Is Canada About to Crack Down on Google and Facebook? (thestar.com) 90
The Minister of Canadian heritage has a message for Google and Facebook, reports the Toronto Star:
"The Canadian government stands with our Australian partners and denounces any form of threats," Steven Guilbeault said in an emailed statement to the Star's Susan Delacourt. The "threats" Guilbeault referred to involved some of the world's richest and most influential corporations, Facebook and Google, which have separately warned Canada's friends down under that they will suspend services in Australia or block media organizations from using their platforms if Canberra follows through with a law they don't like. That law would force these giants of the digital age — companies that rake in tens of billions of dollars each year and control the infrastructure of the internet's most-trafficked venues — to negotiate payments to the journalism organizations that create the news content hosted on their platforms...
Google did not respond to a request for comment from the Star this week. Facebook, however, signalled in a background conversation with the Star that it is willing to pay more taxes in Canada.
But taxation isn't the only government intervention that companies might face, according to Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa professor and Canada Research Chair in internet and E-Commerce Law: The second area where Geist sees potential for federal action is in response to calls for foreign digital players to pay for Canadian content. Here, Geist said "it's pretty clear (the government is) going to do something," given how Trudeau assigned Guilbeault to bring in legislation to modernize Canada's laws on broadcasting and telecommunications before the end of the year.
In his office's statement to the Star, Guilbeault said the government is committed to a "more equitable digital regulatory framework" in Canada. "It is about levelling the playing field," he said. "Those who benefit from the Canadian ecosystem must also contribute to it, through the Canadian broadcasting sector or the fair remuneration for the use of news content."
Google did not respond to a request for comment from the Star this week. Facebook, however, signalled in a background conversation with the Star that it is willing to pay more taxes in Canada.
But taxation isn't the only government intervention that companies might face, according to Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa professor and Canada Research Chair in internet and E-Commerce Law: The second area where Geist sees potential for federal action is in response to calls for foreign digital players to pay for Canadian content. Here, Geist said "it's pretty clear (the government is) going to do something," given how Trudeau assigned Guilbeault to bring in legislation to modernize Canada's laws on broadcasting and telecommunications before the end of the year.
In his office's statement to the Star, Guilbeault said the government is committed to a "more equitable digital regulatory framework" in Canada. "It is about levelling the playing field," he said. "Those who benefit from the Canadian ecosystem must also contribute to it, through the Canadian broadcasting sector or the fair remuneration for the use of news content."
Re: Dare ya (Score:2, Funny)
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Americans are too bright are they...
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The rules are vague, and they'll be less likely to enforce them for smaller firms. When they grow big and visible the issues will be the same.
Re:Dare ya (Score:4, Funny)
That message is not about what Canada is about to do, that is a warning shot across the bows and about what is be organised across the board by many countries. The whole issue of major tech firms crushing local business and never paying any taxes, suck the economy dry, crippling the ability of countries to pay for the infrastructure those corporations use without paying their fair share often, just cheating on everyone else's tax payments.
They will not just 'TRY', they will do and not only is Google screwed, so are the fucking tax havens that google and the tax cheats use. Clearly more action is being planned and they are pretty advanced and hence no crap about Google being aware of what is coming just a warning to them about playing politics directly in some countries, they will be taken to task and it will not be pleasant for them at all, some of their actions demonstrate political extortion as an intent. Everyone breaks the law in minor ways, Google is making itself and it's employees targets of sustained investigation.
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It does not sound like something that would kill the economy. It sounds like something that will open the economy up and promote innovation and growth.
It might kill the silicon valley economy, but then that region represents an obsolete model anyways. Why should economic activity be so concentrated in a single area when the internet is global and decentralizing.
The suckers who paid enormous amounts for real estate in the area might find themselves screwed. But there's still time for many to get a clue.
Re: Dare ya (Score:2, Interesting)
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Canada didn't close it's boarder to the US though. It only stopped individuals from travelling across the boarder. There is still cross boarder trade in goods (and services*).
* services don't really rely on the boarder being open though since most (all?) can be done over the Internet at this point.
