this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Sure, I completely agree, but I don't think any of that has to do with this situation. I don't think anyone should even have to pay simply for an http link to another public website. That's what this is about.
If the news websites don't want people linking to their website for free then they should change their robots.txt so that they are not indexed and put stories behind a free login gate. Then they can negotiate to give headlines/summaries to Google or Meta or whoever.
The issue is that Google and Meta have positioned themselves as gatekeepers. They can decide which news sites they direct people to and which ones they don't. This gives them a lot of power over news media.
The result has been that despite having more information available to people than ever, people are more ignorant of the news than ever before.
The social media companies have made themselves de facto stewards of the the internet. If they were Canadian corporations, the government would have the power to break up their oligopoly over information. But since they aren't Canadian corporations, the only recourse is to tax them.
Yes agreed, but the problem is far wider than just Canadian news sources. The solution is not to try to tax them, because they will just disengage and make the problem worse. I don't have a good solution right now but if we were to pass regulation it should be something about automated recommendation systems (ai) not trying to make people pay to link to things.
AI recommendation systems are even worse. They learn from the behaviour of people. Not everyone on the internet is trustworthy, so these AI algorithms are learning bad habits. It probably only takes around a 1000 person troll farm to manipulate a machine learning algorithm.
Who can devote 1000+ people to manipulating the machine learning algorithms that recommend content? Countries interested in disinformation campaigns to destabilize their adversaries. Hence C-11... need to have Canadians involved in those systems otherwise it's just going to be Russia, China, or whoever else is dedicated enough to poisoning the data that the machine learning algorithms are learning from.
Ok but link aggregators don't just link the url. They link the url, show a picture they scraped off the site, the headline (aka the most valuable piece of text) and then often the first paragraph or so of text.
It's pretty obvious that the revenue of news media has decreased as social media revenue has increased and it has really shown in the quality of non-public news organizations the world over.
Yes, and all that has been legal, and now it's not and they are choosing not to incorporate it. That's fine and their right. Law makers need to focus on the source of the problem not make nonsensical "patches" that don't work and instead only serve to further break the ideal of the internet.
We didn't need a law for news sites to stop Google and Meta copying headlines and summaries. The news sites could have done that easily on their own.
you contradicted yourself. Which is it?