Canada Inches Closer To ‘Right To Repair’ Reform

Policy

from the fix-your-own-shit dept

Right to repair reform continues to have a moment here in the U.S., with four states (California, Minnesota, New York, and recently Maine) having passed state level protections. The goal: to fight repair monopolies and make it easier and more affordable to repair the technology you own, whether it’s your car, game console, cell phone, CPAP machine, or tractor.

It’s a rare example of U.S. consumer protection heading in the right direction. And Canada appears to be following suit, with right to repair legislation winding its way through the legislative process.

C-244 passed unanimously in the House of Commons in October, and is now being debated in the Canadian Senate. The bill would amend the Canadian copyright act, allowing individuals or independent repair shops to break digital locks in order to make software fixes. It remains unclear what a final federal proposal would look like, but the CBC notes that recent progress has been promising:

“In an email to CBC, the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development said the government is doing pre-consultation work and that the right to repair in Canada could consist of different measures, including at the provincial and territorial levels.”

Much like the U.S., regional Canadian territories aren’t waiting for the federal government to listen to the public and get its shit together. For example in early October the Quebec government passed Bill 29, which aims to “protect consumers from planned obsolescence and to promote the durability, repairability and maintenance of goods.”

U.S. and Canada are trying to make sure consumers have affordable access to the kinds of tools, parts, and repair documentation needed to fix their own products. Europe, in contrast, is taking an approach that’s focused more heavily on making sure companies aren’t building environmentally unsustainable products (like cellphones with the batteries glued to the motherboard).

Collectively it’s a hugely popular reform movement that shows no sign of slowing down thanks to widespread, bipartisan majority public support. Lobbyists have had some success here in the States watering down state legislation, but, as evident by recent tactical retreats by giants like Apple and Microsoft, there are growing signs companies are realizing this isn’t a fight they can win.

Filed Under: autos, canada, drm, game consoles, parts, repair monopolies, right to repair

Canada’s Online News Act (C-18) Has Been An Unmitigated Disaster; Why Does California Still Want To Move Forward With Its Version?

Journalism

from the who-could-possibly-think-this-is-still-a-good-idea? dept

We’ve written a bunch of stuff about the obvious to anyone who understands the internet problems of Canada’s C-18, now dubbed the Online News Act. The fundamental premise behind it is to break the open internet, as an obviously corrupt forced wealth transfer from one disfavored industry to an industry that helps get politicians elected. Everything about this concept is bad, as we recently discussed with Paul Matzko, who reviewed the history of these types of laws and how they’ve done serious damage to journalism.

To date, Canada’s Online News Act has been a total clusterfuck. Meta has made the reasonable business decision to no longer allow news to be posted to its websites, which has not reduced Meta’s traffic one bit, but has harmed Canadian news sites. As the Canadian news site FreezeNet recently noted, the officials who supported C-18 and insisted that everyone was lying when they pointed out these problems have now, themselves, taken to flat out lying about the law and its impact, falsely claiming that the bill has nothing to do with linking (even as officials have admitted that you only have to pay the tax if the companies allow links). They also seem to be living in a fantasy land, as pointed out by law professor Michael Geist (also a guest on our podcast about this bill):

That’s Geist noting:

Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge tells US media conference Bill C-18 is a “win-win” solution. Urges other countries to stand with Canada. As Canadians know, the reality is it has been lose-lose-lose for users, media outlets, and the platforms. Now a model for what not to do.

Ridiculously, politicians in the US still want to move forward with their versions of this disaster. Just last week, there was a very silly conference in DC entirely about pushing these corrupt, open internet-breaking, crony corporate welfare bills. Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge was there, along with Amy Klobuchar, who is pushing a similarly disastrous bill in the US Senate, and California Assembly member Buffy Wicks talking up how her bill (which has been pushed back to next year) will help “level the playing field” for journalists (what does that even mean?).

However, today, the Chamber of Progress, a trade group for internet companies, sent a letter to Wicks, highlighting how (contrary to her claims about bills like this helping journalists), the Online News Act in Canada has been a total and complete disaster for everyone, including journalists.

