Quote:
Originally Posted by Firebot
As opposed to poor struggling small businesses like Bell or Rogers who own the media outlets that would be getting paid as part of this ruling and who lobbied Liberals and pushed for C-18 and C-11 in the first place? All while making job cuts to maximize shareholder profits?
https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pm...-blocking-news
The issue with C-11 and C-18 is that both have direct obvious corporate beneficiaries, to the detriment of Canadians (in the case of C-18 easy accessible news and information).
C-18 does absolutely nothing to benefit Canadians, and it's foolhardy to think that Google / Meta should just pony up some cash when they can simply and freely choose not to link (again to the detriment of Canadians).
It could be certainly argued that sharing the full article should be fairly and rightfully compensated, but this is not what C-18 does. |
Well I don't take what they say at face value either. I'm sure they'd make a big stink about the impossibility of complying with regulations that don't benefit them as well.
But yeah, this is basically the kind of law I'd expect a corporate-friendly neoliberal party to create, particularly in a country with significant regulatory capture in its media regulator.
But ultimately, other countries/jurisdictions are looking to or have done similar things for a reason. For years, Google's AMP links basically monopolized how ad revenue is generated from news articles to their own benefit (and at the expense of publishers). And sure, their defense is that using them was optional, but there really was no option if you wanted people to be able to find your articles. While AMP links have declined, they're still pulling the same kinds of things. There's a reason why Google was sued by 17 states over anti-trust claims largely based on this very issue
And they've threatened other jurisdictions over far more reasonable regulations. The EU wanted to make it so they couldn't reproduce large parts of articles on their own pages without paying publishers/creators for it (which is reasonable, IMO). So what did Google do? They threatened to pull Google News out of the EU altogether if they didn't get their way. They kept saying how they don't make money off of news, so pulling out wouldn't negatively impact them at all. Lo and behold, the EU called their bluff and they eventually came to an agreement where Google licensed publishers' content.