[canadiantim]

Sure, no problem. Bill C-18 is a tax on links to news articles. Currently the regulator in charge of implementing the law is only targeting 2 large companies: Google and Meta (you may have heard Meta stopped news sharing within Canada as a result and Google is considering the same), but it's expected for the regulator to apply this law to progressively more companies over time. But I would argue this severely restricts the free flow of information on the internet, which is effectively censorship (because it's removing news links from the internet, atleast in Canada)

[AlexandrB]

It's more of a kind of trade war than censorship since the links being removed are removed in a content-neutral manner, not based on whether they support/oppose a specific viewpoint. Also, it's Meta that decided to remove the links of paying the tax. Removing links was not mandated by the government.

Having said that, it's a very stupid law.

[canadiantim]

You're right the links are removed in a content-neutral manner, but the law also hurts smaller publishers more than larger publishers because the larger publishers are getting direct money contributions from the government to compensate them but the smaller ones aren't. So the most likely net effect of the law is to put out of business a lot of smaller news media in Canada and only the well-connected large news businesses will remain.

[lukeschlather]

C-18 is about copyright. You can argue all copyright is censorship in the same way, which while I think is a valid viewpoint it's not really a good argument, copyright and censorship should be treated as two different things.

Put another way, if it should be legal for Google to do whatever they want with copyrighted content, I should also be able to do whatever I want with Google's intellectual property. You've got a status quo bias by looking at C-18 as "aggressively pushing for censorship" but ignoring Google's successful "censorship" of people who would copy other copyrighted works.

[canadiantim]

Is C-18 about copyright because it's about the content of news articles? I haven't really heard Bill C-18 being about copyright before. Are news articles copyrighted content? Honest questions, I'm not sure.

You are right I do have a bias. I'm not particularly trusting of Google or Meta, but in this particular argument I would side with them (even though as you point out Google in particular has been successful in other types of censorship)