Re: Dare ya (Score:4, Interesting)
Through inaction and complicity Google, Facebook and Amazon ARE the internet.
Nope. They are only the currently most popular resources on the internet in their respective markets. They replaced others, and can equally be replaced by others which work essentially the same way with little or no user training. Users deserted the other options when those three became superior to them, and if there are other superior options then they will switch again. Those services could be made inferior through legal action, permitting competitors to rise above them.
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It wasn't so much free choice of these services by the end users as it was the U.S. government/military backing certain companies into commercial prominence.
Many of people's 'independent' decisions are largely influenced my marketing and propaganda instead of logic and reasoning.
I believe this to be the sol
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Microsoft certainly has benefited over the years from direct Government support. It has remained a steady and reliable source of income. However, Windows would likely still exist without it, due to network effects and inertia.
Government could have broken Microsoft's dominance through antitrust action, but chose not to; in that regard, it supported Microsoft. But it also could have not begun antitrust proceedings in the first place. It would have looked no more suspicious than what actually happened.
Re: Dare ya (Score:2)
Re: Dare ya (Score:3)
So the biggest threat you see is that something else will replace them? Sounds like an excellent plan. Break them up, get real competition and interoperability, or just tax their ad revenue - why should they be exempt from provincial and federal sales taxes?
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The Network Effect will probably lead to monopolies either way. If you boot out American monopolies, you'll get Canadian monopolies, etc.
And even if you have multiple competitors, keeping their content "in line" won't necessarily be easy. It's more cats to herd.
Re: Dare ya (Score:2)
Threat (Score:5, Insightful)
If they force Google and Facebook to pay for news links, they won't host news links. They've done it in other countries already. The article makes it sound as if the news organizations have a right to be hosted on Google, Facebook, or any other site, and then force those sites to pay them.
Not sure why people keep using the term "threat." According to the news organization's logic, they are being harmed now by Facebook and Google freeloading off of them. If Google and Facebook are forced to pay for linking to news articles, then decide to not pay and not host their links, that is what the news sites are angling for, isn't it?
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Re: Threat (Score:1, Funny)
Re: Threat (Score:5, Insightful)
Democracy can't, won't, and doesn't exist. It is a fantasy. When authoritarians in governments and multinational media control what an electorate watches, reads, hears, and believes, elections are merely a formality.
That's your US reality coloured by living so long in a corporatocracy that you have come to believe that this how everybody lives. One could also say that corporatocracy is a is a fantasy because the people can always band together, bargain collectively, agitate politically as a whole and throw off the yoke. Some of us live in actual functioning democracies because unlike what has happened in the US, our economic elite has never managed to convince us that wage earners banding together and bargaining collectively and acting politically as a whole is a bad thing that needs to be banned by law and prevented by gerrymandering and voter suppression wherever possible. People have thrown off the tyranny of social and economic elites many times in recent history starting with the Swiss in the 14th century and there is no reason why you can't do it too.
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Explain why Canadian media has buried Justin Trudeau's comments regarding admiring China's "basic dictatorship". Then reconcile that with your prior comment reply.
I repeat my previous statement. People have thrown off the tyranny of social and economic elites many times in recent history starting with the Swiss in the 14th century and there is no reason why you can't do it too. By any reasonable metric the USA is a bigger and more dystopian corporatocratic hellscape than Canada ever was or is. Canadians have the option of voting Trudeau out of office and they will if he get's too corrupt. The Trump movement in the US has elevated Trump, a trust fund baby and member o
Re: Threat (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you suppose that Canada is anti-capitalist? Our system is robustly capitalist; our corporate taxes are lower than most places in the US and we have a free market economy.
Just because we understand that capitalism is not optimal for certain things like delivery of medical care, it doesn't mean we're against capitalism. We're just against the sort of system that lets thousands of people choose between bankruptcy and suffering; the kind of system that costs more per capita to deliver care while yielding worse outcomes. In other words, we make rational decisions, not partisan and self-defeating ones, when it comes to medical care.