The letter is chock full of quotes from Canadians highlighting just how bad the law is for Canada, first highlighting how, if they help journalism companies at all, they massively distort the market to just the largest news providers, and screw over the smaller ones:

“This whole experience has me shaken. The reality is I made a huge mistake launching an innovative media business *in Canada*. There was massive government risk I didn’t take seriously ”- Chris Dinn, Founder and Publisher of Torontoverse (News Startup)

“Unfortunately, Bill C-18 misunderstands that crisis, misdiagnosing why news advertising revenue has collapsed, and who is at fault for it. As a result, Bill C-18 ‘fixes’ the problem through a convoluted system that makes news producers increasingly dependent on and subservient to both online platforms and government, threatening their critical role in holding these powerful bodies accountable.” – Openmedia, a community-driven organization that works to keep the Internet open, affordable, and surveillance free

It also quotes others highlighting how badly C-18/Online News Act is harming journalism companies, including the CEO of Village Media, noting that the bill is going to take away 15% of its traffic for no reason at all, and with no real benefit. And plenty of others as well:

“Let’s get something straight. Canadian news organizations did not and does not unanimously support Bill C-18. Digital-only news publications like Narcity Media Group, Village Media, and ZoomerMedia Limited wanted nothing to do with this.” – Chuck LaPointe, CEO, Narcity Media

“The act known as Bill C-18 is based on the assumed truth of the unproven allegation that Big Tech companies help themselves to the content produced by news organizations and refuse to share the profits they accrue from that larceny. Always wobbly, that cornerstone assumption has turned out to be pure fantasy.” – Peter Menzies, past vice-chair of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission (CRTC) and is a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute

There are many more quotes in the letter as well, including from Sue Gardner at Privacy International, who used to be executive director at Wikimedia Foundation, and head of the CBC’s website (i.e., she understands both the internet and journalism):

Bill C-18—which is really no more than a shakedown of the platforms in order to prop up the dying business models of legacy incumbents—just isn’t good enough. It’s lazy and it’s not in the public interest. Canada deserves better.

There are many, many more quotes from all sorts of experts in that letter, which one hopes that Wicks will actually take seriously. As the letter itself explains, the basic fundamental purpose of a tax is to get less of whatever it is that you are taxing, so it’s bizarre that Wicks would push a bill whose result will be less journalism:

As you know well, typically taxes are reserved for behaviors that policymakers are attempting to discourage, such as alcohol, tobacco, or even sugary beverages. For instance, California’s taxes on sodas have been shown by the Public Health Institute to unequivocally reduce soda consumption.

Similarly, taxing news links – as CJPA does – will undoubtedly lead platforms to shut off news links, as they have in Canada. Journalism at its core is about informing people and broadening the reach of objective truth. Taxing shared links is not only antithetical to this principle, but it discourages the exchange of valuable information.

If passed, CJPA will likely have the same impact in California as Canada’s law has had: Harm to both Californians and small news publishers. Large media organizations who can build their own direct connection to consumers may be fine, but small news publishers will undoubtedly be harmed.

Will Wicks listen to the experts this time? We’ll see. Last year we warned her directly that her AADC bill had serious 1st Amendment problems, and she dismissed our concerns. And yet a court just concluded that her bill infringes on 1st Amendment rights, just as we predicted.

So, maybe, instead of dismissing anyone who criticizes her bills, Wicks should take the time to actually speak to experts who can highlight all the ways that her bill will harm Californians and especially California news organizations like my own?

Filed Under: buffy wicks, c-18, california, canada, cjpa, journalism, link tax, media, online news act, pascale st-onge

Latest Data: Canadian Media Needs Facebook More Than Facebook Needs Canadian Media

Journalism

from the didn't-we-cover-this-already? dept

As we’ve discussed widely, the entire premise of various link tax bills has never made sense. They’re pushed by the media and politicians insisting that Google and Facebook are unfairly “profiting” off of their news. Except that’s never made any sense at all to anyone who looked at the situation carefully.

