In this week’s newsletter, we compiled recommendations for Canadian publishers seeking solutions to Bill C-18 and for American publishers who want to become less reliant on Facebook. We’re also highlighting examples of what publishers have already been doing to give you some inspiration.
#Canada#C18#LinkTaxes#BigTech#News#Media#Journalism#Meta#Google#TargetedAds: "The link tax laws passed around the world have typically been justified on the grounds that companies such as Google and Meta are are using links drive traffic to news sites, but keeping any profits from advertising in the process. In other words, online advertising means Google and Meta have taken control of the online advertising that used to be the mainstay of news publishers.
As a previous PIA article explained, today’s advertising system is based on constant surveillance of site visitors, but Google and Meta retain most of the revenue. In other words, if C-18 aims to fix the publishing industry’s financial challenges, the solution isn’t introducing link taxes that don’t address the real problem. Instead, news publishers could move to context-based advertising, which respects the privacy of visitors, and doesn’t hand most of the ad revenue to intermediaries like Google and Meta."
'When asked about the massive taxpayer-funded parkade, Therme's CEO said his firm expects only 10% of his luxury spa customers to arrive by private vehicle.'
So, the other 90% will arrive by #Toronto public transit?
SERIOUSLY??
#Canada#C18#META#SocialMedia#LinkTax#Journalism#Media#BigNews#BigTech#Newspapers: "The claims associated with the government’s regulation making process have been vastly overstated. Indeed, if it was the platforms making the claims, they would probably be called disinformation. About the only regulation that really matters right now involves Section 11, since it sets the criteria for an exemption from arbitration and approval of the deals between platforms and media companies. The reports about Google and the government negotiating aspects of the law surely involves what the exemption criteria is and how it will be interpreted. For example, the inclusion of a minimum spend by way of regulation would provide cost certainty and effectively have the government dictate to the CRTC how the criteria should be interpreted (namely, ignore them all if Google meets the spending target). The remainder are minor and have no real impact on how the law will be applied to Meta or Google.
When News Media Canada says “what we’re saying to Meta is, ‛The regulations aren’t drafted yet. Pick up a pen. Put down your saber and let’s try to work through this together” it’s a fake out designed to deceive. There are no regulations to be discussed that change the core elements of the law. It’s been decided, has received royal assent, and kicks in anytime within the next 120 days. News Media Canada and the associated lobby groups won the battle for Bill C-18. It’s the resulting consequences they don’t like."
So hypothetically (not that this scenario would ever happen in a million years, but) if Meta came and sat down at the table, and managed to walk away with a deal for Section 11 with an inclusion for a minimum spend of $1 annually and then met that target, then basically they could effectively preserve the pre-C-18 status quo for themselves.
That .. seems like a pretty substantial amount of leeway given in that particular part of regulation making, contrary to the main point that the article is trying to make. (It seems to me that perhaps Section 6 - about the bargaining power imbalance - might also provide some relief, but considering how much leeway Section 11 theoretically gives out I'm not sure it matters all that much.)
There are no regulations to be discussed that change the core elements of the law.
Regulations should not be allowed to change the core elements of the law - that's like allowing the law to be rewritten from the backdoor through a series of new regulations. To take an example from down south, it'd be like passing a law that defines the word born to include "and both your parents are U.S. citizens at the moment you come into existence" and using that to reinterpret the U.S. Constitution to not have birthright citizenship anymore.
#Canada#Meta#News#Journalism#ClimateChange#Fires: "Fires have been burning in virtually every province and territory throughout the summer, with different regions getting hit worse at different times. Right now, the devastation is being felt most acutely in the Northwest Territories and British Columbia. The Northern city of Yellowknife, which is home to about 20,000 people, was just evacuated and Kelowna is under a state of emergency with some of its residents being evacuated too.
But as people are trying to get essential information from government and public safety officials, Meta’s news ban is getting in the way. I never thought it was good that public institutions became so dependent on social media for public communication, but the reality was that people were on them, so governments followed to ensure important messaging could reach their citizens. Now those decisions are coming back to bite them.
Earlier this summer, British Columbia’s Transportation Ministry couldn’t tweet essential wildfire road updates because Elon Musk had rate limited accounts across the platform. Now, people in Yellowknife, Kelowna, and anywhere else that may be in the path of the fires can’t access news about it on Facebook or Instagram. Some people have started taking screenshots of articles and sharing them so their friends will be able to see updates being published by news media."
