Some reflections on the Australian experience and what they might mean for Canada.
After Google’s move on Thursday, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez sent a written statement calling the companies’ moves “deeply irresponsible and out of touch … especially when they make billions of dollars off of Canadian users” with advertising.
Australia’s regulatory experiment – the first of its kind in the world – also got off to a rocky start, but it has since seen tech companies, news publishers and the government reach a middle ground.
If you are relying on Google and Meta/Facebook for news you are already not doing news correctly.
They want to make an example of Canada… When companies have enough power to even think about trying and make an example out of a country then they need to be dismantled or, even better, nationalized because it means they’re important enough to be considered utilities.
At this point I would support not backing down purely to set an example of our own.
Exactly. There are obvious problems with this conundrum and the government’s move is not ideal but then the situation we’re in is also not ideal. The implications of leaving it unmitigated are eating into our democracy and without a functioning democracy, there’s no functioning world wide web. And so as a firm supporter of the WWW, I find myself having to stick for our government and our media oligopoly (🤢) on this one even if it’s not ideal from the WWW lens. It feels a bit like chemotherapy. We have to do it even if we harm some systems because otherwise many more systems will go. 🤷
Google and Meta are not the internet. They think it belongs to them and act like it’s their kingdom. But they’re wrong.
If the Canadian government were smart, they’d start a massive campaign to encourage Canadians to move to using RSS readers for all their news – Google and Meta would lose their freaking minds, as it would let people read headlines and news summaries without even visiting their landing pages (less ad impressions) … hit 'em where it hurts!
Edit: Clarifying my thinking … maybe the Canadian government could propose to let Google et al. serve Canadian media outlet’s stories through their search sites… but only if they committed to supporting RSS/Atom feeds of the same articles. This would force them to open up their data a bit and make alternatives to visiting their sites more viable.
There is no way the general public would adopt RSS. The barrier to entry is just too high right now. Technology that delivers news needs to be idiot-proof and require basically 1-2 steps
Eg:
- click on the blue-green swirl
- type “Facebook”
Or:
- turn TV on
- change channel to news
Don’t get me wrong, RSS is great, but it’s also used exclusively by the computer-literate and it has been that way for basically 25 years.
RSS does not necessarily mean clunky UI and difficult to use. There are some pretty beautiful podcast apps with great content discovery features out there :)
No reason a news app that reads RSS needs to be more complicated than opening Facebook.
The government should be providing basic communication services. It’s criminal that private companies like Twitter are the de facto alert and information system for life saving government services. That kind of infrastructure needs to be socialized. Likewise we should have channels for publishing journalism that are not controlled by private capital.
I 100% agree with you.
It’s crazy that our gov is even using Facebook or Twitter for advertising their message. Why not use the fediverse instead ?!
This is what I did on Friday. Took 20 minutes and set up a feedly account. It’s just like I did with Reddit a few weeks ago. Set up a Lemmy account, and moved on with my life. We can easily adapt.
Interesting, this is the first I heard of feedly. I did the same thing. Lemmy and I used some RSS reader from fdroid. Feedly app has pretty bad ratings… How are you liking it?
Google and Meta will cave just like they did with Australia.