First of all, links to news has never been particularly important to either Google or Facebook. It’s always been a small part of what they do, and almost always not a key part of monetizing anything, but just as an extra feature (Google, famously, barely monetizes Google News at all).

Second, as we just discussed on our recent podcast, in the pre-internet era, the largest expense for newspapers was printing and distribution, and the internet basically removed the vast majority of those expenses, and gave them a system to do both for basically nothing.

Third, Google and Facebook were then sending traffic to these news sites for free. And we know that the news sites valued that free traffic, because if they didn’t they (1) could easily block it, and (2) wouldn’t hire SEO and social media experts to help try to get more such traffic. Indeed, there was tremendous empirical evidence suggesting that the news orgs got way more benefit from Facebook and Google sending them traffic than either Facebook or Google got from having links to news on their platform.

And, now, with Canada’s C-18, we’re seeing even more evidence making this point. As you’ll recall, C-18 is Canada’s version of a link tax that was signed into law earlier this year, and which will go into effect soon. However, both Meta and Google have said that they will respond to this by blocking links to news in Canada, and Meta has already done so.

And while Canadian media orgs and politicians completely lost their shit about this, effectively claiming that Meta linking to news sites is “theft” and not linking to news sites is corrupt, you’d think that maybe someone in the Canadian government would realize just how bad all this looks.

The latest is that, once again, the actual market is showing that the news orgs appear to need Facebook and Google way more than Facebook or Google need news. First there was a report showing that the lack of news links in Canada did literally nothing to Facebook’s traffic.

Daily active users of Facebook and time spent on the app in Canada have stayed roughly unchanged since parent company Meta started blocking news there at the start of August, according to data shared by Similarweb, a digital analytics company that tracks traffic on websites and apps, at Reuters’ request.

Another analytics firm, Data.ai, likewise told Reuters that its data was not showing any meaningful change to usage of the platform in Canada in August.

So, all this talk about how Facebook needed news to keep users on the site… the reality is that, no, they did not.

Of course, if we check in on the other side of the equation, we see that maybe the news orgs actually kinda relied on that traffic more than Facebook did. There was a CNN report claiming a “dramatic drop” in traffic from Meta to news orgs, but that’s to be expected, given it was going from whatever it was to basically zero. The question is how much of their traffic does that represent.

A quick look around at Canadian news orgs suggests that (unlike Facebook’s traffic), the traffic to news orgs in Canada has mostly (though not entirely) declined since the block went into effect in early August. The Toronto Star showed a decline in visitors from July to August of 1.6 million visits, according to Similarweb. The NationalPost was down about 300k visits. The TorontoSun was down about 500k visits. CTV News also lost about 500k visits.

Of course, not all news orgs saw their traffic decline. Two of the biggest actually saw a bump up in traffic: CBC.ca and the Globe and Mail both saw their traffic jump up a bit, perhaps because as Canadians look for other sources for news, they were more likely to go directly to two of the most well known news sites for Canadians.

Along those lines, another report, this time from Insider, notes that those Canadian news orgs with apps saw app usage increase in August:

Yet, because of the loss of access on Facebook and Instagram, several major news outlets in Canada are seeing an uptick in downloads and usage of their own apps, according to an analysis from Apptopia. The apps of CTV, and Globe and Mail, as well as French language outlet La Presse, saw thousands more downloads in August compared to July, when content was still available on Meta’s platforms.

The Globe and Mail in August saw a 98% increase in app downloads and a 27% increase in daily users; CTV News saw a 157% increase in app downloads and an 83% increase in daily usage; La Presse saw a 32% increase in app downloads and an 8% increase in usage; and The National Post’s downloads were up almost 10%, with daily usage up 3%. Meanwhile, CBC News saw downloads and daily usage remain relatively flat.

All in all, it looks like maybe it doesn’t much matter if Meta doesn’t link to news sites. Of course, you can argue this is a good result for basically everyone involved: getting rid of news doesn’t harm Facebook, and the media get more direct traffic. Though, of course, if you listen to Canadian politicians you’d think it was the end of the world. PM Justin Trudeau acted as if this is all about “corporate profits,” but that literally makes no sense.

