"Making available of news content (2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if (a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or (b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content."

https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...

The problem is media companies have been pushing this exact blueprint for d years. decades. It is a terrible, terrible template.

If countries want to tax big tech and give the money to media organizations, they should be honest about it. Laws like this distort reality.

>the current balance between news organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task.

This doesn't make sense. Newspapers want links to their stories. I've even seen media organization paying "internet brokers" to advertise stories.

The law has the economics of the internet backwards. To receive a link is to benefit, everyone knows this except the government.

What's happening here is that publishers and their owners somehow figured these pesky internet wiz kids owe them more money.

Then we’d not only have enough financial resources to subsidize a free and healthy press but also for other worthy endeavours like better health care, open source software, science, etc.

All without hampering with basic pillars of the web.

Nobody owes anyone else a business model.

Let's go 100%. Will journalists then pay people who they report on?

I normally agree with release early, collect data and iterate. I'm not sure the law, with a bill of this impact, dependent on a bunch of politicians with obvious bias, who just went on summer vacation for 3 months, falls into this category.

As seen in Twitch.tv vs Kick.com where streamers are dropping Twitch and migrating en-masse to Kick. Abusing the content creators can backfire. However Google is in a different situation; they have a virtual monopoly on content discovery and not existing on Google basically means not existing at all. How do you fix that? Is Google an internet-utility? Should it be regulated as such?

If this were about good journalism then the law wouldn’t be necessary at all. The revenue these companies are generating from the journalism content is from displaying a headline. The whole point of the law is that the actual content of these articles is so utterly worthless, that users can’t even be bothered clicking on it. A substantial portion of those users derive all of the limited value that they believe it has by reading the headline alone. There is no legislative solution to that problem. This is law is only a solution to the problem of useless businesses being selected out of the market by their consumers.

CBC has received $1.2 billion annually from the federal government (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporat...) and is very ... government friendly ... in matters like the trucker protests.

I remember more independent press around 2000-2010, where there was true opposition in the media. I see nothing like that now.

then why were most news publications as bad as they are now 20 years ago? maybe they just suck. I learn more from HN that some news site ever did.

When I read american aerticles about my country, they are just plain WRONG.

First attempt for Canada maybe. Australia did it a few years ago:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56163550

But Australia wasn't the first either. The Australian media companies got their idea from the French(?):

    https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/21/google-agrees-to-pay-french-publishers-for-news.html

It was obvious it wouldn't work, and clearly hasn't worked in Australia. The newspapers are still posting large losses, still shutting down newsrooms. It's inevitable they will disappear in their current form. The newspapers business wasn't selling news or doing investigations to create news. Their business is the same as Google's: selling ads. The news was always just the bait they used to get people to read their ads and they shamelessly copied it, often with only a few words changed, between mastheads. Each had their own little area they sold to, the size largely determined by how far you ship dead trees in about 6 hours. Now the BBC, CNN, The Guardian and the other remaining big ones can reach the entire world now, so we don't need thousands of little mastheads all repeating the same news items. These big news rooms do a far better job that the little ones at gathering news, and selling ads. And so, the little mastheads will die.

It's bad law because in order to cover this use case, they banned creating 10 or 20 word summaries of a 200 or 300 word article, expanding copyright accordingly. That had to do that because at least in Google's case, as all Google every did was post a few words and a link to the actual content, on the newspapers site. Copyright terms have already been stretched well beyond their utilitarian justification, probably by an order of magnitude. This stretches the definition of what is covered by copyright by a similar amount. Admittedly this stretch is fairly harmless here, but if it leaks into other domains we will have a mess on our hands.

I’d happily pay good money for high quality news / journalism presented appropriately for the medium. That means a lot of concise real time information, coupled with long form discussion and debate. All packaged up in a modern, high quality web app, with auxiliary mobile applications.

Very unlikely, IMHO. The CRTC isn't in the habit of making decisions that harm large Canadian companies.

"We may not agree with their laws but it is their right"

This statement can be used to justify any law. We are also not debating whether it's their right but if it's a good law.

These news organizations want to have their cake and eat it too. They rely on these platforms for traffic. Now they also want to be paid for getting that traffic. That's not how this works.

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890

I find that a puzzling comment. EFF has a strange way of showing its allegiance to "Big Tech".

What do I not know? How does the EFF demonstrate its allegiance to them?

I took the EFF's work on privacy as an impediment to "Big Tech"'s business model. How am I wrong?

Spot on. In Canada it's about the handful of the oligarchs who have control over almost everything. It has nothing to do with the average plebs

I don't see how Meta and Google weren't completely predictable, and I don't see how Canadian media benefits from getting shut out. I am so confused.

> Last November [2021], Spain overturned the 2014 law and instead signed on to a European Union copyright directive that lets publishers negotiate their agreements directly with platforms.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/06/after-8-years-google-news-...

I agree; I'd argue you don't have much of a valuable service if all users need is a headline. Print media needs to give up the traditional shallow breadth fueled by advertising and go niche, and go deep. Cable TV should learn this lesson as well.

Then the solution is to modify your `robots.txt` file to prohibit these snippets.

Of course, no-one actually does this because they're well aware that the headlines are what drives attention and clicks.

I feel like a similar thing was tried in Europe somewhere a few years ago and then quickly ditched, because all the publications saw their traffic crater.

Looks like something similar was enacted in Australia, and Google/Facbook settled: https://www.reuters.com/technology/australia-says-law-making...

And an update from Google's blog from 4 hours ago: https://blog.google/intl/en-ca/company-news/outreach-initiat...

Very often a headline is all someone needs or wants. That has value. Without anyone buying that newspaper, the newspaper stand has got value from the headline, and contributed nothing to the newspaper publisher in return.

The reality is that headlines are advertisements for articles. That's why there are headline writers in the first place. Make a better advertisement, get more sales.

In the case of Google, publishing links with headlines means publishing free ads for that website. The website most certainly benefits from that relationship, if they didn't, they would just use robots.txt to block Google indexing their website, which someone has always been free to do.

The real problem is that newspapers would just like to take a percentage of Google revenue, because they're a big company.

So have those publications opted out of search and Google News? If not, it's pretty clear that they're getting more benefit from those links than they're losing to people "reading the headline and getting all they needed from it".

I assume these news organizations don't even bother writing the article, right? Because your story obviously applies equally well to their own site. Users will open the frontpage of the site, read the expertly crafted headline, and leave.

So the solution Google is proposing works out for everyone. Canadian news sites can ensure people go to their site for headlines and Google can no longer show information for those sites. The Canadian news sites should see increased revenue in terms of subscriptions and advertisements.

News sites could get rid of their <title> and OpenGraph tags, and people could share the raw story URLs without any context. No-one would click through as they'd have no idea where the URL went, though, so news sites provide these titles willingly and have full control over how they write them or what level of detail they share.

The idea that headlines like "Queen Elizabeth has died", "Madonna discharged from hospital", or "Interest rates go up" replace the need for the rest of the story for any substantial part of the target audience seems far fetched to me, and if the meat of the story is given away in the og:description.. they wrote it!

For those unfamiliar, Pablo Rodriguez is the Minister of Canadian Heritage under whose auspices all these censorship and control schemes are being pushed forward.

Ironically, Pablo Rodriguez is the son of an Argentine Peronista (the far-left populism that cripples Argentina to this day). The family fled the country when the war broke out. Pablo was old enough to see first hands what happens when there is no free independent press, and now he's eagerly fostering those same conditions onto Canada.

https://news.google.com

I just opened it on a browser with no ad blocker and scrolled to the bottom. There are no ads in there. It's all news.

But what is the situation in Canada now? Did they really put a law into place which says "When you link to a page with a short excerpt to show what the link is about, this is now a copyright violation"?

Wouldn't that also make search engines illegal?

This is also a new development in journalism at CBC, older journalists tend to value reporting over opinion pieces, whereas younger journalists feel like it's their "duty" to push their opinion onto the readership which is an extremely toxic ideology.

The CBC is the only chance left for some sort of even keeled news in Canada.

Otherwise maybe some YouTube personalities might make a showing - I'm sure the farmer into the middle of Alberta will watch that.

https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/cancon/mandate.htm

Yeah, this is exactly the point that such a regulation would bring up. Businesses can't expect Google to both use your data and not use your content in their search results.

If you say "I don't want Google's indexers to read my content and surface it to people that haven't clicked my site", that's fine -- Google won't be able to index your content (as requested), though, so your site won't appear in search results.

This seems like a situation where the cards are much more clearly on the table, and my expectation is that no reasonable business would choose to have Google not index their full content.

Google can index the articles independently of serving their entirety to visitors. Might as well claim that wikipedia can't have articles covering movies without acting as the worlds largest piracy site.

> but then want Google to pay for the privilege.

On the other hand Google wants all the articles for free, but doesn't have any motivation to share the users or ad impressions they attract.

I disagree. I think there's a lot of it out there, in the form of blogs and small forums. It's just really hard to find, like mining for gold in the Super Pit [1]. You need to sift through mountains of rubble to find tiny amounts of gold.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Pit_gold_mine

Well, sure. Who pays for it?

Could there be a way to sustainably make enough money from visitors without making it all suck?

Ironically, the predatory and terrible academic journal industry is probably the only thing out there right now that comes close to getting this right. Rather than expecting anyone to subscribe to each journal individually, they give a bulk subscription to an entire publishing service that then grants access to many journals.

If someone out there offered a $20 a month service that granted access to Bloomberg, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, WaPost, Financial Times, all in one, I'd gladly buy that. But there is no way in hell I'm subscribing to all of those separately. Even if the aggregate price was cheaper, I wouldn't want to do that.

[ ] I want to see results from sites I'd have to pay to access

For news sites and netflix we now have subscriptions shielded by paywals, which really is incompatible with hyperlinked sites or search engines. Even if you subscribed to 1000 services, the experience would probably be horrible. The internet was designed to be free, but evidently that's not a good business model if you want to make a living.

My definition of "best" includes my ability to actually read the content under my terms.

I thought that Blackstone owned Globe and Mail but it seems they sold it in 2021 so your info is the current info.

Companies should earn my by building good competitive products.

> (a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or

> (b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.

See point b. Simply facilitating access, for example by linking or having the article in a search index, would be enough.

(Also, really smooth move deleting your original toplevel comment and just moving it to a reply under the highest voted thread. Not even any pretense that you're replying to jeffbee, but just cynically trying to get the maximum visibility for your entirely made up claim.)

Before Google, search engines were basically just doing keyword matching and so you'd have the issue that every search for a programming topic landed you on expertsexchange. Google was the first to start leveraging click-away signal, and they were able to successfully down-sample keyword-farmers like that one and their ilk.

The shift away from desktop and laptops to cell phones is a major factor as well.

To me 2016 was just a continuation of what started before, there was no inflection then.

The 2000's are when things started to change, not 2016. And Obama's first election was when the internet started to be taken seriously by politicians (2008). It's basically what gave him the win.

And with the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict.

Unfortunately Brazil is trying to take that right away, too. Hopefully they fail at doing so.

I'm not sure why people here are defending GOOG so much.