistic billionaires avoiding paying taxes.
Ideally the Facebooks and the Googles of the world would just be broken up using anti-trust laws. But since they're US companies, the Government of Canada doesn't have the ability to do this. They have too much control over information and all that can be done about it within Canada is to tax them. Redistribute some of the money they make from their information control to others.
It's sad that they've managed to use their control over information to convince people that it's wrong for them to have to pay taxes.
Remember when companies had to PAY to get listed in the phone book, pay for for being discovered with ads?
WTF should google PAY news companies for posting links to them?
I can absolutely see good reason to have to pay for "content" such as images and summaries that may lower the number of clicks through to the news paper, but having to pay for every link is just absurd and as much as I have no love for FB or Google they are doing what is reasonable from their point of view.
https://www.davidgraham.ca/p/an-interim-proposal-for-media-subscriptions
Except their costs are exorbitant and eat the majority of the pie based solely on infrastructure and not the actual content creation. And there’s a palpable difference between “advertising your number in a phone book” and “having another company eat the majority of the profit on content you create.” Google and Facebook are not unlike Reddit; they don’t create value except by facilitating access to that value. Absolutely, they should earn something for that facilitation, but not the amount they’re currently earning.
“having another company eat the majority of the profit on content you create.” If they are summarizing and users don't need to click sure, but linking is a whole another level. If the media outlet can't survive with people ACTUALLY viewing the content on their site there is something wrong with the media outlets business.
According to Senator Peter Harder, the government expect Google and Meta to pay for as much as 30-35% of the news expenditures of Canadian news outlets as a result of Bill C-18. When the 25% labour journalism tax credit is added to the mix, that is as much as 60% of the costs of Canadian news covered by either the government or two foreign companies. Do you believe that is a healthy, sustainable approach?
So you have one company funding another to top them off to 60% of their costs covered?
During the Senate hearings, smaller Canadian media outlets such as Village Media warned that they would be forced to shut down due to Bill C-18 if Meta and Google exit the news market. Other such as Le Devoir cited data indicating that 70% of their website traffic comes from search and social media. How did you account for these risks? What do you say to Canadian media outlets who may be forced to shut down due to your legislation?
So if 70% of a sites traffic is coming from people actually clicking through Google and Facebook what are we solving for?
Long and short I would be very OK with the law demanding compensation for summaries but NOT for linking.. Linking is fundamental to discovering content and is essentially the phone book problem.
FB and Google DON'T get much value out of just a link.. Hence why they are SO willing to just turn it off.
Taking FB and Google out of the picture and assuming the internet had no search..
How would anyone find these media outlets? A list? ok if a list why would that list want to include news sites if it had to pay to include them?
Do you use an ad blocker? Do you go to news sites ? If so maybe YOU are the reason they are going out of business?
I strongly recommend the book "The Four" by Scott Galloway. He does an excellent job of breaking down how the Four Horsemen (Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook) destroy regional competition by leveraging their power as content gateways yet constantly skirt regulations that apply to broadcasters. Their cries of "we're not a broadcaster, we're just an aggregator" ring hollow when their algorithms determine what articles & headlines people see and they have shaped public opinion on various topics (e.g. elections, supreme court decisions, labour negotiations, public demonstrations, etc). He outlines how Google outmaneuvered the NYT and became the defacto gateway to all journalistic content because they were able to freely link to content created by others, while still putting an editorial spin on stories through their aggregation (eg should the story talking about "BLM protestors" appear before or in place of the story about "counter-racism demonstators" (narrator: they are the same story).
Might have to check that out.
Keep in mind my main opinion is that the LAW is written so broad and bad that it would essentially penalize any competitor to google or Facebook as a linking source.
The internet is literally based on linking, way back Netscape Navigator was THE BROWSER, and included a homepage with links to news and sites, then there was Yahoo, another mostly LIST based site.
Facebook doesn't really go out and link news, users share news they discover with others, IE word of mouth.
Any manipulation of rank I see as a separate issue, however this bill seems to convolute the two of them. Might be better as a separate bill about search bias, one about content summarization and lets drop the whole pay per link thing.
Like many bills that have GOOD parts we have to look at the whole and many bills and laws are just turd sandwiches..
skirt regulations that apply to broadcasters.
In fairness, they are probably more like newspapers, which are also not subject to broadcasting laws. In fact, I was reading through some newspaper archives (early 1900s) the other day. The newspapers contained pages upon pages of:
"Mr. and Mrs. James Smith hosted friends from the next town over this past weekend. A good time was had by all."
It turns out Facebook was invented centuries ago.
Then all you have to do in order to see it through the other lens is to think content when you see link in this context. We know that the platforms don't do linking as in
<a href=...>Click here</a>. They all embed titles, summaries, pictures and sometimes whole pages. I think the conversation about linking in this context is a straw man. It's not about linking. Then overlay how profits are generated around it. The analogies fall apart and the problem emerges. In the end it comes down to profit or wealth redistribution and priorities. For a while money has been flowing away from news and into platforms. We need to shift money back from platforms to news. If the platforms paid reasonable taxes, maybe we could redistribute it from there to the news. Except platforms don't pay reasonable taxes. In this case it's either coming out of citizens pockets, a new net subtraction, or it's gotta come from the platforms' pockets. We seem to have made the right choice to take it out of the platforms. We're going about doing that.Mind you, the conversation about the accessibility of quality news content across the classes of society is distinctly separate from this and worth having. Depending on how much we are able to get from the platforms back into the news, we may be able to decrease the cost of access for everyone. If you're concerned about that, you should be rooting for higher numbers rather than lower.
undefined> They all embed titles, summaries, pictures and sometimes whole pages. I think the conversation about linking in this context is a straw man.
