Canada Wants To Implement A Link Tax
from the link-taxes-keep-spreading dept
One chapter of my Walled Culture book (free download available in various formats) looks at how the bad ideas embodied in the EU’s appalling Copyright Directive – the worst copyright law so far – are being taken up elsewhere. One I didn’t include, because its story is still unfolding, is Canada’s Bill C-18: “An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada”. Here’s the key idea, which will be familiar enough to readers of this blog:
The Bill introduces a new bargaining framework intended to support news businesses to secure fair compensation when their news content is made available by dominant digital news intermediaries and generates economic gain.
In other words, it’s a link tax, designed to make big digital platforms like Google and Facebook pay for the privilege of sending traffic to newspaper publishers. The full depressing story of the copyright industry’s greed is retold in Walled Culture. But a fresh perspective on this latest link tax comes from one of Canada’s top copyright experts, Professor Michael Geist. He has been writing blog posts about Bill C-18 and another terrible proposed copyright law, Bill C-11, on his blog for a while. They are well worth reading for anyone who wants to follow what is going on in Canada and in copyright generally. Geist has recently written a great post about Bill C-18, entitled “Why Bill C-18’s Mandated Payment for Links is a Threat to Freedom of Expression in Canada“:
The study into the Online News Act continues this week as the government and Bill C-18 supporters continue to insist that the bill does not involve payment for links. These claims are deceptive and plainly wrong from even a cursory reading of the bill. Simply put, there is no bigger concern with this bill. This post explains why link payments are in, why the government knows they are in, and why the approach creates serious risks to the free flow of information online and freedom of expression in Canada.
Geist explains how the Canadian government is being dishonest by trying to suggest the bill is not really about forcing platforms to pay for links, just forcing them to compensate news publishers in some way for using those links. Geist also points out how C-18 would require links to news material from big publishers to be paid for, but not those from small media outlets. That in itself reveals this bill is about rewarding a few corporations at the expense of smaller publishers. Also troubling is the fact that “the bill effectively says that whether compensation is due also depends on where the expression occurs since it mandates that certain venues pay to allow their users to express themselves.” Geist rightly points out that this would set a terrible precedent:
Once government decides that some platforms must pay to permit their users to engage in certain expression, the same principle can be applied to other policy objectives. For example, the Canadian organization Journalists for Human Rights has argued that misinformation is akin to information pollution and that platforms should pay a fee for hosting such expression much like the Bill C-18 model. The same policies can also be expanded to other areas deemed worthy of government support. Think health information or educational materials are important and that those sectors could use some additional support? Why not require payments for those links from platforms. Indeed, once the principle is established that links may require payment, the entire foundation for sharing information online is placed at risk and the essential equality of freedom of expression compromised.
That sums up neatly why the whole link tax idea is so pernicious. It seeks to privilege certain material over other kinds, and would turn the fundamentally egalitarian glue of the World Wide Web – links – into something that must be paid for in many cases, destroying much of its power.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, or Mastodon. Reposted from the Walled Culture blog.
Filed Under: c-18, canada, copyright, eu, free expression, free speech, link tax
Comments on “Canada Wants To Implement A Link Tax”
A Lesser Market
Canada has a small market compared to the USA or Europe. It is evident, that its government is doing this to mimic Europe and Australia. It is also evident that, as a small market, Canada generates little income for Google and other search engines. What would stop them from abandoning Canada if this bill became law?
Re:
Because earning 50¢ instead of 1$ is still better business than proudly leaving money on the table.
Link Tax (Inverted)
Dear News Organization, per the new bargaining act declaring that links have monetary value, you must now pay one dollar to us to provide a link to your news site.
Thank you,
Google
Re: If only...
As past examples when the tech companies had spines showed while the likes of Google can do just fine without those links the publishers they’re linking to do not end up so well when the links are dropped, so if anyone should be getting paid it absolutely should be the publishers, it’s just a pity Google and company would never have the guts to actually point that out.
Re: Re:
If Canada has indeed learned from Australia, they sure have included the “if the bargaining doesn’t come out in favor of the publishers, the government makes sure of that” clause.
Oh no, who will save Canada from this horrible fate?
Why, it’s everyone’s favorite Canuck superhero not named Wolverine, Captain Copyright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Copyright
They should bring him back.
Re:
Ah, Captain Copyright, the least-liked superhero since Captain Hammer.