Re: Threat (Score:3)
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The Canadian media who didn't take federal government handouts constantly point out things embarrassing to the government. Canadians are paying attention, and pretty soon handouts will be the only income these dinosaur media will get, while the new media thrives.
Re: Threat (Score:2)
Re: Threat (Score:3)
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The problem isn't really burying news... it's that a significant portion of the population simply doesn't care. Trudeau could shoot a baby in downtown Ottawa, and his polls would barely move. Too many Canadians are insane. Therefore, we have the awful government we deserve.
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The really buried it deep I guess. It was so deep that a simple Google search produced this as the top link.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politic... [ctvnews.ca]
In fact the whole first page of Google results are links to Canadian news organizations about Trudeau's remark.
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Re: Threat (Score:1)
Re: Threat (Score:2)
A free market depends on competition. Monopolies are not a free market.
That's why you need market regulation to have the maximum free market.
Re: Threat (Score:1)
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A free market depends on competition. Monopolies are not a free market.
Monopolies are an inherent part of the free market.
Right, that's why you need rules limiting their power. If they weren't an inherent part of a free market, you wouldn't have to do anything about them.
If you add regulations to combat toxic effects of the free market (e.g. monopolies, competitors communication, deceitfulness, theft, ...), the ones influencing those regulation will have an advantage on this new regulated market.
Yes, that's why government is not "hands off". You have to stay involved for it to function correctly.
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Monopolies are an inherent part of the free market.
If you have a monopoly that part of the market by DEFINITION is not free. The end result of a free market is monopoly and the destruction of the free market. Regulate the market to avoid monopolies and the market may not be totally free but isn't totally unfree either.
Re: Threat (Score:1)
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This is not an idle question of "fairness." The status quo has taken all the money out of covering news, and I think really harmed investigative journalism as a result.
Re: Threat (Score:2)
So what? Facebook and Google search will become even more spammy and full of shit than they are now?
They'll pay up or die.
Re:Threat (Score:4, Funny)
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If Facebook stops allowing links to news sites it will harm Facebook. A lot of the bullshit people post on there is links to news. Obviously the news sites hope that it will hurt Facebook more than them and Facebook will relent.
They might not even be wrong, if people can't post links but instead say "I just read on Clickbait News that..." it could drive some traffic to their site, maybe as much as the links did. I bet the click rate for links is extremely low, especially as people usually copy/paste some of
Re: Threat (Score:3)
People will just do like I do - have a few local news sites that are always open, and refresh them when they want the news. I don't bother with the apps because they suck up bandwidth for useless stock photos that have nothing to do with the story, and videos I don't want to watch, so they're all blocked - which means I also don't see the ads.
I still watch their regular local broadcasts, so they still get ad revenue, but neither Google nor Facebook get anything from me - no searches, no posts, no social
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And if Google cannot post news links, people will stop going to Google for news. It sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Google can be a search engine for dry facts, and of course for shopping.
Google being shut out of 'News' sounds like a good thing.
Re: Threat (Score:2)
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Totally correct, assuming we're just talking about linking (I've found the news stories on this to be infuriatingly vague on *precisely* what is being targetted).
Linking to news articles drives people to the content hosters' sites. I.e., it is a good thing for content hosters and their content providers. Additionally, if they don't want to be linked to, they can prevent it with robots.txt, no? Google even has web pages devoted to testing your robots.txt file to verify it's blocking Google's web crawlers.
As
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And for good measure, see Prof Michael Geist's post where he pretty much says the same.
https://www.michaelgeist.ca/20... [michaelgeist.ca]
A French subpoena! That will teach them! (Score:2)
Nobody stops GAFA, before you know it your downstairs neighbour Democrat president will start ripping up all your trade agreements.
Re: A French subpoena! That will teach them! (Score:2)
As for the border, it should be closed for the duration of the pandemic. The US has passed the point of no return in getting it under control. Maybe open it in 2023, 2024, 2025 ⦠or maybe just leave it closed permanently. The reduction in air traffic alone makes it worth it.
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Canada should send some of its best aerial mounties into California and fire some fragmentation bombs that deliver carbon filaments over Facebook's substation.
