[PoignardAzur]

I'm as much against american hegemony as the next frenchman, and I still consider this wave of "we'll make google pay for the traffic they send our way" regulations to be bullshit.

It's carriage drivers making the automobile industry pay them a fine for the crime of making them obsolete.

[bensecure]

> It's carriage drivers making the automobile industry pay them a fine for the crime of making them obsolete.

That's utter nonsense. If google is sending traffic to a site, then naturally they consider that site valuable in some way. Nothing about google makes news "obsolete", and in fact google is basically just a website for finding news articles (and other content). The Canadian implementation of this law, unlike the Australian one for example, gives google the option of excluding these news sites from search results entirely if they consider them unnecessary. That google has chosen to negotiate a deal instead demonstrates that google recognizes the value these sites provide.

[PoignardAzur]

Fair, that's on me for reacting to the headline without reading the article, and "obsolete" is too strong a word.

I was mostly thinking of the lobbying groups in europe which very much didn't want to allow the "exclude from search results" opt-out.

[xethos]

We have a userbase that, in general, prides itself on reading the article. Far too many here still don't make it past the headline. Do you think Google is actually sending traffic to articles posted by the news orgs, or are people more likely scanning headlines and confirming their biases? At most (on average) I'd expect clicking through and skimming the sub-headline

[polishdude20]

I'm just disappointed that it seems the only way our government can make money is by pulling it from American companies.