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Lemmy was pretty harsh about this when it came out. I was a bit surprised to see the fediverse take the side of Facebook and Google.
I thought it had good intentions. Journalism isn’t free, is becoming a service of value to Google and Facebook but without costing them anything.
I dunno, thought it was a good move.
It was/is a good move.
Some people are complaining that "billionaire media conglomerates" are going to be getting some money, but not that the large corporations like Meta and Google are making money off of others work without compensation.
Mind-boggling.
It totally disregards how the internet and the web works. Meta and Alphabet aren't copying whole articles and reposting them, they are linking to articles with a summary. You don't charge some one extra because they drive traffic towards you.
Linking with a summary of what is at the other end of the link is how the web works. Charging a toll to link to your site is greedy and ignorant.
It seems very obvious to me that social media is a net negative to media organizations. People very rarely click through to articles, headlines are clearly the most valuable part of an article.
Ultimately the way things work now is not sustainable it leads to low quality news that can barely stay afloat. How do you propose you fix it?
headlines are clearly the most valuable part of an article.
Then there is no value at all. Views from an illiterate user have no value.
To fix the news industry media corps have to start doing quality work not click-bait, rage-trolling, opinion pieces. Once there is something worth reading maybe there will be a case for the extraction of value from links.
Thing is, it wasn't an issue on the web before social media. So now traditional media creates content that gets posted on social media, the eyes that see the content only sees it on social media with the ads that pay the digital media company, in the end the social media is richer, the traditional media is poorer and the user is stupider because they didn't bother actually reading the content.
There 100% was link sharing with partial and full content being reposted long before "social media" arrived. "Tradidtional media" is only poorer in this current interaction because they produce such low quality content that it can be summarized in 5 words or less. If they wrote anything with depth they would have a real case for "social" platforms infringing on their copyright but you can only word a clickbait tittle so many ways and none of them are unique. Users aren't going to click through to a clearly dogshit article.
News sources need to quit cranking out click bait if they want to draw in real readers or, they can put their news behind a paywall and rely on subscribers to stay in business. If no one actually wants to pay for the "news" they produce then maybe they just suck, let them fail and something else will tke their place.
A couple thousand people sharing and not reading the articles vs millions doing so?
Proof is in the pudding, traditional media have seen an increase in traffic since Facebook blocked them.
Then keep blocking. There is no reason to set a precedent for one country saying what can and can not be linked without compensation. The blocking was done voluntarily by Alphabet and Meta and helps break up the monopoly they have on people's screen time.
It has to start somewhere though and the precedent was already set by Australia and Canada is totally free to force Meta to obey Canadian laws if it wants to offer its services in Canada and that means that the government absolutely can tell them "If you want to operate in Canada you have to allow your users to share Canadian media content."
So the law penalizes them for just linking, even if they removed the headlines and the summary they still have to pay. Why aren't news organizations paying Meta & Google for sending traffic their way?
Meta and Google are making money off of others work without compensation.
Meta doesn't seem to think they make very much off news at all, given they've been blocking it for months now here and have been cutting down on it globally across their products.
It's a great move.
Remember all the memes about "I'll pay you in exposure", well that's what the web giants want to do.
Honestly, the government doesn't have to do anything more than pass the bill. There's no need to put on pressure, as if they don't want to pony up the cash, they can just go on without the goods.
I will say that it will make an interesting experiment in regards to news dissemination if various sites stop stealing all the articles and don't replace it with anything at all.
My personal website shows up in Google searches, should I be legally allowed to charge them for every time they display a link?
This was an greedy move pushed by Canada's billionaire media corporations and enacted by woefully ignorant politicians. Even if the plan DID work how exactly would it have played out? Bell Media would sick its pack of lawyers on Google and hammer out some per-1k clicks agreement. Small Canadian media outlets would submit an online form, the form would require an inhuman understanding of the law and access to analytics that they probably don't even record, but there would be a nice easy "Bare minimum payment to comply" box near the bottom that would see them receive a couple bucks a year.
Canada is one one the most technologically backwards countries on the planet, we pay THE highest rates for data, all of our service providers are owned by one of three monstrous companies and most of the time you only have a single option where you live anyway. If there is going to be any disruption to digital access it needs to be internal, slap Bell, Rogers and Cogeco for fucks sake.
The plan is already working.
should I be legally allowed to charge them for every time they display a link?
Are you a news organization that produces local, regional or national news content?
Even if the plan DID work
Isn't it working? Google has already agreed to pay.
While I agree it was a greedy and ignorant move, the difference is that your website is being advertised for free every time it shows up on Google searches, while news articles are stolen wholesale without anything more than a link to the original that nobody is going to bother checking because they got the entire value of product that people care about.
It's the difference between a movie trailer being shared on streaming services vs the movie itself being uploaded everywhere. One's advertising, the other's piracy.