Canadian Media Orgs Said That Meta Linking To News Was Anticompetitive; Now They Say NOT Linking To News Is Anticompetitive
from the pick-a-lane,-guys dept
This is just so painfully obnoxious. The legacy news media, spurred on by a welfare system that pretend free market supporter Rupert Murdoch dreamed up and convinced governments to implement, whereby the government would force internet companies, which had innovated and created new business models that worked, to suddenly be required to pay for sending traffic to legacy news media organizations which failed to innovate. It’s extreme corporate welfare, egged on by a guy who pretends to be against all kinds of welfare.
Canada is the latest country that was convinced to go down this very stupid route, and even as everyone explained (repeatedly) to the Canadian government how this would flop, they still went forward with it. In response Meta and Google (the two targets the Canadian government were trying to extort with this new law) announced that they would no longer allow any news links in Canada. Meta has already begun phasing out links to news in Canada.
The legacy media, which promoted this without the slightest bit of critical analysis (after all they were going to get paid, so why spend any time exploring the downside to such a tax?) is now losing its remaining braincells over this. A bunch of legacy Canadian media orgs are demanding a regulatory investigation of Meta over this move.
CBC/Radio-Canada has joined other news publishers and broadcasters in requesting that Canada’s Competition Bureau investigate Meta’s decision to block news content on its digital platforms in Canada, describing the social media giant’s decision as “anticompetitive.”
Let’s just review this more clearly for the slow folks who work in Canadian media (and the Canadian government):
- Media whines that Meta and Google are unfair, because they’re making money on the internet while the media is not. They often claim that Google and Meta are “stealing” from them when all they’ve actually done is provide a better vehicle for advertisers.
- In particular, the media complains that these companies are “making money from our content,” never once considering that news is a very, very, very tiny part of both Meta and Google’s business (Google doesn’t even try to monetize it in much of the world), and the thing that both companies do is PROVIDE LINKS TO THOSE MEDIA ORGS. These are the same orgs that, I guarantee you, have people on staff whose job it is to try to get more traffic. And here, Google and Meta are giving them a ton of traffic for free and the media orgs are somehow complaining that all that traffic is unfair.
- They convince politicians to pass a law requiring the big internet companies to pay for links, even though that goes against the fundamental concept of an open web. If these media orgs don’t want traffic from Google or Meta, they can easily block it. The problem is that they want that traffic AND they want to get paid for it, which has the whole equation backwards.
- The law that they demanded gets passed and Meta and Google start blocking links exactly as they promised they would do, and which makes perfect economic sense as the money they’d have to pay far outweighs the value of posting news links.
- The legacy media orgs… whine that this is anticompetitive.
So… according to these media orgs, Meta and Google linking to news is anticompetitive. But also not linking to news is anticompetitive.
Of course, when you put it that way, you realize this has fuck all to do with links or competition. It’s just straight up corruption. Meta and Google have large bank accounts. The media orgs have smaller bank accounts. The only fair thing, according to these legacy media orgs, is that Meta and Google should be forced to give them money. I mean, this is just pathetic:
“Meta’s practices are clearly designed to discipline Canadian news companies, prevent them from participating in and accessing the advertising market, and significantly reduce their visibility to Canadians on social media channels,” the CBC said in a joint statement with the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and News Media Canada, a trade organization that represents newspapers.
“Meta’s anticompetitive conduct, which has attracted the attention of regulators around the world, will strengthen its already dominant position in advertising and social media distribution and harm Canadian journalism,” the statement read.
“The applicants ask the Competition Bureau to use its investigative and prosecutorial tools to protect competition and prohibit Meta from continuing to block Canadians’ access to news content.”
So, linking to them in the first place was anticompetitive because it helped Meta get more advertising, and now not linking to them is anticompetitive because it helps Meta get more advertising, and holy shit how does anyone take these media orgs seriously any more?
Canadian politicians supporting this nonsense sound even worse:
“Facebook … would rather block their users from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations,” Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said in a statement Tuesday.
Again this is so out of touch that Canada should feel embarrassed that it has an elected official this clueless. The “fair share” to pay to send someone free traffic is zero. Zilch. Nada. There is no world in which anyone should ever have to pay to send someone free traffic on the internet. When you charge for such nonsense the only logical business move is to block all such links.
