Meta Begins The Process Of Ending News Links In Canada
from the the-end-of-the-news dept
This is not a surprise, because the company made it clear it planned to do exactly this, but Meta has now begun the process of stopping links to news sources from appearing in Canada, something that Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez insisted would never happen. The company says it will take a few weeks to roll out fully, but in the meantime, Meta explains what this will actually look like.
For Canadian news outlets this means:
News links and content posted by news publishers and broadcasters in Canada will no longer be viewable by people in Canada. We are identifying news outlets based on legislative definitions and guidance from the Online News Act.
For international news outlets this means:
News publishers and broadcasters outside of Canada will continue to be able to post news links and content, however, that content will not be viewable by people in Canada.
For our Canadian community this means:
People in Canada will no longer be able to view or share news content on Facebook and Instagram, including news articles and audio-visual content posted by news outlets.
For our international community this means:
There is no change to our services for people accessing our technologies outside of Canada.
The details mention Facebook and Instagram, though it’s not clear if Threads is included as well. Perhaps as a subset of Instagram it is, but that also might damage Threads viability even more.
This is disappointing in all sorts of ways. Not being able to post, view, or discuss news is not a great result, obviously. I especially feel bad for the media orgs who bet big on Facebook as a delivery channel, who are hurt by this (as many people know, Techdirt basically ignored Facebook other than setting up an auto-posting system, and while others mocked us for this decision, in the long run, I still stand by it).
But the blame for this disappointing result needs to go fully on the Canadian government. This law is bad. The entire structure of it is an attack on the open web, suggesting that governments can force some companies to pay other companies for sending them traffic. That makes no sense in any world.
Throughout this process, the media orgs that supported this bill, and the politicians behind it as well, have vastly (embarrassingly) overestimated the importance and value of news to Facebook and Google. Even in what they’ve talked about, suggesting that these companies were “profiting unfairly” off of news, just never made any sense if you had any idea how any of this actually works. Google and Facebook make very little money off of news links. At best, they served as a way to get some users to spend a bit more time coming to their platforms as part of their feed, but it was never a central part, nor particularly valuable.
I did, however, want to respond to a few comments (often screamed at me on Twitter) directed at me regarding my opposition to these laws. There’s this weird, dangerous, belief that because these laws “tax” Facebook and Google and lots of people (reasonably!) dislike Facebook and Google, so they must be good laws. And, relatedly, they claim that anyone who doesn’t support these laws, must be doing so in support of Facebook or Google.
But, that’s both silly and shortsighted. I’d be happy to see both Meta and Google cut down to size, and have said so for years, and have even suggested many ways of making that a reality. But these kinds of laws are dangerous, on principle, in taxing something that makes no sense to tax, forcing payments for something that should be fundamentally free, and undermining the basic structure of the open web.
But, worse, they represent an acceptance of a fundamentally corrupt principle that will undoubtedly be abused to much greater lengths going forward.
In establishing the principle that the government can look at one industry and force another industry to pay it, is a recipe for very dangerous corruption. That’s doubly true when, as in this case, we’re talking about one industry that mostly failed to innovate, rested on its cash cow laurels, and spent years mocking the innovation occurring around them. And then going after the industry that did innovate, that built products and services that customers actually used, with better business models, and basically telling them they have to cough up cash for the industry that failed to do that?
That creates incredibly skewed incentives for literally everyone involved. It creates terrible incentives for legacy industries. Terrible incentives for innovative industries. Terrible incentives for politicians. It’s a lose-lose-lose proposition.
Am I concerned about the plight of media today? Absolutely (I mean, for fuck’s sake, I run a media site!). Am I concerned that Google and Meta are too powerful, and prone to abusing that power? Absolutely. That’s why I constantly push for plans that lessen their power and move people to alternative approaches.
But you have to do it in a way that doesn’t fundamentally mess up literally everyone’s incentives in a manner that isn’t just obviously corrupt, but so blatantly so that it diminishes everyone’s trust in our institutions.
Filed Under: c-18, canada, journalism, link tax, linking, news, open web
Companies: meta
Comments on “Meta Begins The Process Of Ending News Links In Canada”
I think the next predictable move by the Canadian government will be to try to impose some sort of “must carry” rule, outlawing the suppression of links to news outlets that charge for linking: “You must both send traffic our way AND pay us for the privilege of doing so.”
After all, that’s close to the model in the US for cable systems to carry local broadcast stations.
And the correct response for Alphabet and Meta would be to say, “very well, then, our services will no longer be available to Canadians, because under the Canadian model the revenue we obtain from them will no longer support the cost of providing them.”
Re:
“I think the next predictable move by the Canadian government will be to try to impose some sort of “must carry” rule, outlawing the suppression of links to news outlets that charge for linking: “You must both send traffic our way AND pay us for the privilege of doing so.”
