As Canada Passes Corrupt Link Tax, Meta Says No More News Links In Canada
from the never-pay-to-link dept
Two weeks ago, Canada’s Heritage Minister, Pablo Rodriguez, who has been the main Canadian government official pushing for C-18, the bullshit link tax bill, that is just a corrupt wealth transfer from one disliked industry to a favored industry, insisted that it was “unacceptable” that Meta might stop allowing links to news if the bill passed.
The interview is quite incredible. Rodriguez makes a number of absolutely laughable claims, such as acting as if the value flow is entirely in one direction: from media to the tech companies. The CBC journalist, correctly, points out that the media orgs (including his own) get value from being able to distribute their content for free online, and notes that if Meta (and Google) stop allowing links that will harm the media.
Rodriguez seems wholly unprepared for this question. As he looks stunned, he stumbles through the following:
CBC: I agree that our work has a value, but also their platforms allow us to reach an audience. We use Facebook, we use Instagram, to reach people, to help us. And if this goes through and Meta follows through on its threat, we’re going to lose access to those audiences. So how is this a helpful thing for Canadian media.
Rodriguez: Well… first of all. They have to make that business decision and… they’re making a lot of money… in Canada and… they would have to justify why they do that… and second they have a lot of deals with a lot of news media outlets across the country. What would happen to those deals? I think we can come to a fair deal. We can talk to each other. I always said it. And they know it. My door is always open. They have my cell phone and my staff at any time. So we’re ready to discuss, we’re ready to negotiate, but we’ll never negotiate or accept something under threat.
I mean… what does that even mean? We’re ready to negotiate, but we won’t negotiate “under threat”? But the “threat” is simply Meta saying that news content just isn’t worth paying for.
As the CBC reporter points out in response, the reality is that this is likely to harm news organizations even more (this is after a hilarious exchange in which Rodriguez, the government minister pushing this bill to force websites to pay up for links, insists that the best part of his bill is that it creates a “marketplace” that “the government has nothing to do with” which is… not how any of this works).
CBC: We heard at the Senate this week, the Committee studying this, Brian Myles is with Le Devoir said they get 40% of their traffic from Google and 30% from social media. And if Google and Facebook go through with this they will suffer, he says, because direct traffic is less than 20%. The Globe and Mail CEO Phillip Crawley told Senators if Facebook pulls out “millions of dollars go away.” Millions of dollars go away. And that’s a lot in the newspaper world. I mean, I know you’re saying you’re trying to help newspapers and media organizations. This would not help if they follow through, if they’re provoked by your legislation.
Rodriguez: But that’s exactly what they’re trying to do through their threat. They want you to repeat what they’re saying. They want to scare people and scare politicians too. That’s what they’re trying to do! They want to intimidate MPs. They want to intimidate Senators, especially Senators because the bill is there at this moment…
The man seems to be in deep deep denial. This is not about “threats.” It’s about saying that having to pay for links is just not worth it. It’s a straight up cost-benefit decision. And Rodriguez seems unable to comprehend that Meta would actually stop allowing news links, or that it’s just not worth paying for links.
And… that’s now what Meta has decided. On Thursday, the Senate passed C-18, effectively saying that Canada is breaking the open web, and Meta announced it was officially pulling news links from Canada:
Today, we are confirming that news availability will be ended on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada prior to the Online News Act (Bill C-18) taking effect.
We have repeatedly shared that in order to comply with Bill C-18, passed today in Parliament, content from news outlets, including news publishers and broadcasters, will no longer be available to people accessing our platforms in Canada.
Ooops.
Now, as when this happened in Australia, I’m sure some people are going to get mad at Meta, but that makes no sense. If you believe in the open web, if you believe that you should never have to pay to link to something, if you believe that no one should have to pay to provide you a benefit, then you should support Meta’s stance here. Yes, it’s self-serving for Meta. Of course it is. But, even if it’s by accident, or a side-effect, it’s helping to defend the open web, against a ridiculous attack from an astoundingly ignorant and foolish set of Canadian politicians.
Filed Under: c-18, canada, journalism, link tax, pablo rodriguez
Companies: cbc, facebook, meta
Comments on “As Canada Passes Corrupt Link Tax, Meta Says No More News Links In Canada”
Dear Rupert Murdoch,
Fuck You.
I hope you step on a Lego, and that’s about as bad as I’m legally allowed to voice.
You deserve your spot in the Ninth Circle in Hell, you evil fuckface.
Re: Watch Ted Lasso?
Do you ever watch Ted Lasso? The main “bad guy” on the show is named “Rupert M.” (though what the “M.” stands for is different), and I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that like Keith Rupert Murdoch, he’s a ginormous fuckface.