No wait, I was wrong…there are people out there who like Captain Hammer.
Shining a light on C-11 and C-18’s problems, good!
Now shine a light on Canadian Senate Bill S-210, will you?
The TL;DR of that bill is that it blocks porn…and other things thanks to some ridiculous clause in the bill (section 9, 5a)!
It also forces websites to install age-verification systems!
My Site Will Suffer Because of This
One of the most irritating aspects about this is that the way the law is written, no news organizations can opt out of such a system. There is no mechanism for someone like myself to go to Facebook and say, “This law sucks. I want no part of it. Please exempt me so I can continue posting links on Facebook.” The bill FORCES payment for news links regardless of what a news site owner wants or doesn’t want.
What’s worse is that eligibility requirements to collect on any funds generated by the link tax is written in such a way as to exclude my website. I would have to employ two separate journalists at arms length from editorial decisions I make just to take the first step. This is something I, and many other small operations, can’t afford. Yet, at the same time, the same section that bars my website from claiming any kind of revenue would also make it trivial for state sponsored troll farms to build and collect that money I would be barred from collecting. Even if Google knew about such operations, they would be disallowed from denying such payments to state sponsored troll farms (and, at that point, I wonder if Google would be forced to break sanctions against Russia in the process because of this).
All this at a time when Facebook has already announced that they were halting payments to US publishers, the statistic floating around that 4 in ever 1,000 links on Facebook pointing to a news article, Facebook undergoing mass layoffs, and the fact that Canada is ultimately a small market compared to others like the US. Yes, Facebook caved to Australia thinking they could manipulate the situation to harden their company against any future competition in their space, but there are a lot of other issues going against the possibility that Facebook would go along with that. Further, Facebook has publicly admitted that they may be forced to block news links in Canada.
Perhaps the worst thing about this isn’t necessarily knowing that my site will be hamstrung trying to grow reach, but rather, knowing that the Online Harms proposal will be coming after this. In that proposal, there was an idea floated that websites could face a fine of $10 million should they not respond to a complaint about something being “harmful” within 24 hours. What is “harmful”? Literally anything that can be dreamed up. Who can complain? Anyone.
I am sitting here occasionally seeing my career flash before my eyes in all of this. Still fighting against all of this tooth and nail in any way I can (currently publishing gavel to gavel coverage of the Bill C-11 Senate hearings) and I have confidence that many of these laws will be challenged in court. At the moment, as far as the legislative process is concerned, it is feeling like a losing battle at this stage. 🙁
Additions to the robots.txt file
You can google for robots.txt
Google and other “big tech” sites could implement a new rule that they will not use links to a news site unless the robots.txt file gives them express permission to do so without any monetary cost.
Now the default would be that nobody links to the valuable news sites that want to extort money. If they want to allow linking for free, that is up to them to affirmatively give permission.
Re:
The counterargument that sites could use robots.txt has been around for months, if not, over a year now. Big publishing just continues to ignore it, hoping that, among other viable counterarguments, will just go away on their own.
They know this is something they can do if they are truly concerned about their site being indexed when they don’t want it, however, they know how dependent they are on search engines like Google.
The only thing big publishing cares about is “get money from big tech”, so they push the conspiracy theory that Google and Facebook are “stealing” their content, posting it on their sites, and generating revenue for themselves while refusing to compensate publishers as a result. Obviously, none of that is true and even if the platforms did do that, then it would be a trivial DMCA notice to take such content down. It’s probably the easiest narrative to poke holes through, yet they run article after article proclaiming this as fact (which, in turn, kills their credibility in the process).
Re:
That assume the law does not force them to link to and pay the news sites if they link to any news site anywhere in the world.
New Side Hustle
This might be a nice new “Side Hustle” to help Canadians get money without doing anything to earn it.
It seems that Canadian Politicians are proposing a “link tax” law that will allow me (just a citizen) to (for example) require the Phone Book (both White and Yellow Pages) to pay ME for every instance where they provide a “link” to my phone number! This should also allow me to bill advertizer’s for sending me junk mail (by LINKing to my home address) and many other possibilities too numerous to mention here!
(It’s a sad realization that Canadian Politicians really don’t seem any more intelligent than those in other countries!)
Thanks for sharing. It is very helpful for me and also informative for all those users who will come to read.