Don't need to. We could just stop sending our water bombers every California fire season.
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Canada should send some of its best aerial mounties into California and fire some fragmentation bombs that deliver carbon filaments over Facebook's substation.
Don't need to. We could just stop sending our water bombers every California fire season.
I was partial to the suggestion someone had of loading a C-130 up with various forms of manure and dropping it on the headquarters, server farm, and his mansion.
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What do you think the effects will be on the Canadian economy if Californian wildfires are permitted to run unchecked?
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What do you think the effects will be on the Canadian economy if Californian wildfires are permitted to run unchecked?
Burn Hollywood and more films made in Canada. Fewer of our people vacationing there or moving to be in movies. So probably a boost to our economy.
Now consider the effect on the U.S. of 40 million Californians scattering over the rest of the country changing the R vs D balance U.S. wide. Enough to paint the map Blue? Maybe the Red states should send fire fighting aid.
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They will force Facebook to pay for news feeds. Facebook will cease to host news feeds. People will navigate their browsers off Facebook to read the news. What's not to like about it?
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They will force Facebook to pay for news feeds. Facebook will cease to host news feeds. People will navigate their browsers off Facebook to read the news. What's not to like about it?
Facebook collects less data. Less data is available for sale. Facebook is less valuable and less popular. What is not to like?
It's complicated (Score:5, Interesting)
In Oz, the Murdoch media (and others) are asking for more than money - they want access to the search algorithm/s, and access to user data collected by Google/Facebook.
I can understand why they'd want money for anything beyond a headline and a link, that's fair enough (leaving aside the validity of that content, we're talking about Newscorp here). But what they're demanding are insights into gaming the system, so Murdoch et al can fuck right off.
If they get what they're demanding, it'll be VPN only for me, and doing what I can to poison any data that might end up in Newscorp's hands.
Inability to regulate corporations. (Score:5, Insightful)
The inability to regulate corporations have really been the downfall of the west. As shown by the previous Facebook article, corporations have gained way too much power, and now expect governments to cower before them.
Funny that Trump trying to ban Wechat and Tiktok has caused other nations to realize that they too can ban US social media, or at least attempt to regulate their actions.
Re:Inability to regulate corporations. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not inability, it's disinclination.
They're not TRYING.
They're ROLLING IN KICKBACKS.
Canadian government always been control freaks (Score:1)
The fig leaf of "Canadian Content" is really about Canadian-government-regulated-content. Here's a link to an archived article from almost a quarter-century ago (1996). The CRTC (Canadian Radio and Television Commission) is our analog to the FCC. http://www.efc.ca/pages/media/... [www.efc.ca]
> In a TV interview last week, Francoise Bertrand, the new
> chairwoman of the CRTC, made some disturbing remarks
> about the Internet that obviously shows her lack of
> understanding of it.
>
> In a nutshell, she wishe
priorities (Score:1)
It's not a threat. (Score:3)
It's a fairly sane business decision to decide to not incur an additional cost. Just because the outcome of that decision is known up front doesn't make it a threat.
They must use the correct motivation (Score:3)
I am all for reigning in Facebook, Google and the likes. They have become too powerful in the world, and as corporations are not democracies, this automatically subverts democracy and will lead to bad outcomes (we're already seeing that).
But actions will be ineffective in the long run, and even cause more collateral damage, if linking and reusing information would become (too) regulated.
Instead, the actual issue is that customers are paying for products with their personal data, which leads to targeted advertisements, incentives to generate clicks, algorithms that amplify bad emotions and fake news etc. etc. Most of the customers think they do so willingly, but are not aware of the devastating consequences for society as a whole, and for them personally if they have a bit of bad luck.
That is the issue that should be resolved. Advertisement must be limited by law, in one form of the other. Even those that have a religious belief in the sanctity of free markets and expression, will have to see sooner or later that the freedom they are trying to protect, will be wiped away be the consequences of this.
Free services with hidden cost should be banned, and the whole business model that underpins Facebook, Google and some others must go away.