Again, as everyone tried to explain to Canadian politicians from the beginning, none of this makes sense. It requires paying for something that should never be paid for, so it’s entirely reasonable to just stop hosting news links. It’s not about “corporate profits,” it’s about recognizing the problems of paying for links fundamentally.

Either way, though, the early results suggest that Facebook made the right decision here, while the Canadian government looks extremely foolish.

Filed Under: c-18, canada, journalistm, link tax, news
Companies: facebook, google, meta

After Canada Starts Taxing News Links, Canadians Are Upset That They Can’t Follow News Of Wildfires On Facebook

Journalism

from the blame-your-stupid-government dept

Let’s start from the basics here: if you tax something, you will get less of it. That’s how taxes work. If you want less of something, you add a tax to it. In Canada, some very, very clueless politicians (pushed by the news media) passed a tax on Facebook and Google linking to news. Both companies have long made it clear that news is not a revenue driver for either company, so Canada’s decision to make it more expensive basically priced both companies out of the market, and both have announced a discontinuation of links to news for Canadian users.

Meta began removing links to news at the beginning of this month, and people are already realizing how messed up things are when you can’t link. Up in Canada’s Northwest Territories, there are wildfires happening, and people were relying on social media to share news… but they can’t do that any more.

Like many in Canada’s Northwest Territories, Poul Osted has been relying on social media to keep in touch with loved ones as they scramble to evacuate from nearby wildfires.

But Mr Osted said he has been left frustrated by his inability to share news articles on Facebook during the active emergency situation, due to Meta’s ban on news content for Canadian users.

“Instead we have to screenshot parts of a news story and post that as a picture,” Mr Osted told the BBC.

“Oftentimes this means you don’t get the whole story, or have to go searching the web for verification.”

I’m sure some will blame Meta for this, but this is 100% on the Canadian government. As we’ve explained over and over again, no matter what you think of Meta, this law is breaking one of the fundamental pieces of the open web: you never have to pay to link to someone.

Meta may be a terrible messenger for this, but we should be happy that the company is taking a stand here, even if it’s doing it for selfish reasons. If link taxes like this are allowed to sweep the globe, the fundamental internet that we rely on will have changed in a very bad way. There is no way that these kinds of taxes stop at just news providers. Once other industries catch on, you can expect link taxes for all sorts of other “struggling” industries.

If people are frustrated about not being able to share important information about wildfires, that’s totally understandable, but they should be asking their government why they’ve made linking too expensive.

Meanwhile, others are complaining that Meta is blocking sites that aren’t really news. This isn’t a surprise. The same thing happened in Australia too, when that country launched its own link tax. I know when that happened some people got mad at Meta, but that was silly. When the penalty for not paying for a news link can be massive, you can bet Meta is (reasonably!) going to err on the side of overblocking.

And, as the company has to go through tons of sites to figure out which are and which are not allowed to be linked to, of course some borderline cases are going to get caught in the crossfire. According to this article, it includes things like a satire publications and a music radio station that doesn’t really publish any news.

In both cases, it’s fairly understandable. Both publications look pretty close to news, and there’s no way for a human to carefully vet which “news-looking-sites” are actually news vs. those that are not. At least this round of overblocking resulted in a funny situation:

The Beaverton, which describes itself as a “satire and parody publication,” was blocked by Meta on Facebook and Instagram a week ago after the technology conglomerate mistakenly lumped it in with news providers in Canada. Its readers, however, could once again see its content online by Thursday.

Luke Gordon Field, editor in chief of The Beaverton, said the blocking prompted him to act. The blocking was no joke, he said.

Field wrote an open letter to Meta threatening CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a fake lawsuit for defaming the publication by calling it a news organization. That letter was posted to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Then there’s the music radio station:

Dan Lovranski, the volunteer host of Dr Mouth’s Rock and Roll Lunch Party on CIUT 89.5 FM Tuesdays at noon, said CIUT-FM, the University of Toronto’s radio station, is being blocked by Meta on Facebook and Instagram. He said CIUT-FM, which mainly produces music-based programming, is a community-based university-run radio station.

