@coolboymew It would be really awful if Google did end up doing a surprise deal striking. It would only further incentivize profiting off of surveillance capitalism, greatly distort the market, likely reduce payouts for smaller players using things like Adsense, and would even work to Google's detriment as it would establish a precedent that this warmed interpretation of copyright law is becoming the expected norm. One way or another, nothing good would come out of such a deal.
@reneestephen Yeah, that's probably a silver lining to this situation. I worry, though, that it may be a temporary reprieve, though. The rage farming will probably circumvent the news link blocks by screencapping fake articles and spreading disinformation that way. Still, that will take extra effort and might serve as a speed bump to slow that garbage down. Hopefully, the reprieve lasts a while at least, though.
@trendless I really hope that happens. Rescinding this bad law is the only way forward in fixing this situation. It's already causing a lot of carnage with many smaller news organizations halting expansion projects and possibly pushing some of them into folding in on themselves.
Unfortunately, for the time being, it seems that the Liberal government only intends on doubling down to 'stand up to the bullies' instead of seeing reason with this situation.
@mmasnick Fair enough. I only let you know since you seemed to be following that sort of thing and thought it wouldn't hurt to give you a heads up on that.
@coolboymew@Hoss I'm not so sure Google (or Facebook for that matter) will actually get hurt by this. The data was pretty consistent in that very few interactions revolve around news for them.
I mean, even I would shrug off an, at most, 2% loss in traffic and carry on like nothing happened. The media companies, however, are a different story with seeing stats of 40%-60% in a potential loss of traffic. Any cash strapped media organization would, at minimum, get a new limp from that.
@keithzg@coolboymew Indeed. With the government already openly contemplating issuing massive bailouts, the hedge fund managers and CEOs will be happy in the end. The actual people behind news coverage? Not so much.
@joemcken@mmasnick The Canadian government, I think, has finally realized they f***ed up. They are currently in panicked emergency meetings to try and get the platforms to not block news links altogether. Apparently, Facebook was hours away from pulling the news block lever before the government finally communicated with them.
It appears that #Lemmy is communicating with various Mastodon instances, however, #KBin is still not federating. Sounds like KBin is getting slammed with traffic right now. Speculation is that they had to enable Cloudflare to keep things online, but that is messing with federating. You can follow magazines like @tech or @gaming, but the content won't show up.
Kind of curious how one submits links to these magazines from Mastodon once these issues are sorted out.
@Otome@kbin.social Yeah, I'm seeing no actual content with the magazines themselves - at least the ones I tried.
KBin users show up in search for me and they do show that they have posted content, but I have to look at the original page as its not yet showing on my instance. I suspect that if they are new instances and new users, then accessing the content hasn't been able to happen quite yet. I'm sure I could interact with them if I wanted to, though.
@Otome@kbin.social I don't know if this screenshot helps, but for a standard KBin user, this is what I see on my instance right now (the link will go to the KBin users server instead).
@Otome@kbin.social Yeah, I can imagine the excitement. For magazines that definitely have content such as @tech, all I see on my instance is the number of followers, join date, and a description. Looking at the KBin side of things, there is content.
@iusearchbtw I'm on the noc.social server trying to access a KBin account. Magazines show no content, but users content shows up in the Posts and Replies tab. Looking at your account, it's almost like you are a brand new account. Normal posts tab shows nothing and your reply is the only thing that shows up on my Mastodon instance. Screen: