https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/canada-google-pay-74-million-annually-canadian-news-105251259
Canada’s government says it has reached a deal with Google for the company to contribute $100 million Canadian dollars annually to the country’s news industry
Given that Googles estimated annual revenue is between 160 - 180 billion, that 74 million is only 0.04625% (if taken from the lower estimate) I'm sure they would chalk it up to just the price of doing business.
Well on the flip side, if Google doesn't mind paying that amount, Canada's news industry just gets $74 million more every year than it usually does.
And it will all go straight to their CEOs. None of the people who actually do hard work will see a penny of that.
And all they have to do to keep that money flowing is make sure they don't publish anything that might jeopardize Google's dominant market position.
Well, Canada has about 0.5% of the global population and we're only talking news here, not all services. So that fine/fee seems appropriate.
What a disgrace. This law is hostile to the basic principles of an open web; Google should have refused like Meta is.
I agree that the decline of journalistic quality is bad for the world and would like a mechanism to improve it, but I have yet to read a convincing argument for why anyone should have to pay a fee to link to a news article. I could see an argument for reducing the amount of the content that can be republished as a preview under fair use, but nobody seems to want that.
There are three things I don't like about that argument.
That's not how the Canadian law was written. Google providing a link, even with no headline or preview, would still have to pay.
Having to pay to even link to news articles will only accelerate the downfall of journalism though. Instead of paying, why not just link to an AI generated article instead? Much needs to be done to save good journalism but this law is a massive step in the exact opposite direction
An AI generated article would still need source material.
Anyway, what would be the appeal of a platform that couldn't link anything but just showed AI content?
The way I see it, journalism is more or less dead. A shade of the former institution. There doesn't seem many other ways to fund journalistic endeavour.
"Journalism" has be dead for a long time. Just read up on what Hearst was doing in the 1800's.
We're just seeing the zombie grasping at everything it can.
I agree with OP. This law is a disgrace and I don't understand how people here on open fediverse can support it. It breaks the open web model and allows mega corporations to double dip - their content is public but only when they want it to be. So they want the advantages of public web without bearing the costs.
Disregard that this is Google. It sets precedent for all web and its as bad as other anti open web laws we hate. Honestly perplexed by the support with this. The corporate hate is baiting people out of sane thoughts.
I hate giant corporations as much as anyone else but this recent trend of blindly siding with the opposition is just so incredibly dumb to the point where it feels like the fire is being stoked by legit troll farms. Wouldn't be surprised if they are involved in this spread of chaos and distraction.
Free linking is essential for the open web. You can link to anything at no cost. That's especially important here too; no free linking, no Lemmy. Link taxes are hostile to that, and that's exactly what this is. It might be good for journalism - though it's probably just the big players that are going to seriously benefit - but it's a bad precedent.
As I replied to the other commenter:
If it were just a link then there wouldn't be any problem. Users would follow the link to the publisher's web site. I think the problem is that facebook et al scrape the content and show cards and summaries and then user's don't visit the publisher's web site. They're getting paid for their content, for being linked.
I don't think that was ever considered seriously as a solution though. The legislation is specifically about links. If they genuinely thought that Google was stealing their content, they'd go after them for copyright infringement. I'm not going to lose any sleep over Google paying Canadian news organizations, but this whole thing is a bit of a grift. And the news organizations know it's a grift. It would be trivial for them to prevent Google from indexing them. They want those links and they need them. They make money from them -- that's why they have people on staff to do SEO. If those links are presented well, people are more likely to click them. I don't think that needs much explanation. Even on here, if someone puts in the effort to have a good headline/title, image, and summary, I'm way more likely to click on the post and click through to the article. On the other hand, the news orgs would be fools not to accept $74 million in no-strings-attached money. What's true for news organizations is also true for everyone else too though. Who among us wouldn't be foolish to walk away from tens of millions of free dollars? The next in line now gets to say, "Why them and not us?"
Even baby steps toward a pay-to-play internet are steps in the wrong direction. This might not "break the internet" on it's own but licensing links like copyrighted works is moving us along that path.
This law essentially gives special rights to corporate news websites. It allows them to have the benefits of being public source (indexing, sharing, previews, accessibility etc.) but they can choose not to bare the costs of public information. This shitty law should have been a copyright framework ammendment that applies to all IP but instead it's a clear example of regulatory capture.
What do you mean they can choose not to bear the costs of public information?
Every law ever created should have been better
The World Wide Web is a web of links. Websites link to other websites. These publishers want to be paid when certain companies link to them. That’s an affront to a core functionality of the web.
If it were just a link then there wouldn't be any problem. Users would follow the link to the publisher's web site. I think the problem is that facebook et al scrape the content and show cards and summaries and then user's don't visit the publisher's web site. They're getting paid for their content, for being linked.
That’s the BS line publishers have been trying to trick people with but that extra stuff such as the lede and photo are explicitly provided by the publisher to enable rich preview cards/links. They literally add extra code in the page for that exact purpose. View source on any of their articles and you’ll see Open Graph metadata tags, which were created by Facebook.
They added code specifically so their links from Facebook would look better, and are now pretending like the rich preview cards are stealing their content.
I think they're more concerned about having their culture merged entirely with the United States.
So just start a government subsidy program for news, and increase corporate taxes. That would at least be honest. The lie that this is somehow compensation for something of value is the part that I can't abide. There's not even any advertising on Google News. It's literally just linking out to news articles. If you search for news topics, you usually won't find any paid links on that either. People bid on search terms related to stuff people might buy, not on hard news topics.
So now Canadian news outlets are basically partners with Google who have a significant revenue stream that depends on Google's continued success. If you thought you saw a lot of big-tech cheerleading out of the media before just you wait; we're in a whole new era.
Firefox in a nutshell.
They get so much money from Google, that they can't risk doing things "too" well.
If Google is just publishing headlines and directing traffic to news sites it seems like too much.
The problem could be that people are just reading the headlines, ergo, not accounting views on the news sites.
I don't know how the situation looks in Canada, but here news are so undermined at this point that news sites have become gigantic clickbait farms.
Yes, ads on traditional media websites are just cancerous, can't stand to browse a traditional media site without an ad blocker. It can't help their reputation to show such crap on their site.
The real problem is that rather than buying ads in traditional media, advertisers are buying ads on Google and Facebook. They’re taking revenue away from traditional media.