It’s got nothing to do with competition at all. It has to do with greedy media owners who are looking for a handout from the government, by asking them to tax internet companies on the media orgs’ behalf.
Filed Under: c-18, competition, corporate welfare, handout, link tax, welfare
Companies: cbc, google, meta
Comments on “Canadian Media Orgs Said That Meta Linking To News Was Anticompetitive; Now They Say NOT Linking To News Is Anticompetitive”
'Linking to us is theft! Not linking to us is extortion!'
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it’s a strange form of ‘theft’ where the victim complains more when it stops.
I would love it if the tech companies grew a spine and the next time someone tried the ‘we’re just demanding that Meta/Google pay a fair price’ asked point blank how much the publishers should be paying for all the traffic they get out of the relationship and whether that should be more given while Facebook can do just fine without the publishers the same cannot be said about the reverse.
After all if Facebook and/or Google getting increased user interaction thanks to links to publisher content is them benefiting from that content and therefore something they should pay for then the publishers getting massive amounts of free traffic, something platforms usually have to pay and pay dearly to get certainly seems like something they should be paying their fair share for as well.
What's this?
Techdirt community members with Techdirt Credits can spotlight a comment as either the "First Word" or "Last Word" on a particular comment thread. Credits can be purchased at the Techdirt Insider Shop »
I feel embarrassed that my country has an elected official this clueless.
Re:
By the sound of it, your country has multiple elected officials that are that clueless.
Re: Re:
And apparently, multiple politicians over the period of at least several decades…
Re: Re:
In this case, the problem is less the politicians (every political Party whether “left/progressive” or “right/conservative” is supporting it) and more that the general public gets it’s information about it from the same large news media that are trying to pull this scam.
And Bill C-18 aside, the politicians are heavily dependent on those media for news coverage on them and their Parties for everything else, as well — uniformly irate editorial desks at every outlet can only be bad news for every politician that these media feel are hurting the media organizations income opportunities by opposing this grift.
Right now, I can’t be sure which politicians (aside from St. Onge himself) are genuinely this clueless. Some of them must be simply covering their PR rears in a highly vulnerable situation.
(The governing, Liberal Party in particular, has been dealing with post-covid exhaustion and traditional Canadian “this government has been in power too long; time for a change just on principle” voter-satisfaction malaise decline in voter support, and probably doesn’t risk taking a stand against this major-media welfare scam right now, regardless of what the government/Liberal Party might or might not really believe about the whole link-tax boondoggle.)
Fifty years ago, Canadian media were warning about the dangers of media consolidation — today they’re demonstrating that the dangers were real, and have serious consequences.
Re:
You say that like it matters which country, or which politician, you are referring to.
Babies love Bisquits, or else
Do any of the news orgs ever address these logical contrdictions? I mean, they often seem to side with reason and facts otherwise.
ALso, why did Google/meta cave in Australia? It seems a weak point in thier argument. A simple short-sighted error? (‘just pay them their pittance and lets move on”)
Re: "...why did Google/meta cave in Australia?"
Two words: Rupert Murdoch.
Google no doubt realized that if he got pissed off about it, every last bit of media he owns around the world would have been pumping out ‘GOOGLE & FACEBOOK ARE ANTI-JOURNALISM!’ stories until the cows came home.
Re:
Afaik as I know, The Australians wrote their version of the law so that any news links, to news sources in any country, triggered payment to Australian news companies.
Re: Re: Actually it's the government that caved
FB blocked news in Autralia before the law was passed so the gov negociated and gave them an exemption for existing agreements. Also, in Australia the law requires designation by the treasury, no automatic inclusion like in Canada, but no one has ever been designated!!!
So, taken to only a slightly illogical conclusion: Canada would have no problem requiring Petro-Can to pay Canadian Tire any time someone drove from the gas station to their store to buy windshield wipers.
Also, Canadian media organizations that are ‘reporting’ on this are acting very unethically. They aren’t some independent third party, they are VERY vested in the outcome. They should only provide their commentary as opinion pieces.
Re:
How about instead, Canada created an oil exploration company, and every time you (as a foreign competitor) found a new oil field, this Canadian company automatically owned half? Actually, you don’t have to imagine; “Petro-Canada” is that real life “oil exploration company”!