“It’s affecting a lot more things than just news agencies,” Lovranski said on Tuesday. 

Lovranski said he’s amassed a global audience by promoting his show — “rock and roll, lots of fun, loud and boisterous, crazy music” — on Facebook and Instagram. He said Facebook is a “great promotional tool,” but no longer.

Now, listeners cannot be alerted to the show on Facebook and cannot be given information on how to download the show so that they can listen to it later, he said.

Again, you could argue that this doesn’t belong in the block, but Meta can’t afford to make mistakes here, so a radio station seems close enough to news that you can understand why it would get blocked.

Don’t like it? Complain to the Canadian government who pushed for and passed this very dumb link tax.

Filed Under: c-18, canada, journalism, link tax, music, satire, wildfires

Meta Begins The Process Of Ending News Links In Canada

Journalism

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

Canada’s Online News Act: The Fallout Continues, As Google Will Block News Links, Other Support Programs

Journalism

from the no-payment-for-links dept

This isn’t a huge surprise, as they’d already suggested they would do this, but Google has announced officially that it will block news links in Canada to avoid having to pay to send traffic to Canadian news sources.

We have now informed the Government that when the law takes effect, we unfortunately will have to remove links to Canadian news from our Search, News and Discover products in Canada, and that C-18 will also make it untenable for us to continue offering our Google News Showcase product in Canada.

The company goes on to note all the ways in which it had been supporting journalism in Canada, nearly all of which it will now stop because of the pure stupidity and open internet-breaking nature of the bill, which demands payments for linking to news, going against the fundamental principle of the web.

We already pay to support Canadian journalism through our programs and partnerships – and we’ve been clear we’re prepared to do more. As part of our Google News Showcase program, we have negotiated agreements covering over 150 news publications across Canada. Last year alone, we linked to Canadian news publications more than 3.6 billion times — at no charge — helping publishers make money through ads and new subscriptions. This referral traffic from links has been valued at $250 million CAD annually. We’re willing to do more; we just can’t do it in a way that breaks the way that the web and search engines are designed to work, and that creates untenable product and financial uncertainty.

Ever since the Government introduced C-18 last year, we have shared our experiences in other countries and been clear that unworkable legislation could lead to changes that affect the availability of news on Google’s products in Canada.

We have successfully collaborated with Governments and news publishers around the world on the shared goal of strengthening the news industry, and we currently have thousands of mutually beneficial agreements with news publications around the world.

We tried to take this same approach with Bill C-18. We repeatedly offered constructive feedback and recommended solutions that would have made it more workable for both platforms and publishers, unlocking further financial support for Canadian journalism. We also endorsed the alternative model of an independent fund for Canadian journalism supported by both platforms and the Government, an approach that’s worked elsewhere. We appeared several times before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications and submitted detailed recommendations to both committees.

We advocated for reasonable and balanced amendments to the legislation for over a year. None of our suggestions for changes to C-18 were accepted.

This news follows on Meta making a similar announcement a week earlier. For what it’s worth, Meta has also announced that it will be ending the program it had to fund journalism in Canada.

As the fallout from the federal government’s Online News Act continues, Facebook parent Meta is terminating a contract with The Canadian Press that saw the digital giant support the hiring of a limited number of emerging journalists at the national newswire service.

The newswire agency was informed Wednesday that Meta will end the contract, which has funded roughly 30 reporting fellowship positions for early-career journalists at CP since the program’s inception in 2020.

Canadian Press executive editor Gerry Arnold said that in its letter informing the media company of its decision, Meta clearly linked its termination of the program to Canada’s Online News Act, which became law last week.

With all of this going on, even as the Canadian government was very clearly warned about just how damaging C-18 would be, Drew Wilson at Freezenet reported that the government is now scrambling to negotiate (after the bill was passed) on ways to keep Meta and Google allowing news links in Canada.

Of course, that quoted some Google folks saying that they were hopeful for an agreement — and that was before this announcement from Google, so it sounds like the negotiations failed.

