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.
@StillPaisleyCat I could not be less worried. Did anything really undesirable happen in Australia after similar legislation?
Some deals are made, some cash flows differently and soon enough things are pretty much the same as before.
That’s one of the points in the article - despite the dire comments from the two corporations, almost everyone expects it to settle down.
@StillPaisleyCat Yeah it makes total sense. I do wonder if that’s superficial analysis and there is really something important to do differently from Australia.
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. 🤷
I am curious about what is that middle ground?
It’s called negotiation. What Canada is doing is not that. They are demanding unbounded amounts of money.
In Australia they ended up negotiating a price that worked for both sides. No doubt a predictable among each year too.
The proposed regulations haven’t even been published for consultation yet.
The bill received royal assent last week, but I guess it leaves it open for specific implementations. Google and Meta oppose the whole thing. https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/news/2023/06/online-news-act-receives-royal-assent.html
Yes, which is literally why Google said they are preparing to remove links. They are not going to incur completely unknown penalties. In Australia Meta and others also pulled links for the same reason. It was only after they negotiated a price that worked for both sides that they came back. If I ran Google or Meta I’d do exactly the same thing.
God I hope we can stand our ground. We need a domino effect of countries to turn the tide, the first few will always be the hardest though.
Hopefully we change this law. Trying to charge people for links is incredibly bad. There is no need for any law. If the news sites want to get money for links they can just put all their articles behind a login gate and make them not scrapable.
Trying to charge people for links is incredibly bad.
Good thing the law isnt charging people but the richest and most powerful corporations on the planet!
News sites used to generate a lot of ad revenue. Now, Google and Facebook combine to receive 80% of all ad revenue. If you see an ad online, it’s likely Google or Facebook got paid for it.
But why do they make so much ad money? Because they host links to what people want. They’re making tens of billions simply by hosting links to the content of others, who aren’t making money anymore because advertisers give their money to the link hosters and not the content creators. This “link tax” is a way to ensure the content creators get their fair share. Google and Facebook don’t create content, they link to it. Why should they get all the money?
I have no sympathy for ad driven businesses. Let me buy access to ad free news and I’ll be interested. Fundamentally this is because the traditional news business model stopped working and they never bothered to update to a model that does work. Instead, they want to legislate that they get paid without even trying to adapt or improve.
