1y ago

Canada says Google will pay $74 million annually to Canadian news industry under new online law

www.independent.co.uk Canada says Google will pay $74 million annually to Canadian news industry under new online law

Canada’s government says it has reached a deal with Google for the company to contribute $100 million Canadian dollars annually to the country’s news industry

Canada says Google will pay $74 million annually to Canadian news industry under new online law::Canada’s government says it has reached a deal with Google for the company to contribute $100 million Canadian dollars annually to the country’s news industry

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Obligatory fuck Facebook.
But reminder that laws like this would require link aggregator sites like Lemmy (or instance owners more specifically), to pay money simply for hosting links to news sites. Terrible law imo.
I think it's reasonable to require fees for rehosting an article or pictures on your web page, but charging just to have a url link is totally antithetical to the structure of the internet. If anything those links drive traffic to news websites, where they are free to host advertisements or require subscriptions.
Edit: as below this particular law won't affect lemmy servers. I still disagree with the idea that posting a hyperlink alone to a website should cost money.
- The Canadian law in question has specific provisions in it that would pass any lemmy instance by.
  — Companies impacted by the Online News Act must have global annual revenue of $1 billion or more, “operate in a search engine or social-media market distributing and providing access to news content in Canada,” and have 20 million or more Canadian average monthly unique visitors or average monthly active users.
  source (archive)
  That's literally half the country, by the way.
  There was never any chance this law was going to impact any lemmy instances.
  
  The astroturf is strong with these people.
  The only groups affected by this law are the obscenely wealthy. It amounts to whining about having to pay more fair share. There are dozens of ways to see that happen; perhaps this isn’t the most efficient, but you won’t see me crying for Google, Meta, Twitter, or any other social media giant.
  
  True, thank you for pointing that out. I still disagree with the idea that you should have to pay to link to another web site. If they're rehosting content from that website, like an article summary or picture, than absolutely. A link alone makes no sense, that's driving traffic to that website. In any other business you'd be paying for referrals/finder fees for new customers, not the other way around.
  
  Yeah, I fully agree. The goal of most websites is to get linked by Google, the argument that Google should then have to pay for giving the websites what they want anyways is weird.
  I also don't feel like the argument that it's ok just because it targets wealthy companies changes whether the actual law makes sense or not.
  
  The problem is not link aggregation, it’s the fact that most of those covered by it actively attempt to keep you from visiting the site. Google for instance, usually throws the main hook of articles into a summary, or moves you to an amp page which isn’t actually beneficial to the news site as they get no revenue for it. Similarly, Facebook is taking active steps to keep you on site and never visiting the news site in question.
  So it’s not “just hosting a link” as you are putting it, it’s “hosting a link, while actively going to great lengths to never actually let the end user go to the site.”
  
  AMP is something web sites opt into by building an AMP version of their site. The fact that you're saying an AMP page is diverting traffic from a site makes me think you're not qualified to talk about this stuff.
  
  AMP is something websites opt into, absolutely. However opting out has a major potential to hurt your placement on search results. AMP is also limited in what kinda of ad formats it can serve. Want to take a guess at which work best? Google Adsense. Most other forms of advertisement just aren’t compatible, which can directly effect ad revenue.
  Edit: Just realized I previously said “no revenue” which is incorrect because it can still produce revenue. So while “no revenue” is absolutely possible, it isn’t guaranteed. That’s what I get for using generalizations though.

15 comments