[dsir]

This bill is so backwards. If anything the news companies should be the ones paying Facebook and Google for doing free marketing for them.

Google and other social media platforms seem like the primary source of traffic for these legacy media companies. I mean a lot of news organizations upload links to their content themselves because that's how people find what to read. I reckon very few people go directly to the news websites to find articles and that's certainly not going to change because of this law in my opinion. The concept of a service provider having to pay to host links is absurd and goes against the nature of how the internet works. It's an attack on the very nature of the internet framed in a manner of "Protecting Canadian's" when in reality, the people who's pockets its meant to line ironically are the ones who are going to be hurt the most by it.

What a disaster.

I can't wait to watch how this backfires when the legacy media companies start complaining about how they are getting next to no traffic once this passes. That's not even to mention the smaller publishers who now aren't able to promote their own content on these platforms because of this bill.

[jonny_eh]

The news companies don't want clicks, they want subscribers. They don't want traffic from Google News or Facebook, they want users to open their own app/newspaper directly.

[majormajor]

I also imagine that there's a pretty low clickthrough rate for FB embeds of news articles, compared to "see headline, leave angry comment" engagement that only benefits Facebook without returning anything to the publishers.

[jonny_eh]

This may have downstream benefits to public discourse.

[subarctic]

If that's the case, whey don't they stop posting their content to social media? Is the idea with this bill to prevent a race to the bottom, where all the news organizations post their content for free in order to compete with each other?

[jonny_eh]

While social media shows news items, the traditional outlets need to compete THERE. If there's no more news on social media, the hope is that people will close those apps and open their local news app.

[goodbyesf]

> The news companies don't want clicks, they want subscribers.

My understanding is that news companies make their money primarily on ads. If it's subs, then why don't these news companies go entirely behind a paywall and demand google and facebook remove all links to their content. Instead, they are using government to essentially steal money from tech companies for those links.

Their actions doesn't align with your assertions.

[jonny_eh]

> and demand google and facebook remove all links to their content

Then users will get their news for "rando-AI generated news outlet" posting on FB instead.