[randomdata]

Especially when the news organization is free to deny the request referred by a linking party who has not offered the expected compensation. It is not clear why a new law is needed here when existing contract law already sufficiently covers the issue.

[wubrr]

How would news organizations deny the request referred by a linking party? Are you talking about a technical denial - as in reject the HTTP request? I guess technically they can base something like this on HTTP referer header, but you can have links without referer info as well.

[cmrdporcupine]

Referrer is exactly how you would do it.

The idiocy here is that most of these publishers are likely customers of Google's ad networks anyways, and the clicks through to the articles are yielding ad revenue to them, and they likely are getting analytics and tracking that identifies exactly where the inbound traffic is coming from.

It feels like a shakedown by people who are in other parts of the business totally disconnected from the web content / publishing arms, who likely know better?

[wubrr]

Referrer is basically optional though, you can specify a link to have no referrer : `<a href="example.com" rel="noreferrer">link</a>` , among other ways.

It's true that the links only increase the revenue/traffic to their website though, so they should really be supporting the referrers rather than blocking them.

[randomdata]

> you can specify a link to have no referrer : `<a href="example.com" rel="noreferrer">link</a>` , among other ways.

But you wouldn't do that if you want the link to resolve. If you don't want it to work, why would you go to all of the trouble of creating the link in the first place?

[Dylan16807]

And block people that use a bookmark or share the link via chat programs? I think almost no sites would do that.

[randomdata]

They would if the users affected do not impact their bottom line. After all, the whole point of this is to keep out users who are not paying their 'fair share' via Google/Meta by proxy.

But also, the technical solution to bookmarks and small-scale sharing between friends is quite obvious. You don't need referrers to solve that problem.

[wubrr]

Huh? The link would still resolve and work, just the referrer header wouldn't be set.

[acdha]

What happens when they set a referrer policy no-referrer? I’m sure Google and Meta would say that’s to protect user privacy.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...

[randomdata]

The simplest option is to treat it as a rejection. Users aren't going to be dreaming up (choosing a recent article at random) URIs like /politics/federal/chiefs-of-ontario-says-trudeau-s-carbon-price-is-discriminatory-and-demand-a-review/article_9c995f63-1e26-56c6-9048-79781a9b649c.html in order to get there without some referring party.

Negotiations between Google/Meta and the news organization when defining the service contract can explore alternative options (access token, for example) should it be an imperative, for some reason, that the referrer still be inaccessible. People are allowed to talk to each other.

[cesarb]

> Users aren't going to be dreaming up (choosing a recent article at random) URIs like <long url> in order to get there without some referring party.

What about bookmarks? I don't think clicking on a bookmark on your browser is going to send any Referer header.

[randomdata]

If that case is beyond "who cares?", which I suspect is not, once the user is granted access to the news the first time then they can be given subsequent access regardless of referrer.

[acdha]

Users are going to be opening links from emails, SMS/MMS/RCS, other apps, and sites which do care about their users' privacy so, yes, this would be a problem for many people.

[randomdata]

It can only be a problem for the news agencies – and only if those users are a significant number to impact profitability. If those users don't matter, restricting their access doesn't matter. Who cares if someone who isn't helping your bottom line can't access the content you expect payment for? That’s the whole point of this – to keep out those who are not helping the news business.

Now, each successful entrance into an article via allowable referrer would come with an access token to allow future access absent of referral. When sharing in the small scale, the news agency can simply allow these links to be shared. But if the reach grows wide, suggesting that a major tech source has picked up the link and should be using their contractually settled upon authentication mechanism instead, then the token can be invalidated.

[Dylan16807]

These are the people trying to visit your website because of very specific interest. You should want their views a lot, not try to keep them out!

The access token plan is workable, though still causes annoying linking problems.

[randomdata]

> You should want their views a lot, not try to keep them out!

Views don't pay the bills. They only want viewers who are willing to pay to play (even if by proxy). C-18 ensures that payment is made, else user access is restricted by legal force. Which is the same outcome if it were done by technical force. They don't care about the restrictions on users who are eschewing payment in either case.

[Y_Y]

And if somebody sends you the link in an IM? Or if the browser fakes a referral from the news sites landing page?

[randomdata]

Any IM service not operated by a major tech company that the news organization wouldn't also want to collect compensation from is going see such a small number of referrals, who cares? Same goes for the number of people who are going to take the time to hack around it. Who cares?