I personally think it is the most dangerous aspect of the law and a major over reach and makes it costly poison for any popular site to link to Canadian news content even without a summary.
For a while money has been flowing away from news and into platforms. We need to shift money back from platforms to news. If the platforms paid reasonable taxes, maybe we could redistribute it from there to the news
Other than CBC, news has always been a subscription / pay service.. It seems people are not willing to pay for that now.. Other than CBC our taxes SHOULD NOT be going to Bell, Corus, Rogers, Quebecor, double check and note that Canadian monopolies OWN nearly all the news outlets in Canada.
Essentially what you are proposing is Canadians give MORE to these Canadian monopolies both from tax payers and from other businesses (all popular web platforms that link to them as the law is written)
We know that the platforms don’t do linking as in
<a href=...>Click here</a>. They all embed titles, summaries, pictures and sometimes whole pages.There isn't a trivial way to get those without media companies going out of their way to provide the information. If I go over to that article on nationalpost.com, I see multitudes of OpenGraph tags, such as
<meta content="Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram" property="og:title"/><meta content="https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/nationalpost/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Pablo-Rodriguez-1.jpg" property="og:image"/>. OpenGraph, to be clear, is a protocol created by Facebook to standardize how web pages appear on their platform. If National Post wants links to their content to look like your example, that is entirely in their hands. Heck, it's less work.(Of course, they won't do that, because that would be stupid. They'd rather make an embarrassing attempt to extort Facebook for free money because they have realized advertising is doomed and they don't know what to do about it).
They all embed titles, summaries, pictures and sometimes whole pages.
I see the title and picture on facebook, but I don't see a summary or the whole page. I see a comment from the publisher, which sometimes gives away the article, but that's up to the publisher.
Yeah, why should Google pay for something other people produced that Google is monetizing. It's just MADNESS when you come out and say it like that...
The trouble here is Canadian News outlets want their cake and eat it to.
The Canadian government on behalf of Canadian News outlets is telling social media platforms like Facebook/google/instagram/twitter/Lemmy? And search engines? that they cannot benefit over the hard work of Candian News outlets.
Where this is at play is when you see news on one of these social platforms that is summarized and posted directly on that social platform, (think your Google feed, Facebook wall, twitter feed) thus users do not need to go to the News Outlets website directly and generate add revenue for the News Outlets. This is the profit loss for the News outlets and why they are pushing/pushed for this.
Where the Canadian government and Canadian News Outlets are "overreaching" IMO is telling these social platforms that even direct links to the News Outlets Website are not allowed unless the social media sites and search engines pay for the link.
This means as a Internet user you will no longer see links or summarized Canadian articles anywhere on the web including your search engines. Unless you make a effort to go to the News site directly.
A little anecdotal here.
What I find bonkers is News outlets pay to have their newspapers sit in a convenience store, so that individuals can grab the paper, pay for it, and read it.
So by this similarly, though very simplistic, I would think of the social media platforms and serach engines as the "convince stores", and the requirements being that News Outlets should pay to display their links in said "stores". This way when users click on the links the news outlets get their add revenue on their site, thus the customer "pays" for the articles indirectly with shown adds.
This would mean Canadians still see Canadian News, and News outlets get their cut as it's only viewable on their new sites directly. Not summarized buy the social platforms.
Just my two cents.
I mean, I can't seem to be against this. So, good? I guess people who solely get their news from here will get further pulled into American news spheres and will need to make more of an effort to view Canadian news. Let's be honest, majority of people won't do that. Let's see though.
Those people are just incidentally being exposed to news articles that their social minders are specifically selecting to manipulate them. They aren't really going there to consume news, it's just a thing that happens to them when they are there. I think that anyone who is actively consuming news and for some reason has not gone elsewhere will be strongly encouraged to finally do so...
Liberal government finally does something for the people. Though if they owned stock in meta they would have done nothing like they have done nothing about the housing crisis and people washing and parking their money through Canadas real estate market. I wonder if the NDP would of done better overall. But I'm just venting.
Housing is under provincial and municipal jurisdiction.
The federal government insures housing so people are able to get mortgages, which they didn't before that because banks didn't want anything to do with that type of loans. If you want the market to crash it's because you don't realize that everyone will pay the bill indirectly if that happens, from having to cover the insurance to having to pay services for people having no retirement anymore.
Who's responsibility is to prevent illegal funds from being washed through Canadian housing market? Probably not any politicians since most of them are invested in this bubble. Yeah I guess the solution is for everyone to have their fund drained by the market and for Canada to experience brain drain. I guess that's another long term plan, I'm sure this won't cause large social instability at some point when people get very tired for paying 4k a month for a 20 year old apartment.
An upside down world where people are reliant on social media for news. Then becoming upset when they have to be told it's a bad thing.
This is why I voted Liberal last time around -- we've FINALLY arrived.
We could've done a bit better.. cough TekSavvy sale.. cough, but I'll take what we can get.
Crazy idea. How about we force the government to only advertise with the news companies?
Unfortunately that may lead to a bit of a monopoly and advertisements would cost an arm and a leg.
However I would be all for that though, because the more an advertisement costs the less profit it will bring in and therefore less advertisements overall.
I just think they ought to know how it feels to be forced to subsidize an industry, out of their own pocket, against their will.
Government: You're making money off of other people writing articles. We're going to make you pay for doing that.
Meta: Okay, we'll stop that.
Government: No, that's not what we wanted. We wanted you to pay the money to our industry friends. No tax-funded ads for you!
Party Official: We're still good, right? We want a fighting chance at winning an election still.
Failing newspaper: The government is standing strong...