I never thought it was good that public institutions became so dependent on social media for public communication,
Is that really the case? I thought it was more a convenience to be able to get alerts that way.
But the counterpoint is that we aren't hearing about anyone saying "I didn't know we had to evacuate, I checked my Facebook feed every day and didn't see anything there."
Much smaller scale, but when I want to see if there are any issues with the TTC in Toronto I check the service alerts page on their website, not their Twitter or Facebook pages.
"Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has accused Facebook of putting "profits ahead of people's safety" after it blocked news amid devastating wildfires in the country.
Facebook banned news on its platform in response to Canadian law forcing it to share profit with news outlets.
It did work well for reddit imvho as it's understood that reddit definitely lost revenue and users as a result - but that might also not apply to FB so well in this case; as the reddit one was global rather than specific to a single country, and reddit was already unprofitable to begin with - whereas this is boycotting what's likely an already unprofitable line for a very profitable company.
Black and white cartoon. Left panel: a group blocks a road with a banner reading “No new oil | so there’s a liveable planet for our children.” Right panel: A boardroom, with members of the board raising their hands. In front of them is a chart showing planned oil extraction going well above a dashed line marked "Level...
I got this when trying to report https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/364640/Trendy-Reaction-Videos and also separately got the same when trying to report https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/364628/Home
New excuse for a new week! "This page transmits information using https protocol. Some vendors cannot receive opt-out requests via https protocols so the processing of your opt-out request is incomplete." (This after the komonews.com page put up a fake modal "updating your preferences" which, let me guess, wouldn't have been a thing if I'd just accepted all.) #MaliciousCompliance
Canada’s Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said Meta is recklessly putting people’s lives at risk by blocking Canadian news on its two massive platforms.
Google, Facebook et al are #blocking Canadian news site #links because of the bill the Canadian government passed which will force them to pay to link to Canadian news sites.
I just want to add that I find it really disingenuous that you mention Google here, when Google is rightly not mentioned in the article at all. This is likely because Google is not blocking news of the wildfire.
Please stop blaming the Canadian government for Google's blocking the news of the wildfire when Google hasn't yet blocked the news of the wildfire.
I mention Google because the Heritage Minister has specifically said this law is for Facebook and Google, and applies to (only) them
That's reasonable, but I think comes with the obligation to mention that G isn't blocking news yet while FB already is doing so. Otherwise, there's the potential to spread misinformation (namely, that folks will read the comments and think that G is already blocking news or had blocked news of the wildfires, which isn't true).
I don't use anything Google, so I don't see their news links.
Normally reasonable. But in this specific case, doing something to fact check if G is actually blocking news yet might have been a good idea.
That said, I'll make it easy for you. I assume that I, and any other readers, can take your lack of a statement on this (with a statement being something like "Yes, G isn't blocking news yet" or "No, G has definitely started blocking news of the wildfires") as a tactic acknowledgement of and agreement with my previous statement that G isn't blocking news yet.
It doesn't matter whether they have to pay now. The law says they have to pay a link tax, so they've decided to stop linking - that is their right, and why wait until the last second? They derive little benefit from it anyways.
Makes sense for FB. WIth G I am less convinced - G started out as a search engine company and linking was always their bread and butter.
The supposed benefit to making an exception was for the chance for FB to potentially save lives. But actually the evac managed just fine without FB's help so I'm skeptical that there was actually any benefit to FB (as there were no lives lost, FB allowing the news to be spread mathametically could not have saved any additional lives), or any benefit to repealing C-18 and asking FB to come back.
Blaming the federal government for the housing crisis makes about as much sense as blaming your local municipality for the military’s recruitment problems.
The analogy makes sense when one comes at it from "blaming"
That said, in practical terms, the federal government probably has more levers available to it should it choose to use them with regards to the housing crisis, than the local municipality does to encourage the folks who live in that municipality to sign up to join the military.
It's worth noting though that C-18 hasn't taken effect yet. So FB loses nothing by making an exception for this.
So I think the point is - as politicians ask FB to unblock potentially lifesaving news about the wildfires without asking for any payment, FB would instead have those lives lost to benefit their bottom line (profits).