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Don’t watch Ted Lasso, and honestly, Murdoch is more responsible for dividing humanity AND promoting authcap surveillance states with propaganda arms.
That alone is enough to go straight to the Ninth Circle of Hell.
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Am not sure what this has to do with Murdoch.
But as you are an anonymous coward, I am guessing you don’t know either…
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Sadly for you, I DO.
Murdoch was instrumental in getting the Aussie version of this shitstain of a law passed. With bribery and threats.
And he stands to gain the most from this as well, since that means he gets to destroy the comeptition while he SPREADS FUD AND WHITE SUPREMACIST PROPAGANDA IN CANADA.
ie, HE STARTED THIS MESS.
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Exactly.
Our only hope lies in the LGBT community. Once they take over from straight white freaks of nature everything will be OK. Every white male is a Matthew Bennett who deserves to be dragged out into the streets and shot like mongrels.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
Hi, Hyman Rosen.
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Just because you’re brain-dead, doesn’t mean AC is ignorant.
Meta and Google should just start changing THEM for commercial use of their platforms.
They said, while threatening Meta with the authority of the state.
Perfect example that a Politician doesn't have to be competent.
The only requirement for a successful Politician is the ability to attract votes. Nothing about knowing the subjects he’s making decisions on. Noting about morality. Nothing about even competence. Merely the ability to attract votes to retain office.
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Minister for Canadian Heritage is generally a newbie post, where representatives have an opportunity to prove their ability to handle more “important” and “responsible” posts.
Unfortunately, the position seems to almost invariably be filled with clowns, who clearly take their direction from copyright maximalist industries and similar dubious lobbying interests.
Perhaps the bureaucracy within the Heritage ministry has been thoroughly captured by such interests.
At this point, I’m trying to figure out the coming into force provisions of this bill which are… not all that clear (last provisions of the bill): https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/third-reading
The reason I’m trying to make sense of this is because Meta said that they will drop news links once the bill takes effect. So, the bill coming into force will offer a hint as to what timeline we are looking at here. All I know is that there is a window of time that Meta is probably looking at/working with. Once that lever is pulled, the sh!t hits the fan in the news sector here.
“But that’s exactly what they’re trying to do through their threat. They want you to repeat what they’re saying. They want to scare people and scare politicians too. That’s what they’re trying to do!”
And your bill wasn’t a threat?
You should be scared, you attempted to do the same thing others before you have done & kept doing despite having their asses handed to them every time.
Other than some hacks, who stood to benefit, feeding you a lot of bullshit did you even look for any evidence on if what they were telling you was true?
I miss evidence based legislation.
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I miss evidence based legislation.
But think of the children!
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That Anonymous Coward:
Anonymous Coward
Now you’re both just being reasonable and we simply can’t have that!
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Pablo Rodriguez is a moron on any subject related to the internet. He was completely clueless when pushing for Bill C-11 and he is completely clueless here as well. If he is even aware of his own surroundings, he is more aware than usual. He legitimately thought that you can separate platforms like YouTube from the content that the platform hosts and regulate the platform accordingly while leaving the content completely alone. The man has absolutely no business in writing legislation that has anything to do with the internet.
All of this would be comically hilarious if the consequences weren’t so terrible.
The Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) stands to completely undermine the future of online creators who work with video of any kind. Smaller streaming platforms like Crunchyroll are already threatening to leave Canada entirely. Innovation is very much under threat thanks to that.
The Online News Act (Bill C-18) threatens to inflict enormous damage to the online news ecosystem in Canada. Smaller players depending on a platform like Facebook or Google now risks seeing a huge chunk of their entire audience vanish overnight. The larger news organizations are going to see significant losses to their audience and online revenue with some of the government subsidy programs on the verge of ending. The job cuts have already started in the sector and the ones I’m seeing now (i.e. Bell cuts) will likely be just the tip of the iceberg. Unless something absolutely drastically unexpected happens, we’ll soon see the lever to turn off news links in Canada get pulled and the flood of pink slips to countless journalists will follow.
All this as Bell told the CRTC recently that the future is on the internet as they ask to have local journalism requirements stop. Apparently, the CBC also asked for the rules surrounding local journalism requirements to be loosened too. They are about to shift further into an online environment that is trying everything it can to memory hole them for the sake of staying in compliance with the laws of the land.
It’s blind stupidity all the way down.
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All while Rupert Murdoch and his ilk profit.
From buying the now devalued local news agencies.
This whole saga reminds me of the “Canada on Strike” episode of South Park.
(Clip for reference)
I’ll just give up the Globe & Mail and switch to the New York Times and Washington Post. If I care about local news, I’ll have my VPN connect to Detroit and then take a look at the Globe & Mail.