After all, that’s close to the model in the US for cable systems to carry local broadcast stations.”
Well, except that cable must-carry regs here in the States don’t require cable systems to pay to carry stations that elect for mandatory carriage under those provisions. Getting compensated for carriage requires broadcasters elect for retransmission consent, which ironically is responsible for cord-cutting (and erosion of the cable industry’s viability) because of hardball tactics undertaken by some broadcasters in contract negotiations (like what Nexstar Media Group, which owns two stations where I live, has done in negotiations with DirecTV, Dish Network and Fios, among others, that have caused recent blackouts of its stations) that have resulted in higher fees passed on to customers that have pushed many towards streaming.
Compensating others for content distribution only works when the resulting regulations are structured to ensure those negotiating don’t misuse their leverage to where it causes inadvertent broad harm, including to the very companies seeking “fair” compensation.
Tudeau now needs to explain to news industry how went from hundreds of millions in free money to shrinking viewership.
Well, holy shit, Zuck making some surprisingly correct moves for once.
Still remember when he briefly did this in Australia, only to cave to Murdoch…
Citation needed. I don’t think that social media made better business models. Ones that made more money, yes. Better, no. Not sure how news orgs were/are supposed to ethically compete with surveillance capitalism.
Re:
The news corporation may fail, but that will not stop the publication of news and commentary by other means. It may be that reporters have to find business models that allow them to carry on as reporters. It is the reporters that write the news, and it is the corporate management who are fearing that they will lose their positions and power as gate keepers to the news.
Re: Re: The news corporation may fail.
Sounds like what happened when Indie music was getting started and the RIAA was all beside themselves.
Re: wrong definition
A business that makes money is certainly a better business model than one that loses money.
Re: Re:
A business model that’s exploitative to consumers and/or workers shouldn’t be making OR losing money. It just shouldn’t exist.
The news coverage of this whole matter in Canadian media is a real mess.
None of the political Parties seems to have a clue, and are spouting performatively about fairness, compensation, “Big Tech” abusing its power to exploit the media, while none of the major Canadian news outlets (not even the CBC) care to cover the topic accurately — or dare I say, “honestly”.
It’s hard to have reasonable, rational public discussion, let alone reasonable, effective legislation, when all the actual, relevant facts are consistently ignored both by every political parties and by every major news media.
Re:
It’s difficult for Big Media to tell the truth about link taxes when getti g their grifty payday depends on misleading people it’s all about “fairness from Big Tech.”
Media Talking Points Continues
Just wrote my first followup on these developments. The media seems to think that if they just pushed some more talking points, the problems will magically solve themselves.
The CBC talking points, for instance, was really something:
I thought that was arrogant enough and thought no one would top that, but Unifor successfully did when they posted this:
They really think that making these comments is going to magically make things all better for them. They wrote some angry comments and, somehow, Meta is supposed to respond by saying, “Well, we made it this far, but they wrote a mean tweet. Guess we have no choice but to do everything they say now.”
Talk about embarrassing. Still, I’m betting that they will continue to whine about the consequences of their actions for a long time now.
Re:
Ah the sort of statements you get when someone is arrogant and/or greedy enough to think that they are the ones providing all the value in a relationship.
On the plus side I can imagine they might be getting a little panicked at this point due to realizing that they might shortly lose their best source of traffic and that’s all sorts of funny.
Re: Re:
Oh, the large media companies are panicked alright. They don’t want to admit it, but they are absolutely freaking out behind the scenes. One industry group is asking advertisers to “pledge” 25% of their advertising budgets to news outlets.
What’s more, several news organizations are already running campaigns begging readers to bookmark their websites and download their apps. I can’t even remember the last time I saw campaigns urging people to bookmark their websites. That’s going back to, what? Early 2000’s? I’ve seen a few publications devote their entire front page of their physical newspaper to the begging of bookmarking and app downloading.
(If anyone wants links to the two examples, I’ll be happy to provide them)
All of this while trying to portray that stiff upper lip attitude publicly and say that the platforms are the ones that are going to lose relevance and audiences, not the news organizations. The last thing Canadian news organizations are are the centre of attention for everything and Mike Masnick showed that quite well with those studies saying how little traffic goes to news organizations from platforms earlier.
In the likely event Google follows suit and pulls the same switch to disable support for Canadian news links, things are going to get significantly worse.
Re:
That’s some serious gaslighting from CBC. Apparently removing links to their own websites makes those websites no long available to anybody. Canadians no longer have “access to news — all news, from all outlets, both public and private” because Facebook is apparently the whole Internet. Do they really think most people are too stupid to see the obvious fallacy?
