[bryanlarsen]

Canadian journalists could have done this without the government by adapting tactics similar to unions.

A union strikes not because they want to withhold work from their company, but because even though both the company and the union members want to work, the strike shifts the power balance.

Similarly, Canadian journalists could have gotten together to withhold links from Google & Meta until they got a better deal. They'd both be worse off during the duration of the strike, but negotiations could get a better long term deal. And in this metaphor, Meta is doing a pre-emptive lockout.

The biggest difference is that the government is helping journalists combat the defector problem.

[AlecSchueler]

It comes down to culture and what kind of onus society expects to put onto worker to create and police de facto legislation, which is prefered in some places to allowing the state to enact the same de jure.

They could have done this but now they don't have to.

[babypuncher]

I feel like that could backfire since "scabbing" would be really easy, especially for less scrupulous news organizations more strongly tied to corporate or political interests than actual news reporting.

Basically while Reuters or AP are "on strike", Drudge Report, Jacobin, or Fox News would step in and become the de facto news sources across all of social media.

[bryanlarsen]

This is what I was getting at in the last sentence of my comment. The reason it's a government action rather than a collective action is that way it prevents defections, aka scabbing.

[ipaddr]

But smaller news outlets are not part of this cartel.