Journalism is the bulwark that supports democracy in any society .... you have your politicians and leaders and if there is no one there to ask questions, you are left with just taking the word of everything they say for granted and trust everything they say
Journalists, real actual objective journalists that take no sides and report the relevant topics and leave the reader to decide on what to believe, have the thankless job of taking our leaders to task and make them accountable for everything they say and do.
When you place all that journalistic work in the hands of a corporation to control and manipulate .... it is a real danger to democracy.
Google, Meta and any other corporation should never be allowed to exercise any kind of control, manipulation or effect to any of the work that journalists produce and share
Once you allow a corporation that level of control .... any kind of democratic ideas in the country will slowly get eroded and washed away.
When you place all that journalistic work in the hands of a corporation to control and manipulate .... it is a real danger to democracy. Google, Meta and any other corporation should never be allowed to exercise any kind of control, manipulation or effect to any of the work that journalists produce and share
It could be said that this happened years ago in Canada. Much of what is considered under this bill as Canadian journalism is largely owned by non-Canadian entities.
For example, Postmedia, who publishes the de-facto daily newspaper for many of the larger Canadian cities, is 66% owned by one american hedge fund. The papers have a Canadian presence, but their brand and ownership are much like a modern Tim Hortons, all Canadian trappings but profits that leave the country for an international investment firm.
So, at best, even if the bill redistributes some profits from tech-bros to their umbrella of qualifying Canadian news outlets, two-thirds of any amount paid would still return to the control of stakeholders in the United States anyway.
This is good news purely because it means "news" and their atrocious comment sections will stay off my Facebook feed. I couldn't care less about media conglomorates getting their buck.
What a joke that the heritage minister will "push back" on Google and Meta refusing to carry our news. What, we're now just going to force foreign companies to pay for our failing news industry?
I don’t know where you get the idea they don’t pay taxes here. When they operate here they pay taxes here.
However, this argument that merely linking to content means you must pay the creator of that content is bullshit. If that is true we should just shut down the internet now.
This isn’t anything like Reddit either. Journalists get paid, unlike Reddit mods and users. The news agencies can and do put content behind paywalls. If they choose to put content up for free that is also their choice. Then they don’t get paid for it.
I think this whole thing makes it abundantly clear that the news sites benefit more from the links from Google and Meta then the other way around.
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