They passed a law that said big companies have to PAY to post links to articles.
On the surface it was to go after places like Google News that would summarize an article, link to it for attribution, but people would rarely visit the original article fueling the advertisements that funded the media.
However to nobody’s surprise, the government cocked up the legislation for the problem. They made a law that required the to pay for links, so the big companies just went… Ok, no links, no bill.
Obviously they didn’t think this through, they wanted money to flow from Google/FB to Canadian media for a real problem, but in the effort to seek a way to tap the money for taxes, over legislated without understanding the problem and ended up with no links, no taxes.
This is pretty much what went wrong. It’s a legit problem when google presents a search result by parsing through an article, providing their own summary, and prevents a click. You can even see this on non news searches. You might search for something like what’s the largest river in eastern Europe, and it’ll return a result from a webpage half way down the webpage and show it as an excerpt (totally made up example). Now I don’t need to visit the website, preventing ad revenue.
When you simply post a link on something like Meta, the news organizations themselves are providing the summary you see when you post it. If they’re so damned worried about people not clicking links because their provided summary prevents you from reading the article, that isn’t Google or Meta’s fault. Change the snippet, or don’t provide one.
It’s insane that the media groups are now trying to say it’s anti competitive for meta to not allow people to post news articles now and are trying to force them to allow it. You must allow people to post links, and you must pay us if they do. It’s crazy talk.
I’m big on the hate Meta bandwagon and I despise using their service and rarely touch it, but this is all our governments fault. This didn’t have to turn out like this.
