What I mean is that the postal service provides a server, people mailing letters. Facebook’s service is people messaging each other.
If people started sending links to each other in the mail and it kills newspapers, should the postal service pay?
People message all sorts of stuff on Facebook. And it frequently causes companies to make less money and/or stop existing. That doesn’t mean Facebook should pay those companies to keep existing.
Ok now imagine the gov passes a law saying “if you insert junkmail into a letter containing a newspaper clipping, you have to pay a fee to the newspaper”.
Where’s the problem? Either they stop inserting ads, or they pay.
As for “make less money” vs “stop existing” - having journalism exist is in the publics interest. If one business threatens to cause another to go out of business we might not care, but in this case the business is theoretically socially important.
Well, one pretty big problem is that nothing analogous to "stop inserting" ads is an option provided by the law as passed in reality. You've made it up to make the law sound better than it is. That you had to resort to such fibbing seems like a pretty good indicator on how flawed the bill is.
> The goal is to support news businesses to negotiate and receive fair compensation when third parties with a dominant market position monetize their news content
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_...
It’s possible there isn’t a loophole where they can just demonetize news, I haven't read the law back to front, but the law only exists because of their monetization of news.
To be clear the law, as understand it, doesn’t set out a schedule of fees or anything like that - it merely sets up an enforced bargaining between companies like fb and news producers. So even if there’s no demonetization loophole, an agreement like “no monetizing shared news” is very much a possible arrangement under the law. They’d have to come to the bargaining table first tho
The law does not mention monetization of the news content as a requirement. It does in fact not mention monetization at all.
It is true that the law sets up enforced bargaining, but in a way that effectively precludes any outcome where Meta does not pay money.
If Meta links to any news content from any eligible news company, they must negotiate with everyone. If anyone they are negotiating with is unhappy with the result, they can take it to binding arbitration, and the law forces the arbitration committee to reject any offer that does not "contribute to the sustainability" of Canadian media. Any final offer from Meta that does not involve then paying a sum that is obviously enough would be rejected and automatically cause the opposite final offer to be accepted, no matter how unreasonable. (This is not symmetrical; the news company does not need to suggest a deal that's obviously not too bad).
The arbitration panel would incidentally also be forced to reject any offer that is based on a revenue share of ads shown for news content. (Since that would allow Meta to control the amount paid.)
Given this, why would any Canadian news company agree to a deal that allows non-monetized linking for free? As long as Meta plays the game with even one company, any of them can force Meta to both share their content and also be paid for it, whether Meta profits from it or not
Idk what point you’re trying to make, but at issue here is that journalism is being starved to death by sites like facebook that suck up all the profits and attention but don’t provide any of the service that journalism provided. That’s bad for canadians. This law may be the wrong way to fix this problem, but to talk about rules and principals and analogies without considering the actual consequences is pathological.
We’ve got no sharing news on facebook here now. If nothing is done, this is essentially where we’ll be in a handful of years anyway.
No, journalism is being starved by digital peer to peer communication. Facebook is the thing. People being able to say “hey, did you see this?” instead of needing to read a newspaper.
And of course, the real problem is that newspapers sold their own ads that no one cares about any more (classified).
I think newspapers dying is a problem and would like them not to. But taxing or forcing Facebook to do something is not a solution and it won’t affect the future of newspapers.