Like father, like son?
what the Canadian media really want
…is for Meta and Google to be forced give them free money for no reason. Because they make lots of money and it’s not fair. They should just be honest about this and not tangle themselves into knots trying to evade the actual issue, namely they can’t compete so they want someone else to pay.
As for Murdoch, he’s overseeing a linear TV empire and linear TV is going to fall off a cliff as its geriatric audience dies off. Meta, Google, social media and streaming will be the replacements and make all the money. Murdoch will be cut out because he’s old and clueless and didn’t see this train coming at him miles away. So this won’t be the last BS maneuver he tries. Desperate dinosaurs thrash around in their death throes.
Re:
The most egregious thing Meta is guilty of is cashing in on the whole middleman economy at its peak, when nobody else was leveraging viewer eyeballs at the scale they were doing. They had the early adopter advantage. That’s literally it.
The Canadian government on the other hand is desperately hoping that the poor reputations of Zuckerberg and Meta will somehow pave the way into tapping Zuckerberg’s cash cow. But they timed things too late – even if Canada wasn’t being savaged by wildfires, Meta has already learned its lesson. Meta succeeded by not negotiating with Spain. They then realized what a mistake it was to negotiate with Australia. They have absolutely no reason to capitulate to Canada’s demands.
Re:
I remember the times when social media was touted as this big waste of time by the previous generations. They griped and moaned that social media was destroying the need for authentic human connection and convincing youngsters to do nothing but look at screens.
Fast forward to today, and it’s the old people bitching and whining whenever their access to a screen or service gets denied or restricted.
The debate or results over the effects of social media on humans was never really about welfare of the youngest generation, it was really about assuaging the insecurities of crusty old fucknuggets who no longer have the level of control they think they’re entitled to.
Re: Re:
Funny how all the traditional, “good old days” methods of communication just fucking died in a corner when the government finally wants to shit on social media, don’t it?
Governments have no excuse. They’ve been leveraging social networks as an all-you-can-eat buffet of data and insights into our private lives since Facebook started becoming a thing. They did a deal with the Devil, and whoop-dee-fucking-do, they’re all surprised when the terms of the deal have been changed.
Where's the money?
Left unsaid is how the anticipated $329 million in tax revenue instead turned into upwards of 50% or even more lost views for the news sites. Which in turn directly translates into lost revenue.
NEWS Equals
Anything more then LOCAL NEWS.
Is generally Everywhere already. There is only a few international news agencies that send out to the Other papers/TV/RADIO (for a price) what is going on.
Murduck, has so many News agencies around the world its STUPID. And 1 reason FOX is Beyond STUPID.
When 1 person can OWN more then 1/3 of the NEWS agencies in a nation…THERE IS A PROBLEM.
How would the media moguls react to “Moguls have much much more in their bank accounts than working people, therefore it is only fair that they pay much more in taxes.”
Re: I'm sure this is your very point, but…
I would definitely agree with such progressive taxation. The Moguls would flip out, though, and that includes the legacy media moguls.
Re: Re:
Actually, we know what these fuckers will do.
If they’re not gonna engineer something like Brexit, they’ll either push for tax cuts, removal of taxes altogether or move to tax heavens.
They already use loopholes to pay far, far less than we already do.
Canada, we really shaved the beaver on this one…
The discussion now should be, how do we repeal this ridiculous law.
Not how to force companies to participate in an industry they have chosen to opt out of.
Rallying blame aimed at Google & Meta is a very simple task.
In Canada, blaming Rupert Murdock should be even easier.
Solution:
Dump the blame on the Murdock’s…. Repeal the law…Political crisis solved.
Well maybe not entirely, you would have to admit and justify taking Rupert’s advice to begin with.
Still 1 or 2 cabinet resignations is a small price to pay to extinguish this dumpster fire.
DeNiro frames the dilemma
What the Google & FB’s response should be:
“All right, I’m gonna give you a choice. You can either have the money and the hammer or you can walk out of here. You can’t have both.”
-Casino
I’m not aware of any country that requires that their elected officials be competent (or honest). We already recognize that too many U.S. legislators, at both the state and Federal levels, are far less influenced by facts and logic than they are by money. Why should the Canadians be any different?
FAFO
So Canada Effed around & found out something.
I wonder if the CBC et al. are successful in lobbying the “Competition Bureau” will Meta & Google find the off switches for their services in Canada?
