Canada

Just to make things clear, two thirds of what's going to post media, not two thirds of all that's redistributed.

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.

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.

I don’t know where you get the idea they don’t pay taxes here. When they operate here they pay taxes here.

However, this argument that merely linking to content means you must pay the creator of that content is bullshit. If that is true we should just shut down the internet now.

This isn’t anything like Reddit either. Journalists get paid, unlike Reddit mods and users. The news agencies can and do put content behind paywalls. If they choose to put content up for free that is also their choice. Then they don’t get paid for it.

I think this whole thing makes it abundantly clear that the news sites benefit more from the links from Google and Meta then the other way around.