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
Free linking is essential for the open web. You can link to anything at no cost. That’s especially important here too; no free linking, no Lemmy. Link taxes are hostile to that, and that’s exactly what this is. It might be good for journalism - though it’s probably just the big players that are going to seriously benefit - but it’s a bad precedent.
If it were just a link then there wouldn’t be any problem. Users would follow the link to the publisher’s web site. I think the problem is that facebook et al scrape the content and show cards and summaries and then user’s don’t visit the publisher’s web site. They’re getting paid for their content, for being linked.
I don’t think that was ever considered seriously as a solution though. The legislation is specifically about links. If they genuinely thought that Google was stealing their content, they’d go after them for copyright infringement. I’m not going to lose any sleep over Google paying Canadian news organizations, but this whole thing is a bit of a grift. And the news organizations know it’s a grift. It would be trivial for them to prevent Google from indexing them. They want those links and they need them. They make money from them – that’s why they have people on staff to do SEO. If those links are presented well, people are more likely to click them. I don’t think that needs much explanation. Even on here, if someone puts in the effort to have a good headline/title, image, and summary, I’m way more likely to click on the post and click through to the article. On the other hand, the news orgs would be fools not to accept $74 million in no-strings-attached money. What’s true for news organizations is also true for everyone else too though. Who among us wouldn’t be foolish to walk away from tens of millions of free dollars? The next in line now gets to say, “Why them and not us?”
Even baby steps toward a pay-to-play internet are steps in the wrong direction. This might not “break the internet” on it’s own but licensing links like copyrighted works is moving us along that path.
This law essentially gives special rights to corporate news websites. It allows them to have the benefits of being public source (indexing, sharing, previews, accessibility etc.) but they can choose not to bare the costs of public information. This shitty law should have been a copyright framework ammendment that applies to all IP but instead it’s a clear example of regulatory capture.
The World Wide Web is a web of links. Websites link to other websites. These publishers want to be paid when certain companies link to them. That’s an affront to a core functionality of the web.
If it were just a link then there wouldn’t be any problem. Users would follow the link to the publisher’s web site. I think the problem is that facebook et al scrape the content and show cards and summaries and then user’s don’t visit the publisher’s web site. They’re getting paid for their content, for being linked.
That’s the BS line publishers have been trying to trick people with but that extra stuff such as the lede and photo are explicitly provided by the publisher to enable rich preview cards/links. They literally add extra code in the page for that exact purpose. View source on any of their articles and you’ll see Open Graph metadata tags, which were created by Facebook.
They added code specifically so their links from Facebook would look better, and are now pretending like the rich preview cards are stealing their content.
Can you elaborate a bit?
I don’t really see how this is anti open web.
Free linking is essential for the open web. You can link to anything at no cost. That’s especially important here too; no free linking, no Lemmy. Link taxes are hostile to that, and that’s exactly what this is. It might be good for journalism - though it’s probably just the big players that are going to seriously benefit - but it’s a bad precedent.
As I replied to the other commenter:
I don’t think that was ever considered seriously as a solution though. The legislation is specifically about links. If they genuinely thought that Google was stealing their content, they’d go after them for copyright infringement. I’m not going to lose any sleep over Google paying Canadian news organizations, but this whole thing is a bit of a grift. And the news organizations know it’s a grift. It would be trivial for them to prevent Google from indexing them. They want those links and they need them. They make money from them – that’s why they have people on staff to do SEO. If those links are presented well, people are more likely to click them. I don’t think that needs much explanation. Even on here, if someone puts in the effort to have a good headline/title, image, and summary, I’m way more likely to click on the post and click through to the article. On the other hand, the news orgs would be fools not to accept $74 million in no-strings-attached money. What’s true for news organizations is also true for everyone else too though. Who among us wouldn’t be foolish to walk away from tens of millions of free dollars? The next in line now gets to say, “Why them and not us?”
Even baby steps toward a pay-to-play internet are steps in the wrong direction. This might not “break the internet” on it’s own but licensing links like copyrighted works is moving us along that path.
This law essentially gives special rights to corporate news websites. It allows them to have the benefits of being public source (indexing, sharing, previews, accessibility etc.) but they can choose not to bare the costs of public information. This shitty law should have been a copyright framework ammendment that applies to all IP but instead it’s a clear example of regulatory capture.
What do you mean they can choose not to bear the costs of public information?
Every law ever created should have been better
People opposed to a link tax are opposed to the concept, not the implementation.
The World Wide Web is a web of links. Websites link to other websites. These publishers want to be paid when certain companies link to them. That’s an affront to a core functionality of the web.
If it were just a link then there wouldn’t be any problem. Users would follow the link to the publisher’s web site. I think the problem is that facebook et al scrape the content and show cards and summaries and then user’s don’t visit the publisher’s web site. They’re getting paid for their content, for being linked.
That’s the BS line publishers have been trying to trick people with but that extra stuff such as the lede and photo are explicitly provided by the publisher to enable rich preview cards/links. They literally add extra code in the page for that exact purpose. View source on any of their articles and you’ll see Open Graph metadata tags, which were created by Facebook.
They added code specifically so their links from Facebook would look better, and are now pretending like the rich preview cards are stealing their content.