“For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction.”
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I agree, like how can they (the govt and meta) not also understand that Canadians will just use VPNs to access the news?
Just like happened in Utah recently, when they banned Porn, so the big porn sites started blocking all Utah IP addresses, and boom, VPN use skyrocketed. But all the negative affects of this bill on news companies will remain.
It’s like how is this the best our government can do, this shit is bananas
Step in the right direction, perbaps
Facebook is no place to look for news. It is, however, a pretty good place to look for false information. Maybe people will start looking elsewhere for actual, you know, data?
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Jesus Christ, the white privilege
The self-entitlement and white privilege these people ooze with is disgusting. In a democracy, this wouldn’t be an issue.
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You are really bad at this.
Shouldn’t you be in the Chinese snowflakes can’t handle the Hong Kong freedom song story spouting your lies there?
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This is about Canada and Rupert Murdoch, i.e., not the US, and someone not originally from the US.
You’re really bad at this if you think this is a US bash.
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Go die mad in China.
Speaking as a Canadian...
I really detest when my government puts me into a position where I am formed, by their actions, to come out in support of organizations (Meta, Facebook, etc) that I don’t like, don’t use, and rather despise otherwise.
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(forced, not formed)
'How dare they not just pay the danegeld?!'
Imagine that, you insist that if someone does X then they must pay you for the privilege and they decide that rather than pay you they’ll just stop doing X.
The sense of self-entitlement on display here is positively staggering, how dare those companies put themselves first and not pay for the privilege of driving traffic to other platforms! Clearly refusing to pay the extortion the government and publishers are demanding is a terrible threat to the core of journalism and not a reasonable response to extortion aimed at forcing companies to pay for what they’d been doing for news agencies for free.
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I guess Canadian journalism is about to start performing experiments in “funding in the internet age”.
Logic of it..
Seems to mean,
That for them to GET BACK to being Linked..
They NOW get to PAY for it.
This is reversed.
AS, IF’ they wanted NOT to be linked to, it was NOT hard to insert in the Site a Tag to NOT link with spider searching.
But, do you think they would EVEN try testing this on their sites? Ask Murduc(onPurpose). See how much they would loose from not having links sent to them.
Room for making it worse
Does this mean that a Canadian user would be prevented from clicking a Canadian link, maybe that nobody in the world can click a Canadian link, and maybe also no news links at all?
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Sounds a lot like it could be either or both:
* all news, from anywhere, embargoed against Canada
* all Canada-local news, embargoed everywhere.
Whatever the minimum compliance set to avoid C-18 being applicable to Meta, is what they will do.
Meta wasn’t quite ready to pull out of Australia completely (which IIRC might have been what their law would have required). The Canadian law might be less invasive. … or Canada might be a smaller market.
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Bill C-18 required payments for linking to news organizations. So, in all likelihood, Meta will block the sharing of news links to Canadian sources in Canada. By the Canadian governments own words (specifically, Own Ripley), that would constitute the platform “exiting the market”.
During the senate hearing with Meta, towards the end, Meta also mentioned that they would drop the sharing of news video content too. Anything that is captured in the law would get dropped from Meta’s platforms in Canada.
So, at its core, it’s not really about stopping Canadian’s from clicking on links. Instead, it is about stopping Canadians from posting those links. I can imagine that if you decide to share an article from Global News, and you paste the URL in that post and try to post it, Facebook will throw up a warning message saying that the content cannot be posted because it contains a link to a Canadian news source (along with documentation for the reasons why, no doubt).
I don’t know about links that were posted before the law was passed, though I can see Meta simply hiding posts that contain those links to ensure compliance with the law.
That is awfully credulous.
In a hypothetical world where it was worth paying for, Facebook absolutely would be doing and saying exactly what it’s doing now. It has the scale and leverage to play hardball, against both governments and media companies that rely heavily on it. If it doesn’t get favorable terms, it’s big enough to take the ball and go home.
It’s the same exact thing banks do when complaining about new reporting requirements and the like, and how they’ll kill the bank. Those are overblown in the same way, it never kills the bank. The only difference is Facebook has extra leverage knowing it’s (large amount of) Canadian users will be very annoyed with their politicians, and is willing to use that leverage.
You can still oppose the bill on the grounds that the collateral damage isn’t worth it, but Facebook’s grumbles are the same old tactics companies run out any time a new regulation that lowers profits comes by, regardless of whether it’s worthwhile or not
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Wouldn’t that be an indication that Facebook has determined that the news isn’t worth the price being asked?
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What is slanted language?