Can’t wait for the next exciting installment of Canada finds out…
Re:
Nah, what’ll happen is that The Big Two Meanies will get put on Canada’s version of the 301 Special Report. Not much else they can do beyond that, for obvious reasons.
Meta and Google should pass the costs of linking news articles onto the person posting the link. “You appear to be posting a link to a news article.Law requires us to pay the news organisation for this link. Please enter your credit card details to continue to post this link”. Meta and Google would still be operating within the law, but I guarantee news link postings would dry up very quickly.
Re:
The other option would be for Facebook to withdraw from the Canadian market completely, and close all Canadian user accounts.
Re: Re:
That would be a terrible idea, since I have Canadian contacts on facebook and I follow Canadian instagrammers (instagrammarians?).
Re: Re: Re:
Terrible for you personally, but good for extricating FB from the argument. If they don’t operate in Canada anymore then there’s no reason for Canadian politicians to complain about their behaviour.
Of course just because an account gets closed there’s no particular hurry to delete the data. They could keep it around for a year or two and, if the situation changes, poof the account can be restored.
Re: Re: Re:2
You are forgetting the backlash that they would get from their citizens if Facebook exited Canada, which would make the politicians complain even louder, and make a lot of use of the word blackmail.
I am just enjoying the PM screaming how FB doing this is going to kill people…
I mean if he’d put half the effort into a forestry management program as went into making the deepest pockets pay for sending traffic to media outlets, would they even be in danger now?
Re:
The way to turn that on him is so trivial it practically writes itself…
‘If them scrapping news links because it costs them money is going to get people killed and that’s a problem then stop charging them money for links. You could remove the entire reason they have to stop posting news and save countless lives, that is what you want is it not?’
Re:
Ummm… In Canada, Forestry is explicitly under Provincial jurisdiction.
Re: Re:
Ah, Federalism®; it’s not just for Americans™.
Re: Re:
Something something doing a piss poor job of it.
If Canada can demand FB give money for every news snippet they serve up, they can damn well develop a forestry program guidelines saying maybe try to make sure the entire nation isn’t on fire for months.
the scam undone
What I’ve not seen anyone mention is that this would make news orgs profitable. how? SPAM!
The news orgs get paid per link, no matter who posts it. So, post hundreds, thousands even. You’d have seen CBC and others spammed like never before, because each post now has monetary value. Not the content, the link itself.
Of course, understanding that is expecting too much out of Midnight Flashers like Pascale St-Onge
Welcome to my own hell of covering this insanity. I’ve been covering this almost non-stop for the last two months or so because it’s been in the spotlight so much.
Last month, the government was encouraging companies to follow suit with the governments advertising “boycott” of Meta. The boycott was dead on arrival because the Liberal party (the political party in power) actively refused to participate in the very boycott that they were actively encouraging. Only those who were already highly invested in this “boycott” joined and the whole thing collapsed within days.
With pretty much everything going wrong for the government and the big media corporations, they stooped to whole new lows by saying that Meta is blocking news links in response to the unprecedented wildfires that are going on in Canada. This at the same time conveniently ignoring the massive telecomm outages that have become problematic even to the first responders trying to communicate with each other. The government and the media is literally treating the victims of these wildfires as pawns to further their political agenda despite the fact that people have died in these fires. We’ve reached the point where basic human morality has been tossed out of the window.
Now, very recently, the Prime Minister is attacking Meta because they are making huge profits. He made these comments at a recent press conference. You know what he was doing while admonishing Meta for ‘making money off of Canadians’? Shovelling loads of ad money towards Meta in a campaign that spans over 100 advertisements in this month alone.
https://www.freezenet.ca/as-pm-trudeau-complains-about-meta-news-link-blocking-he-continues-to-shovel-ad-money-to-them/
(The link has a video of him talking if you can stomach the stupidity)
This debate has gotten to the point where it makes me want to swear on a regular basis – which is not normal.
Re:
Pay no attention to the massive wild fire behind the curtain, look over there FB is the devil!!!
Ooh. Called for an investigation!
What is there to investigate? Nothing. Everything about this is and has been public.
So what they’re calling for is performative harassment.
So if I post a link to techdirt on Facebook then they have to pay you?
Re:
Derp. Techdirt is neither a news site nor Canadian.
'Linking to us is theft! Not linking to us is extortion!'