Of course, the above point is quite diminished by the fact that no one's life has been lost yet due to not hearing this news and in fact that the news of the evacuation seems to have gotten out without any trouble despite the blocking by FB. So 1) it's better to rip the bandaid off as we can't trust this company to do the right thing so we should not reply on it and 2) it doesn't seem that we've actually lost anything by losing said company. News gets out just fine regardless.
As for the bill not being in effect - it is, essentially,
Could you elaborate more on this point?
but the payment phase hasn't kicked in.
Which I take to mean that FB wouldn't have to pay to allow the news to be shared at the moment.
Who are you to judge when is the appropriate time for FB/Google to come into compliance with #C18?
A fair point. Therefore, let us look at what Google is doing in Canada. ... yep, once you search for something, News is the first tab on Google.ca - not only can I search for wildfire news, but news on basically anything else.
I haven't judged against
I disagree that they have nothing to lose; for one thing, there are #costs involved in making any sort of change, particularly at this scale.
I work in tech (though not with FB) and have a good idea. The short layman's version is - you're right, however they're not that expensive. If FB did it right, it's just flipping a switch plus paying for folks to be on standby in case things break. If FB didn't do it right, it's still just a matter of deploying the pre C-18 stuff plus standby. Folks who work at Meta earn huge salaries to be sure, but this would probably be a lot cheaper than some of the GDPR fines that Meta has had to pay in the past.
I don't see the government offering to pay Facebook [..] to un-do the changes brought in just to deal with C-18.
Fair. (Of course, this would require transparency on the part of FB in terms of cost, while transparency isn't really something to be considered FB's strong suit, to understate it.)
I suspect FB would refuse regardless.
I don't see the government offering to pay [..] Google to un-do the changes brought in just to deal with C-18.
The article is not accurate, in the sense that the tax hasn't taken effect yet.
If FB refused to make an exception because they "couldn't afford to pay" even in an emergency situation (read: just don't want to pay up even then) it'd be somewhat understandable.
Right now FB doesn't need to pay anything, period. The new tax hasn't been applied yet. I can still use Google for my news in Canada. It's not an issue. FB just needs to flip the switch until the evac is complete (which is a couple of days? week at, hopefully?)
FB is just showing their true colours. They don't mind risking human life as long as it serves their needs. And that's exactly why we need to get weaned off of FB - we can't trust a company like this to do the right thing when the time comes, as current events have proved.
Well, no, not on a technical or technological sense. There's no reason why the technology of the world wide web wouldn't be able to be able to function when a tax is in place.
We’ve had 30+ years of the Web without link tolls / taxes.
Considering Australian (2021) and Spanish (2015) laws concerning this - and in particular the dates that they went into effect vs the first WWW (1991) - I'm not sure that your timeline is accurate.
Anyways, also consider how many companies went from a one-time purchase of software to things like SaaS. Business doesn't mind us having to pay again and again. Others try to make a quick buck by overloading us with ads or trying to monetize our data. Taxing the companies in return seems like fair play to me.
I was having trouble posting - I could comment but if I tried to post, it would always send me to the error page and the post would show up on my profile, but not on the mag I was trying to post it to. I renewed my IP address and that seems to have fixed the problem. Just sharing this if anyone else has the same issue, it might...
Group calls for Facebook, Instagram boycott on Aug. 23 and 24 (www.winnipegfreepress.com)
Non-Paywall Article
Climate extremists (davewalker.com)
Black and white cartoon. Left panel: a group blocks a road with a banner reading “No new oil | so there’s a liveable planet for our children.” Right panel: A boardroom, with members of the board raising their hands. In front of them is a chart showing planned oil extraction going well above a dashed line marked "Level...
OC 50x error on trying to report spam to moderators
I got this when trying to report https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/364640/Trendy-Reaction-Videos and also separately got the same when trying to report https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/364628/Home
AI is weirdly good at recycling (www.theatlantic.com)
The Future of Recycling Is Sorty McSortface...
Had trouble posting, but I renewed my IP address and now it seems to work (EDIT: It's not working again)
I was having trouble posting - I could comment but if I tried to post, it would always send me to the error page and the post would show up on my profile, but not on the mag I was trying to post it to. I renewed my IP address and that seems to have fixed the problem. Just sharing this if anyone else has the same issue, it might...