The Online News Act passed last Thursday and would force platforms like Google and Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, to strike deals with Canadian media publishers for sharing, previewing and directing users to online Canadian news content.
I’m late to the discussion, i’m no fan of giant companies and the billionaires that run them but this isn’t the place to fight them. If you’re summarising the article and depriving the website of clicks and ad revenue then you should definitely pay the news sites, but if you’re linking to them then you’re basically helping direct traffic there. Just like what happened in Spain Google is going to pull out of Canada, the news publishers are going to realise they’re seeing a huge drop in traffic, and a year or two later they’ll be asking Google to come back.
Maybe. Its a nonsense song and dance while Canadians are facing the worst cost of living and housing crisis in our nation’s history. We had the government outright prove that the nation’s largest grocery chains are fixing prices under the guide of inflation and literally nothing happened. Two weeks of groceries for me and my family cost us nearly 350$ when I was there yesterday. The same amount was around 150$ 2 years ago. Wages haven’t increased anywhere near that much. But you get used to liberal democracy doing whatever it can to distract from the crimes of capitalists. So they’re “taking a stand” against news aggregators. It doesn’t matter either way. The working class is one bad day away from homelessness. A dispute between local media capitalists and foreign mega corporations has no impact on anything whatsoever.