I guess, Facebook and Google, now fighting these illogical laws, would be very happy if the counter forces would be only this, instead of what is actually needed, the end of a large part of their business model.
Whats the problem? (Score:1)
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Could be worse, like Trump liking how China is dealing with the Uyghurs.
https://www.ucanews.com/news/t... [ucanews.com]
https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com]
Threats? (Score:3)
It's not a threat, it's the future.
A pox on all their houses (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm no particular fan of Facebook or Google, but Canadian media is failing on its own merits.
There are several things at play here. First of all, Postmedia owns most of the newspapers in Canada. They've cut costs across the country, but still hemorrhage money, because they no longer provide the media that people want. 'Local' news is written centrally, and then distributed to the paper in the region. So the Edmonton Journal, a newspaper that used to be so rich and beloved that it was part-owner of the Edmonton Oilers hockey team and considered a local institution, has much of its content written outside of Edmonton. There's no real reason to buy or subscribe to the paper because frankly, you can get international and national news better from other sources, and local news is non-existent.
Small news organizations are actually doing pretty well. Canadaland is a podcast that mostly covers the Canadian media, but they pay for everything through Patreon and advertisers. They're not getting rich, but they manage okay. I've just heard recently about a 'newsletter' in Victoria that only covers local news, but people pay for it, and they have 40,000 subscribers. It's not that you can't make a viable news organization in Canada anymore, it's just that you probably can't be a huge newspaper and expect to rake in the bucks.
But all of these stupid funds and taxes and ploys by the Canadian government only give money to the big newspapers. They're the only ones considered important enough to give money to. The Liberals want to cultivate this air of even-handedness, because the conservatives here like to pretend that they don't get enough play in the media. So the government is propping up a rightfully dying segment of the industry and ignoring where all the good journalism is being done.
Sure, tax Facebook and Google or whatever, and give money to industries that need to change (still? I mean, c'mon, the internet isn't new, adapt or die already), but fuck the National Post grubbing for handouts after decades of bleating about how capitalism is so wonderful and how taxes are too high and how poor people get too much.
Good move, more countries should do this (Score:2)
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These services are news aggregators. They don't actually 'do the news'. Trudeau is just upset that some of his unilateral edicts have bitten him in the ass. And he can't keep the lid on the public's reaction.
How do you say 'Pravda' in Canadian?
Canada is betting on the losing side. (Score:2)
Google and Facebook are worried about their power (Score:2)
Right now Facebook and Google are free to crawl, read feeds, and have users post links. While they then rank, regulate, replicate, and censor this speech and information. Media companies work for them right now for exposure, ie. free.
The moment that those distribution powers are decoupled from their monopolies and eyeballs have a set price, they lose their dominance in the middle. The content producers can have say on how, what, and when links are shared and find and participate in the real worth of thei
News places are being foolish. (Score:2)
Facebook and Google will just not link to them. Sure, it will hurt Facebook and Google but not as badly as those news sites. Right now, I can scroll through google and click through to a wide variety of news places. If the site's worth visiting, I'll find more news there. Eventually I run out of good links on the site and go back to the Google feed.
If that stops happening, I'll probably just visit BBC, Fox, CNN and call it a day. I'm sure between those three sources I can find enough information to get a de
Back to stone age (Score:1)
Sounds like Australia and Canada want to go back to stone age, like in the 90s when I used to go to a specific news site to read news like a neanderthal. Since those long gone days people have been using aggregate sites (slashdot is one of them). Like a place where I can read headline and then click on article if I'm interested instead of wading through dozens of BS websites.
Google and Facebook should make a special deal with those countries, any media from Australia and Canada that wants to be linked has t
The tech companies are actually being reasonable (Score:2)
Both companies are fundamentally opposed to the idea of pay-to-link. The ability to embed links in stories is at the root of what made the WWW a success. And the links are useless unless you can include enough information about the target so people know whether it is of interest to them. I think the tech companies are on the right side of this one and that the proposed law is misguided. We could perhaps argue that Google and Facebook are including too much information, eliminating the need to click through