Re: Re:
Well, when they convinced themselves that everyone believes them when they said that Facebook is stealing from news organizations by allowing those news organizations to post on their platforms links to their sites, I think they believe their readership is stupid enough to believe that too. The amount of really stupid comments by the large media companies in support of this legislation has been nothing short of astonishing.
The new Heritage Minister, in the midst of all of this, is complaining that the law hasn’t taken affect yet and, therefore, Meta is being irresponsible for doing this now. I wish I was exaggerating on that one, but that’s what she really said.
Re: Re: Re: 'How dare you get out of the way of the fist I was swinging?!'
‘It’s not fair, we said we’d be demanding money if they were doing X after the law passed and they have the utter audacity to stop doing X before we could charge them money!‘
I get that it’s a stupid and corrupt law and therefore by necessity any defenses of it are likewise going to be stupid and/or corrupt but complaining that a company is taking steps to avoid violating the law before it goes into effect, nullifying the ‘harm’ that they were supposedly doing by no longer doing the ‘harmful’ act takes a truly special kind of lack of self-awareness and/or dishonesty.
Who will blink first?
And now the billion-dollar question: Will they stick to their guns and shut down news in the country rather than give in to the extortion, or will they cave again after a little bit of pressure and decide that the dane’s demands aren’t that bad.
Re:
If the news corps get their way, the RIAA and MPA will be the next to come calling with swords in hand.
“If you link to our content without giving us even more money, that’s stealing. Pay us or do without.”
“Okay, sure.”
“Wait, not like that.”
When are they going to pay me for their theft of my content? They know more about me than I do.
There’s an idea so obvious that I feel I must be missing something, but what about URL shorteners?
URL shortener sites are not Meta or Alphabet social media sites, and are not required to block or pay tax for links. And Meta & Alphabet are not enjoined by any law from using such sites.
At first I was thinking of an educational campaign to users of social media, but why not just have a script that parses before posting?
“Your post contains one or more links to Canadian news websites. Please click here [tickbox] to convert those links to shortened URLs. If you choose not to convert them, please understand that we will not display your link inside of Canada, in compliance with Canadian law.”
Thanks for this
as a Canadian, it has sucked to see this b*s continue into law, despite the obvious batshit banana craziness it entails… so it’s especially meaningful to see this coverage when so much (if not all) of US news doesn’t even acknowledge Canada’s existence, let alone dig into what is going on here in a real, nuanced, up-to-date and practical way. And the media here is just so much less focused and dedicated than in the USA, as much as y’all like to say it’s a shell of it’s old self and surface level etc. etc. It’s just crazy that so much of what goes on here basically ends up completely unopposed, because as citizens we just have so many less mechanisms to hold our politicians accountable than you guys do, and that’s if we even wanted to put them to full use…
Sadly canadians are pretty pathetic when it comes to making any kind of stink about anything, let alone about something niche like tech policy (despite it totally impacting our daily lives in a huge way), to the point that I actually find USA news a lot less frustrating, despite the increased dumpster-fire rating of everything that goes on there, and the fact I personally can’t contribute to change happening via voting, donating etc… at least in the USA it feels like its more possible to get some significant number of people up in arms about the worst violations of thier rights, should a group try hard enough… whereas here, even the worst of the worst moves by clearly unpopular governments will barely produce a collective shrug (in the wider media and culture).
The few times we DO manage to make a big stink about things the government(or companies) do, and produce some meaningful backlash and/or social movements, they are sooooooo fleeting and ultimately easily ignored/squashed (not bashing all those efforts, to be clear, it takes a METRIC FUCK TONNE of heart and bravery to bash your heads against the brick walls of our government like that, and I’m Uber grateful for those that do, and are committed to the fight!), which just demoralizes generation after generation of us.
anyways as a Canadian I’ve really enjoyed your excellent coverage of this issue despite TechDirt being a US-based (and thus focused) publication. And your podcast episode with Michael Geist was riveting and got me interested in listening to your podcast more often (as despite being an on&off reader for a few years, I had never checked that out before!).
so keep up the good work,
sincerely,
a young, jaded, millenial
(too nerdy for thier own good)
canuck in interior bc
Canadian Greed
I can’t believe the Canadian government or our big media companies even thought this was a fight they could win. Did they not realize the likelihood of Google and Meta caving is pretty low. Our little local radio station has had their Facebook page removed as I am sure all the others have as well. If the government takes the next obvious step and tries to force the tech giants to carry Canadian news content and pay for it too we will likely lose access to Google and Facebook at a minimum. People don’t subscribe to Canadian online newspapers because it costs money for something that is easily found for free. The articles tend to be long winded and drift off on irrelevant tangents. Greed has been slowly killing them for a long time. They now wish to hasten their demise.