[1024core]

> The move follows the passage of Canada's Online News Act, aimed at boosting revenue for Canadian journalism outlets by mandating compensation from companies like Meta and Google's parent company, Alphabet, for hosting and linking to their content.

Well, Canada fucked around and found out.

[mc32]

I feel like there is no good-gal in this saga. This should be forming symbiotic relationships but they're both acting like parasites.

Both sides angle to extract as much revenue as possible. That said, I don't think social media or any technology company is _obligated_ to carry news.

[wredue]

The spirit of the regulation makes sense.

Advertisers and PII farmers basically use news channel posts to generate revenue, and often scrape critical parts of the article, or even just outright steal the contents in whole.

I’m not sure about the execution, but I do agree with the sentiment. Google and Facebook being allowed to steal your content just because they’re massive is a huge problem.

[kemayo]

If the law was restricted to cases where Google / Facebook had actually scraped the content from the page and was redisplaying it, I suspect we'd be seeing far less objections. Instead, it overreached so hard that it's left Hacker News broadly supporting Facebook's actions, which is pretty wild.

Ignoring how it even applies to pure links with no content ("click here"), a lot of the previews you see on Facebook are using special meta tags that're added to news articles for that purpose. If the news orgs think that using that content for a nice preview of their article is bad for them, they should stop deliberately providing it.

(I think the `og` meta tags are a better argument here than `robots.txt`, because the former is the news orgs actively helping their content get redisplayed, while the latter is Google they-would-argue saying "we're stealing this unless you tell us not to", which sounds far sketchier.)

[wredue]

So.. we agree?

The execution wasn’t right, but the idea of third parties being allowed to take your content just because of their size is bad.

I do have to say that I am growing more and more tired of completely tech illiterate laws being passed.

[kemayo]

We sort of agree, in that I believe we're both saying that the law is currently doing something bad, but that preventing unauthorized reuse of the news org's content isn't necessarily unreasonable.

However, I don't think calling it an execution issue is quite right. The basic concept built into the law is that telling someone where to go to get the news is a thing you should have to pay to do. We can imagine a far more restrained law that just forbids or requires payment for scraping-and-redisplay of article text... but that'd genuinely be a different law with a different goal.

[marcinzm]

Huh? News organizations are explicitly asking third parties to take their content and helping them do so... I'm not sure how that is an argument for third parties taking that content by force. In fact they're now complaining that Meta is no longer taking their content at all. So really not sure what argument you're trying to make here.

[wredue]

What a complete load of garbage. News organizations are asking to be paid for their stolen content.

They are rightfully complaining that tech giants are now attempting to forcefully allow stealing content so long as you’re large enough.

It’s funny, because right now, you’re basically saying that Reddit is correct to forcefully take over subs that are locking down in protest of killing third party apps for the purpose of having better ability to spy on your activity and pump ads.

Same shit dude.

When a liberal government does it = bad

When a sub fights a corporate spy network = good

Funny how that works. Personally, I just enjoy not being a hypocrite.

[jsnell]

It sounds like you don't actually understand the contents of the law. It has nothing to do with "stolen content" as you put it. Just the act of Facebook linking to a news article without any information from the article (title, snippets, images) is enough. How is that theft in your mind?

I have no idea of where your reddit analogue is coming from.

[marcinzm]

Meta blocked the news content, no more stealing according to your own line of argument, how is that a bad outcome? You can't have it both ways that this is stealing so it's bad but that not stealing is also bad because "reasons."

Throwing in a bunch of random insults and statements about liberals and corporate spy networks doesn't make for an argument or a useful discussion. Stick to reddit or twitter if you want to go down that route.

[dabluck]

This is exactly backwards. Google will happily not index any of your content with a simple robots.txt file. These companies are desperate for Google's traffic. They should be paying Google for it!

[1024core]

> Google and Facebook being allowed to steal your content just because they’re massive is a huge problem.

Have you heard of robots.txt files? It pains me to read comments such as yours which display such colossal ignorance.