Strongly agreed. I think a lot of commenters in this thread are getting derailed by their feelings towards Meta. This is truly a dumb, dumb law and it’s extremely embarrassing that it even passed.
It’s not just Meta. No company wants to comply with this poorly thought out law, written by people who apparently have no idea how the internet works.
I think most of the people in the comments cheering this on haven’t read the bill. It requires them to pay news sites to link to the news site. Which is utterly insane. Linking to news sites is a win win. It means Facebook or Google gets to show relevant content and the news site gets users. This bill is going to hurt Canadian news sites because sites like Google and Facebook will avoid linking to them.
But where I see a small nugget of good intent in this law is in the fact that I’d be willing to wager a very large percentage of people read the blurb on Facebook, which summarizes the entire story, and never click over to the actual article, thereby robbing the news site of ad revenue.
This isn’t (supposed to) be about paying to post links. It’s about paying to summarize their content so that users don’t have to leave Facebook.
Right. It’s like if I stand at a street corner telling people to try out a local restaurant. And then the local restaurant says that I should be charged to recommend them. It makes no sense.
Strongly agreed. I think a lot of commenters in this thread are getting derailed by their feelings towards Meta. This is truly a dumb, dumb law and it’s extremely embarrassing that it even passed.
It’s not just Meta. No company wants to comply with this poorly thought out law, written by people who apparently have no idea how the internet works.
I think most of the people in the comments cheering this on haven’t read the bill. It requires them to pay news sites to link to the news site. Which is utterly insane. Linking to news sites is a win win. It means Facebook or Google gets to show relevant content and the news site gets users. This bill is going to hurt Canadian news sites because sites like Google and Facebook will avoid linking to them.
I don’t disagree.
But where I see a small nugget of good intent in this law is in the fact that I’d be willing to wager a very large percentage of people read the blurb on Facebook, which summarizes the entire story, and never click over to the actual article, thereby robbing the news site of ad revenue.
This isn’t (supposed to) be about paying to post links. It’s about paying to summarize their content so that users don’t have to leave Facebook.
This will essentially break Google News and the like in Canada. It’s idiotic in so many ways.
Right. It’s like if I stand at a street corner telling people to try out a local restaurant. And then the local restaurant says that I should be charged to recommend them. It makes no sense.
I hate Meta, but this is just a dumb law.