So now Google has to pay a subscription to Canada?
The next evolution of subscription services hahaha
What a disgrace. This law is hostile to the basic principles of an open web; Google should have refused like Meta is.
No it’s not.
The “open” Web desperately needs good quality journalism.
I agree that the decline of journalistic quality is bad for the world and would like a mechanism to improve it, but I have yet to read a convincing argument for why anyone should have to pay a fee to link to a news article. I could see an argument for reducing the amount of the content that can be republished as a preview under fair use, but nobody seems to want that.
Getting sick of saying that it’s not the link, it’s the preview.
There are three things I don’t like about that argument.
- The idea that small excerpts of copyrighted works are fair use that don’t require licensing or payment is also widely-used in journalism.
- At least in the case of Facebook, publishers get to decide what’s in the previews using open graph tags.
- News organizations have not lobbied for general changes to fair use, but special legal status for themselves and a few tech companies. Laws centered around special status rather than broad principles tend not to work out well in the long term.
That’s not how the Canadian law was written. Google providing a link, even with no headline or preview, would still have to pay.
Having to pay to even link to news articles will only accelerate the downfall of journalism though. Instead of paying, why not just link to an AI generated article instead? Much needs to be done to save good journalism but this law is a massive step in the exact opposite direction
An AI generated article would still need source material.
Anyway, what would be the appeal of a platform that couldn’t link anything but just showed AI content?
The way I see it, journalism is more or less dead. A shade of the former institution. There doesn’t seem many other ways to fund journalistic endeavour.
“Journalism” has be dead for a long time. Just read up on what Hearst was doing in the 1800’s.
We’re just seeing the zombie grasping at everything it can.
I think they’re more concerned about having their culture merged entirely with the United States.
So just start a government subsidy program for news, and increase corporate taxes. That would at least be honest. The lie that this is somehow compensation for something of value is the part that I can’t abide. There’s not even any advertising on Google News. It’s literally just linking out to news articles. If you search for news topics, you usually won’t find any paid links on that either. People bid on search terms related to stuff people might buy, not on hard news topics.
So now Canadian news outlets are basically partners with Google who have a significant revenue stream that depends on Google’s continued success. If you thought you saw a lot of big-tech cheerleading out of the media before just you wait; we’re in a whole new era.
Firefox in a nutshell.
They get so much money from Google, that they can’t risk doing things “too” well.
This is extortion
Extortion is when corporations have to pay for the services they consume
What services?
