[pcc]

Seems like a lot of vitriol and misunderstanding in these comments, so a few thoughts as someone directly affected by the McDougall Creek fire.

Imagine you run a business, doesn’t matter what kind. Prospects look up your service on, say, Google, where Google in many cases now shows them enough of an extract of your content so that they may never even have to click through to your page to learn about what you do. So you can never analyze, ab test, tag, sign up, retarget or monetize these otherwise-visitors who are no longer clicking through. Effectively Google can be argued to be leveraging your content to make their own page stickier at your expense, eg to sell more ads. How would this make you feel? Turns out many people have a real problem with this, in 2019 I realized this at a telco conference where Rand Fishkin in a keynote was advocating people take this to their members of congress.

Firstly, Bill C18 is not even in effect yet. Secondly, its primarily concerned with the intermediaries reproducing the copyrighted news content or summaries/extracts on their own sites, which is the same situation as above where visitors never come to your site because your content is being reproduced/extracted/summarized elsewhere outside of your control. The matter of links to news articles is one interpretation of the secondary concept of “facilitating access” but as already explained in some of the comments here, thats not actually the core driver of this bill and Meta etc are refusing even to participate in the drafting of the regulations around that despite being invited to do so.

On the ground, here is what is happening today: neighbours evacuated or on alert are posting questions in private neighbourhood groups, on everything from food access, water use to garbage collection, and when answers are behind news articles, Meta is stopping other neighbours from posting links to those articles in response. (Incidentally, use of news in private discussion groups is something specifically exempted by C18).

This “interference” is purposeful by Meta as a calculated protest against a bill that is not yet in effect and isn’t about that use case. Yes, some might call this kind of behaviour bullying.

They can of course do what they want, they’re not under any obligation to let anyone communicate anything. Its really just a reminder to everyone that they’re driven entirely by self interest and not the interests of whichever communities they choose to operate in. By implication this makes them unreliable as an emergency communication utility or as a foundational element of community fabric.

[woofcat]

>Imagine you run a business, doesn’t matter what kind. Prospects look up your service on, say, Google, where Google in many cases now shows them enough of an extract of your content so that they may never even have to click through to your page to learn about what you do. So you can never analyze, ab test, tag, sign up, retarget or monetize these otherwise-visitors who are no longer clicking through.

So kinda like the yellow pages in the phone book? Where I would go to the section on lock smiths and read the ads, and call the ones I want to talk to? You're wanting to basically force prospective clients to call each locksmith even if they don't want to. The company that allows ease of access gets the business. You're free to add a robots.txt blocking google today.

>its primarily concerned with the intermediaries reproducing the copyrighted news content or summaries/extracts on their own sites,

This is factually incorrect. The bill does not say "pay to summarize" it's pay to link. The notion that the news orgs are not getting any benefit out of this is insane to me. They're paying staff to manage their Facebook and Instagram accounts. Everything I know about businesses, and especially suffering businesses is that they don't want to burn a bunch of human hours posting stories that are apparently costing them money.

>neighbours evacuated or on alert are posting questions in private neighbourhood groups, on everything from food access, water use to garbage collection, and when answers are behind news articles, Meta is stopping other neighbours from posting links to those articles in response.

Sounds like we should stop depending on our news orgs who paywall public cood content anyways. That information should be on Government run websites.

>This “interference” is purposeful by Meta as a calculated protest against a bill that is not yet in effect and isn’t about that use case.

And I for one welcome it, our news orgs have a dying model and instead of adapting they're lobbing the government to bully the tech companies as they have money. Why have 400 meetings to discuss this bill and not change the text at all?

[pcc]

I'm not advocating any side here, I'm simply relaying what is actually happening on the ground, because the prevailing opinion here seems to be getting shaped by a very selective cherry picking of ideas that don't represent the reality on the ground here.

In the current conditions as you can imagine there is a lot of chatter on social media from people trying to find and share up to date information. A lot of this info is by definition hearsay, and so news articles are often getting referenced when a source of authoritative info is needed. I guess that is because the reporters working for those news orgs are on the ground at the press conferences, working the phones, working their networks of contacts, and working to get verification on when there are insufficient sources to a report. So what they bring here is some combination of a measure of trust, access to info before it hits official government pages, and aggregating of many diverse sources of into fewer places.

These news orgs are not the ones you're thinking of; they're our local community news outlets that have no paywalls and who run totally open/free sites supported by display ads on their sites.

Their articles are in many cases ahead of the official info on government sites. As an example, overnight reporting on one of these news sites sourced updates about the fireline hours before the official update is set to hit the government site, comments from gvt meteorologist about the smoke visibility around the airport which gives us some sense of when the water bombers will be able to fly again, again hours before this info will become officially available, last-minute changes in garbage collection info that is more current than what's on the government site, updates about the drinkability of water and so forth. We learnt from them first that some commercial flights at the airport would resume overnight, and so on.

No matter what you might generally think about reporters and news sites during "normal" times - right now these guys seem to be doing an amazing job of delivering exactly this -- actual news -- making it an extremely valuable resource.

So, Meta's "interference" is causing a lot of people irritation by not allowing us to share links to our community news org articles in private groups, instead forcing people to reference articles by screenshot, description etc. Surely it's inevitable that for some this irritation will lead to calls to boycott FB.

Not sure where the statements about factual correctness come from because the text of C18 is publicly available. It doesn't even contain the word "link". It does speak a lot about "content". And again, it isn't actually in effect yet. Yes the idea of "linking" is one interpretation of one aspect of C18 that pertains to "access of content" -- a cherry picked one that seems calculated to stir up outrage since C18 at least to me reads far more about the use of the content itself.

I've also never seen the Yellow Pages try to dynamically answer questions about a business, so people don't have to call that business, by automatically extracting parts of collateral the business authored but didn't give permission to use in that way.

Rather, the Yellow Pages has a formal spec/interface where they and the business can agree on the extent of what is OK to show.

And this seems to me exactly what C18 is trying to establish: that Meta et all can't simply extract as much out of a news article as they wish, but that there is a framework (with rules that remain to be drafted) where they must agree with the news orgs, what level of summary they can reproduce for free. Not much different than what Apple News presumably already has in place. Except Meta is refusing even to engage in this.

Is C18 perfect? No. Are news orgs in general perfect? Hell no. Is there lobbying and cronyism related to the legacy orgs? Probably. Again I'm not arguing a specific side here, I am simply pointing out that the governing narrative in this thread seems one sided, which always makes me wonder in who's interest that is. Canada hasn't actually put into effect any law banning Meta from linking to news. Claims that that is what the plan is, would be grossly oversimplifying. Meta is not a paragon of virtue here acting on behalf of the freedom of the community at large, it is simply "negotiating" in its sole interest, and so there should be no surprise now that some in the community will advocate for us to "negotiate" back.

Again I go back to the opening thought about Google. There is a larger issue at work here than just the news and just Canada.