Meanwhile, two of Canada’s biggest newspapers, Postmedia (owners of the National Post) and Nordstar (owners of the Toronto Star), are apparently in talks to merge, meaning there would be even less competition and fewer major news orgs in Canada. I’m sure that some would argue that this is why the internet companies need to pay for links, but it actually just reinforces how terribly traditional news orgs have been run in the internet age, where they’ve consistently failed to adapt or figure out how to actually embrace the internet.

And now they want to be paid for their own failures. But, instead, the end result may be that they’re in more trouble because Google and Facebook take away all the benefits they’ve been providing them already.

Filed Under: c-18, canada, google news, journalism, link tax, news, news links, news search
Companies: google, meta, nordstar, postmedia

As Canada Passes Corrupt Link Tax, Meta Says No More News Links In Canada

Journalism

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

Canadian Court Allows Distance Learning Spyware Seller To Continue Silencing One Of Its Many Critics

Free Speech

from the Proctorio-still-willing-to-punch-down dept

A worldwide pandemic in 2020 altered the contours of pretty much everything. Entire cities shut down. Retailers shrunk hours to time periods normally only witnessed prior to the introduction of the 24-hour clock. Shit got exceedingly weird.

The good news is most of the world understood the new normal would be anything but normal. The bad news is far too many governments and government agencies expected everyone to pretend an upended world was the equivalent of anarchy and responded (in)appropriately.

People could no longer be forced to spend most of their day in enclosed rooms with presumptively infected “peers.” I mean, that’s what we, the people, understood about the virus and its attack vectors. But corporate figureheads (who are always able to “work” from home and do not share oxygen with the hourlies) and administrators of educational institutions (who similarly distance themselves from the unpaid laborers [students] who help obtain federal funding through steady [compulsory] attendance) were nonplussed.

These people got angry. Then they got weird. They were told their anger and weirdness possibly wasn’t lawful when there’s a pandemic underway. Being placed on the “quality of life” backburner did not make these people any less annoying. It simply made them more evil.

In the corporate world, it meant guilting people into returning to physical locations. At schools, it meant deploying a wide variety of extremely intrusive stalkerware to assure still-distanced administrators that the people they couldn’t physically hover over during test time weren’t cheating their way to imaginary wins in an imaginary marketplace of ideas supporters pretend is still a meritocracy.

Spyware was deployed. Some of it was sold by Proctorio, which, as its name suggests, is supposed to be a stand-in for the squadron of publicly-purchased kibitzers that hover over students as they “participate” in government-mandated tests. Proctorio was problematic not just because of what it allowed educators to do — virtually invade the homes of students — but also because it chose to engage in legal warfare against critics, security researchers, and anyone else who might dig into its software and business practices.

In response to its aggressive tactics, Proctorio has also been sued. Those cases are still pending. But in Canada, a court has ridiculously decided that University of British Columbia learning tech specialist Ian Linkletter’s posting of documents left exposed by Proctorio is somehow Linketter’s fault. Linkletter’s post makes it clear what’s at stake: his own life and livelihood. And all because Proctorio can’t stand being publicly criticized.

The BC Court of Appeal has dismissed the appeal of my anti-SLAPP application. You can read its reasons online: https://www.canlii.org/en/bc/bcca/doc/2023/2023bcca160/2023bcca160.html

Proctorio’s lawsuit, which has already taken a massive toll on me and my family since it was filed in September 2020, will continue to do so for the time being. It isn’t over, as I had hoped.

I continue to believe the suit against me lacks legal merit. Today’s decision is concerning. The implications for people who express themselves online about matters of public interest are significant: professionals and scholars like me will be less likely to share their expert knowledge, even if it could help protect students and other vulnerable communities, knowing they could face a lawsuit like this from a wealthy corporation in response. The Protection of Public Participation Act hasn’t done its job.

There’s no First Amendment in Canada. There are free speech protections, but they’re not as robust as they are in the United States, which made speech protections the first thing to be enshrined following the ratification of the Constitution.