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it’s a strange form of ‘theft’ where the victim complains more when it stops.
I would love it if the tech companies grew a spine and the next time someone tried the ‘we’re just demanding that Meta/Google pay a fair price’ asked point blank how much the publishers should be paying for all the traffic they get out of the relationship and whether that should be more given while Facebook can do just fine without the publishers the same cannot be said about the reverse.
After all if Facebook and/or Google getting increased user interaction thanks to links to publisher content is them benefiting from that content and therefore something they should pay for then the publishers getting massive amounts of free traffic, something platforms usually have to pay and pay dearly to get certainly seems like something they should be paying their fair share for as well.
Re:
I seem to recall media execs acknowledging in various public inquiries and open government committee proceedings that their media organizations receive on the order of a third to a half of their traffic from Google, Facebook, and similar social media.
I don’t suppose that would explain why their own marketing puts so much effort into making sure that Google, Facebook, and similar social media outlets not only automatically show such links in as attractive manner as possible, but even go to the trouble of posting such links to their news articles, themselves? Nah — that would be just too obvious (/s) .
So when are the news/media companies going to start paying their own advertisers to run ads on their news/media sites? According to them that is how this works, isn’t it?
How anticompetitive it must be for advertisers to have to pay them to mention their products and services on their media sites!
Something rotten
When someone smart enough to know better argues and continues to double down on the patently ridiculous side of an issue so tenaciously, I have to wonder what the real agenda is. The entire rational world warned of the folly of this move, yet it was pushed through at full force without scrutiny or debate. There’s gotta be something rotten driving it; it just hasn’t surfaced yet. There was absolutely no reason for the govt to score such a huge own goal with no apparent upside, so it intrigues me what could possibly motivate them to do so.
Re:
Dark money likes to stay that way. Except when it’s revealed in the light of day, where upon it suddenly becomes a “campaign donation”.
Re:
There’s gotta be something rotten driving it; it just hasn’t surfaced yet.
It’s called ‘greed and corruption’, and it’s not exactly hidden very well.
You know what intrigues me? Canada’s national debt, at the federal level, is something like 1.33 Trillion CAD. Do you have any idea how much Google’s Net Worth is? 1.66 Trillion USD. Seems to me that a word in the right ear would set every Canadian legislator to quaking, something on the order of “Say, we hear that you’re having a bit of a debt crisis, and we just happen to have some extra cash on hand, looking for a place to do some good…..” The collective loosening of political bowels all at the same time would create a stench detectable all the way down to the Rio Grande.
And of course, the point is not to purchase Canada, but to put the dinosaur media companies on notice that they’d better attend that upcoming Come To Jesus meeting, or else the term “find out” is gonna have a whole new example for everyone to point at.
tl;dr:
That media circus FAFO could lead to more than just a short, sharp and painful learning experience.
Well, this has happened elsewhere with similar results. Canadian news execs and lawmakers most likely knew this would happen but banked on Facebook/Google being easy political punching bags so the government would get a pass for making these dumb laws.
These “legacy news media organizations” tend to parrot the government’s point of view, so I see this as internet users are being forced to subsidize government propaganda.
I don’t want to see this in the US.
Re: You're confused about who's controlling the narrative, here.
You’ve got this one exactly backwards. The rather obvious conflict and much more likely abuse of power, is that the politicians are clearly parroting the news media point of view (for fear of offending the same big media outlets, and the public consequently receiving “unfriendly” coverage from those same news media).
“Big Media” are the ones who stand to benefit, and who are controlling the narrative — blame them, rather than Big Tech or Big Government.
Re:
So…
Rupert Murdoch and News Corp don’t ring a bell?
Rupert Murdoch fucking ramrodding the Aussie version of this shitty law isn’t raising any heckles?
It’s already IN America. Pay attention.
The problem media should have with Facebook and Google obviously isn’t links, it’s the duopoly that sucks most of the value out of online advertising for Facebook and Google. If the competition authority wanted to investigate anything, it should be to break up the fact both companies run conflicted, self-dealing advertising auctions.
The trouble with that thought is that no ‘bidders’ at such auctions are complaining. In fact they’re more than happy with the status quo, so why should any government agency step in?
To (sort of) quote a famous line: “You get a lot more from a kind word and a load of cash than from a kind word alone.”