What a disgrace. This law is hostile to the basic principles of an open web; Google should have refused like Meta is.
No it’s not.
The “open” Web desperately needs good quality journalism.
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.
Getting sick of saying that it’s not the link, it’s the preview.
There are three things I don’t like about that argument.
- The idea that small excerpts of copyrighted works are fair use that don’t require licensing or payment is also widely-used in journalism.
- At least in the case of Facebook, publishers get to decide what’s in the previews using open graph tags.
- News organizations have not lobbied for general changes to fair use, but special legal status for themselves and a few tech companies. Laws centered around special status rather than broad principles tend not to work out well in the long term.
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.
So now Google has to pay a subscription to Canada?
The next evolution of subscription services hahaha
This is extortion
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.
Not enough
If Google is just publishing headlines and directing traffic to news sites it seems like too much.
