[ben_w]

Speaking hypothetically because I'm neither a lawyer nor an economist:

If a monopoly or a monopsony withdraw from a market in order to force a change to legislation they don't like, that feels like exactly the kind of thing that governments need to take a dim view of, or else risk becoming de facto puppets of the monop*y.

[thefurdrake]

I feel like this opinion is divorced from reality.

A company removing itself from the market creates room for competition.

FORCING Meta to provide links and also FORCING them to pay for the links they provide is absurd. They have every right to depart the market. And good riddance, too-- you shouldn't be getting your news from social media, anyway.

[ben_w]

> A company removing itself from the market creates room for competition.

Not always.

Let's say, just for the sake of the argument, that people are lazy and social (so far so good), so much so that they spend all their free time on social media (that's the excessive part for the argument).

Don't allow links of category XYZ on social media? Well, now people won't be sharing them. Opportunity has ceased to exist.

You only get competition if there's a new social network that does allow XYZ. If the old social network is dominant, this may not be reasonable or effective — if FB pulls out of Canada, some other random university student can pull off what Zuckerberg did at university, but Canadabook still won't (except by luck) get the international cachet.

> And good riddance, too-- you shouldn't be getting your news from social media, anyway.

Yup, agreed.

Im fact, go further and get rid of FB and all the rest — I'd be happy for us to go back to e-mail and IRC (and I'm only 70% sure that's because I'm pining for my lost youth when everything was simple and I didn't have any important things to worry about).

[thefurdrake]

> Not always.

That's not facebook's problem. If you want a platform where the government compels what content is provided, you should start lobbying for the government to create such a thing.

Seriously, do you GENUINELY want to live in a world where a government can compel entities to provide information then CHARGE them for that act at the behest of other private entities who directly profit from it?

[ben_w]

Want?

Kinda neutral TBH. Governments set all kinds of rules, that's their job. Democracies somewhat align those rules with public interest, imperfectly and with partial overlap with the imperfections of the public interest alignment from free market capitalism.

Just because I can see edge cases doesn't mean I can tell what makes them systemically better or worse.

[thefurdrake]

I guess I just view it as a really bad precedent to set. The government isn't doing this on the behalf of the general population, it is doing it on the behalf of greedy newstertainment hacks that want more money in a desperate attempt to save their outmoded lifestyle.

There's obviously some content the government should be involved with, like inciting violence. Usually that comes with a direct penalty to the government, in the form of a fine (the effectiveness of which is up for debate), not in the form of compelling speech AND paying a private org for the pleasure of doing it.

It's not justice, it's protectionism. Which is gross. Here in America we do similar shit, and it's just as gross here. We only have car dealerships at all due to protectionism, because it'd put them outta business if people could buy all the cars directly.

[halostatue]

Meta did not remove itself from the market. That would be forcing Canadians to no longer have Facebook/Instagram accounts, etc. IMO, that would be entirely defensible.

But Meta makes a lot of money from Canadians and their data, and they don’t want to lose that particular revenue stream. So they have suspended part of their offering to part of the people they serve in Canada because they don’t like a particular (flawed in one critical way, suboptimal in others) law. That’s anticompetitive behaviour, and it's the sort of thing that would get Canada's wireless companies slapped around when almost nothing else would (all three major wireless companies got slapped pretty hard when Rogers went down country-wide and 911 service was unavailable because of a lack of sharing agreements that should be the absolute norm).