Slanted language is a type of language that is biased or prejudiced in some way. It can be used to convey a particular viewpoint or to promote a certain agenda. Examples of slanted language include using words with a negative connotation to describe certain groups of people, using emotive language to elicit a certain response, and using loaded language to frame an issue in a certain way. It’s important to be aware of slanted language and to try to use unbiased language when communicating with others.
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The facts don’t care about your feelings.
False “balance” is dishonesty.
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Precisely. I’m going to slant all the language I want and no straight fuck who believes in an imaginary friend is going to stop me.
good on ya Meta and any others that do the same!!
Along the line of Einstein, “there is no vaccine against greed and stupidity
Along the line of Einstein, “there is no vaccine against greed in the face of Zuckerberg, Trump, and Musk, and voters’ stupidity”! Offer my dictum from way back; “with a precautionary approach, science is the only basis on which the government should act. To do otherwise is to succumb to the mob (Jan 6, Trucker’s freedom convey, conspiracy-theorists anti-vaxxers) and forego the advice of the ancients who gave us our western democracies’ great political-economic government “allocation of resources system” in Philadelphia 1787 based on science!”
Canadian bureaucrats and politicians never learn that overbearing regulation has negative consequences. In the late 1960’s they passed a law requiring all Canadian radio stations to play at least 50% Canadian content. Of course what they forgot was that the majority of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border AND that AM radio was still a thing back then (powerful AM stations could be heard hundreds of miles away from their transmitters). So, all the Canadian kids that got sick to death of hearing the same Canadian “hits” repeated ad nauseam just switched to listening to US stations. And of course they were then hearing American ads, not Canadian ads. This is not to say there were no good Canadian songs from that time, and maybe if they’d made it 20% to 25% Canadian it might have worked, but there just weren’t enough good Canadian hits to fill 50% of a top 40 station’s broadcast day – not to mention that many kids resented having the government try to dictate what they should be listening to!
The biggest effect that law had was to absolutely kill CKLW, a 50,000 watt blowtorch of a station in Windsor, Ontario that had been the #1 station in Detroit and all of eastern Michigan and even in northern Ohio, and that was in the daytime – at night they had listeners far beyond that range. When they had to start playing 50% Canadian content it created an opportunity for the Detroit stations to make a comeback. There a lot more to the story than that but it is a great tale of Canadian protectionism having very unintended consequences (for one thing, many US advertisers were running ads on CKLW, and when CKLW’s audience went away, so did all that American advertising money that had been flowing into Canada).
So here we have the same thing again. Yep, the Canadian government going to protect local business by force of law. Would it totally shock me if newspapers in Detroit and Buffalo and Bellingham started increasing their online coverage of nearby Canadian communities, and maybe running a few ads from Canadian or multinational companies in those sections? Not at all.
In fact if I were a Canadian newspaper, I would just set up a US publishing operation in a border town and publish almost nothing but Canadian news (with just enough U.S. news so nobody can say it’s nothing but a relocated Canadian newspaper), just so Facebook or whatever can run it without having to pay royalties (since they would be getting their news from a US publication that is beyond the reach of Canada’s ass-backward regulators). And I’d give my advertisers deals on advertising in both publications – like maybe buy an ad on the Canadian site, get an ad on our sister US publication free!
I mean, there has to be a way around this nonsense!
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“They” being a government headed by the current prime minister’s father, I take it?
I guess Canadian protectionism runs in the family…
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Possibly, but Trudeau only became PM in ’68.
Meta is right to block news in canada ,they are fighting for the open web ,the right to freely link to anyone without payment .people in canada can just go directly to local news websites.this law is like coca cola or pepsi asking supermarkets for money for the right to stock their products on shelves , it makes no sense .
if meta gives in will news websites ask money to google to show up in search results
I, for one, never get tired of people finding out the rest of the world isn’t the United States.
Meta is an American company and is not subject to Canadian laws
Re: Maybe they know something you don't
You should go tell them that, I’m sure that they’ll be stunned to find out that a random person on the internet knows more about the relevant laws and how they impact companies that the lawyers they pay piles of money to.
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Then Canada should block Facebook, Instagram and all Meta-related web services, then, at a bare minimum. Since Meta doesn’t have to follow Canadian laws to do business in Canada…
I’m sure anyone who really needs to use those services can just VPN. After all, ladt I checked, VPN use is legal in Canada…
If you don’t see the obvious fucking problem…
Entitlement
As others said before me, the sense of entitlement on display is sky high. The media outlets feel so entitled to that money that they simply freeze when confronted with the possibility that the businesses they are targeting may (and did) decide to ignore their content based on cost-benefit analysis. You can feel this going thorugh the head of the guy in the interview: “they wouldn’t dare!”.