That doesn’t mean Canada hates speech. It just means the legal standard isn’t nearly as protective of people like Linkletter, who did nothing more than share information Proctorio obviously wanted to remain confidential, but failed to take the proper steps to ensure it would remain so.

The decision [PDF] says it’s Linkletter who’s wrong, even if it can be argued the information Linkletter shared with others was of public interest.

The respondent Proctorio, Incorporated brought an action against the appellant Ian Linkletter in breach of confidence and copyright after he shared links to Proctorio’s unlisted instructional videos hosted on YouTube. Mr. Linkletter appeals the denial of his application to dismiss that action under the Protection of Public Participation Act.

Held:Appeal dismissed. The judge did not err in finding grounds to believe that the breach of confidence claim had substantial merit and that Mr. Linkletter had no valid defence. His finding that the links were themselves confidential, and that the information was otherwise only available online in a diffuse and scattered form, is supported by the record. He also did not err in finding sufficient grounds to establish that Mr. Linkletter was obliged to keep those links confidential, based on the context in which he accessed them, and that sharing the links caused Proctorio detriment.

This is all incredibly screwed up. First, Proctorio is a powerful government contractor that had plenty of opportunities to greet Linkletter’s speech (in the form of exposed “secret” videos) with more speech. Second, “unlisted” videos posted to YouTube are not the equivalent of proprietary info posted to internal, non-publicly-accessible pages at Protorio’s own website. Third, Linkletter had no “obligation” to perform Proctorio’s OPSEC for it. And, finally, that Proctorio was (arguably) hurt by Linkletter’s posting of secrets Proctorio knowingly shared with a third-party service (where’s the Canadian version of the Third Party Doctrine when you need it?) should have no bearing on this case. If Proctorio wanted to keep something secret, it had far better options than uploading its information to a third party routinely accessed by billions of people every day.

This decision is horrendous. It basically allows private companies to claw back information they inadvertently exposed to the public just by claiming the exposure they caused harmed them. It’s the legal equivalent of claiming that the hole Proctorio shot in its own foot, using its own gun, is the fault of bystanders who happened to witness the self-infliction of this wound and informed others about it.

While the court does recognize that Linkletter’s posting of “unlisted” YouTube links was “expression on a matter of public interest,” it decides this particular expression isn’t protected because Proctorio never expressed an interest in making these videos public. And it upholds the lower court’s decision, which somehow found in favor of Proctorio, despite the company not providing any evidence supporting its claims.

The judge addressed Proctorio’s allegations of two specific harms: first, that sharing the videos would facilitate student cheating, and second, that it would assist Proctorio’s competitors. The judge acknowledged that there was no concrete evidence before him to show how those things might actually have occurred, particularly given there was evidence suggesting that much of the information in issue was already in the public domain anyway. He concluded nonetheless that Proctorio had demonstrated harm because Mr. Linkletter had “undermine[d] the virtual barrier on which Proctorio relies to segregate the information that it wishes
to make available only to instructors and administrators from that available to students and members of the public”: at para. 80. He noted that the links were circulated widely, and that some of Mr. Linkletter’s 958 followers on Twitter appeared to have retweeted the links: at para. 108. […] It suffices at this point to say that I see no error in the judge’s conclusion that there were grounds to believe Proctorio could establish some detriment.

This is a bad judgment call (in the technical and legal sense) being affirmed by a worse judgment call. Proctorio gets to keep suing Linkletter. It is allowed to keep bullying someone for having the temerity to use Proctorio’s own published information and statements against it. And it gets to do this despite consecutive courts acknowledging (1) the information was of public interest, and (2) Proctorio was unable to provide solid evidence of actual harm.

The appeal is rejected and Proctorio is allowed to continue to press its considerable weight against whatever’s left of Linkletter’s resistance. Sooner or later, something’s gotta give. And Proctorio is pretty sure it’s going to be an educator who dared to pass on his findings to his small Twitter following.

Filed Under: anti-slapp, canada, copyright, criticism, distance learning, free speech, ian linkletter, slapp, spyware, surveillance
Companies: proctorio