this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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It's not, that's why I didn't say that.
I did, because it tries to regulate merely linking to content, something I consider absurd. What I did not say is that it is "ridiculous to ask them to share some of the profit they make from Canadian work with Canada". So I responded as such. I'm not terribly interested in engaging with someone who puts words in my mouth. If you're curious for more of my thoughts on this topic, I intend to respond to the interesting comment by @[email protected] when I have time to be more thoughtful.
Does your employer pay you by paying taxes and then government distributes them to you? If there was a real business here, then an arrangement would be made between Facebook and these news organizations. Facebook wouldn't want to lose out on the profit so they'd pay news agencies for the content. But the truth this, the news agencies are profiting far more than Facebook is from this arrangement. They literally need the government to step in because there is no actual business here.
The news agencies can absolutely pull out of Facebook. They can opt out of summaries and photos. But they don't.
That's not what I mean and you know it. Your employer pays you directly for your services because it's a benefit to them. Which is basically how all commerce works.
No. I think the government has to force this business arrangement because it's completely backwards. Media companies benefit from linking (they'd literally have no traffic if they didn't) and they're trying to extract some value where none exists.
And stores won't profit if people don't buy stuff. And streaming services don't profit if nobody subscribes. That's life. If, as a media company, you've giving up all your value by providing summaries and images then that's your problem. If Tim Hortons can't sell any donuts because they give out a free Timbit and a shot of coffee, it is not for the government to fix that. They should just stop doing it.
Media companies should pay Meta for the service they provide. It's literally advertising. Media companies post this material themselves. But if media companies are providing a service that's worth paying for then they should simply withhold that service until Meta pays. That's how the free market works. Tim Hortons doesn't give out free donuts and then go to the government and force you to pay for them if you take one. No, you just buy the damn donut if it's worth buying.
If Meta benefited from this arrangement they'd pay. Is Lemmy also morally responsible to pay media companies because there is a link to this article with a summary?
Media companies lost traffic because the Internet invalidates their business model. Linking is the only thing they have left -- they should be thankful for it.
Just because someone is an asshole doesn't mean they're entitled to less justice. If something is wrong, it's wrong for everyone.
You're arguing for the destruction of the web at this point. Freely linking to content is the backbone of the whole thing.
You're basically saying that actual journalism itself has no value -- if a 2 line summary and single picture is the entire value to someone then why is anyone paying for this? An AI can make that for free. I could be a journalist if all the value is a summary and picture. You're making such a twisted argument with this whole idea that people just read the summary, never click the article, and somehow somebody needs to make money from the article that nobody reads. Media companies provide the summary and pictures to Facebook so that they'll click on the article in the first place.
Social media is just as part of the web as anything. Trying to carve out some exception for Facebook because you don't like them is not a logical argument. What about Wikipedia? Reddit? Lemmy? Digg? Google?
Please provide the receipts, then.
If people have to pay for links, how is that going to provide more traffic to traditional media? Isn't that the whole point of links... to provide traffic.
Facebook thinks people will spend just as much time on Facebook without news links. This whole law is pointless. It's trying to create a market for "links" that doesn't exist. Again, if media companies don't want to provide summaries and images to Facebook they can do that. Instead, all the major news papers in Canada put tags specifically for Facebook to use with their content. They want those links. So makes it valuable to them, not the other way around.
If all you just want to take money from Facebook and give it Canadian media companies, why not just make a law that does that.
Ok. So Facebook doesn't care and the media companies don't care. I guess we'll see who blinks first.
If all that is needed to happen is that media companies withhold their content for Meta to capitulate then they could have done that. We don't need a law for that.
You know that the Australian law doesn't even apply to smaller medias right? It's unsurprising that a law basically written by Rupert Murdoch would include requirements that media companies have to be a certain size in order to eligible.
The amount of traffic they drive to the news sites is payment enough.
If it doesn't drive traffic then the news sites shouldn't at all be worried about sites not linking to them anymore.
It doesn't, though. Facebook is grabbing more and more of the content making it less and less necessary to actually go to the news site. As a result, Facebook gets to profit from ads instead of the news site.
This is a well-intentioned but horrible law. There are a couple of things they could do instead.
Ban large scale data collection on end users without the combination of oversight and properly informed consent that happens in medical research. That still allows for some of the things that are actually beneficial to individuals and society while stripping the power to use the data for such frivolous things as ads. Doing micro-targeted ads requires a level of surveillance and data processing that is beyond the means of any company that has anything else as it's core competency. That would put ads back a few decades to when an advertiser did not choose a customer via surveillance, but chose a market based on interest (context ads). This would put the original creators and publishers of content back in charge. This would have the added benefit of increasing privacy online.
They could ban any practice that interferes with the end-to-end principal of communications. This is the principal that says "the stuff I specifically request is the stuff that is most visible." Right now, Facebook et al are poisoning feeds with "pay to promote" crap so extensively that I'm likely to see something from a bunch of right wing nut jobs at the top of my feed instead of the Marxist outlet I've actually subscribed to. Worse, I might never see the people and organizations that I explicitly follow unless those people and organizations pay up. That could have the side effect of pouring water on the dumpster fire that passes for discourse, because fringe movements would have to actually gain traction through the quality of their ideas and arguments instead of by just throwing money around.