[tannhaeuser]

"Link tax" is clearly chosen in bad faith, like in other cases where that wording had been used. What's really happening is that Google Search shows previews of large parts of articles such that visitors don't go to origin sites to generate page impressions/ad playouts. Which is especially problematic since Google/Alphabet is either an ad provider on the skipped news site or its competitor.

[gspencley]

This is a popular myth about the way the law works in Canada. The myth may be based on how the Australian version works, I wouldn't know. But here in Canada, this is the relevant text of the bill:

> digital news intermediary means an online communications platform, including a search engine or social media service, that is subject to the legislative authority of Parliament and that makes news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada

"Making available" includes just links. In other words, there is no qualifier in the bill what-so-ever that requires that previews and snippets be extracted and provided. A single link with no text or any other content whatever qualifies as "making available."

Here is the entire text of the bill: https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...

[Nextgrid]

> makes news content [...] available

That sounds like a simple link wouldn't count?

[gspencley]

I suppose I could have included other "relevant" sections of the bill. But there's a reason I linked to the full text.

> "Making available of news content (2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if

(a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or

(b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content."

So not only is there no qualifier saying that content needs to be reproduced, but (b) specifically says that "facilitating" access BY ANY MEANS counts as "making available."

[kevingadd]

Indexes don't work without consuming the news content first in order to build the index, right? So it's reasonable to argue that a news search index is a derived work that draws some amount of value from the source news content. Without the news sites offering their news for free to google's spider, google's index would be useless. You could make a similar argument for aggregators since they usually display excerpts and thumbnails.

Ranking seems harder to justify.

[ethbr1]

It does beg the cascading question too.

What if I create a search product that directs you to a site, based on information gleaned from another site?

Trivial example: a "Top 10 Topics in the News Today" list of Wikipedia links, based on scraping a news site's front page daily

On the one hand, "It's free info and scraping should be allowed." On the other hand, if everyone did that, it'd highjack all of the news site's visitors, depriving it of revenue and destroying the very resource it's built on.

[Spivak]

This line of reasoning is dangerously close to saying that mapmakers need to pay license fees for your land to be shown on a map because "without the land your map wouldn't be very valuable."

[SiempreViernes]

Sure, but the act only applies if you are as powerful as Google (Section 6: Application), and since they are the primary target the scope needs to be broad because Google can be counted on producing the most bad faith reading of any law to try to escape paying for the practice of scraping content from journalists in an effort to keep the traffic on their own pages.

[kevingadd]

The text of the bill says that links are "news content"? A pure hyperlink does not make content available, since if the target server goes down the link is useless. It just directs the user to the content.

Unless somebody loses a court case over hyperlinks, it feels extremely disingenuous to claim this law is going after hyperlinks when Google's content was blatantly more than hyperlinks (they provide excerpts).

[SiempreViernes]

The definition of "making available" is actually very broad, presumably to head off at the gate whatever technical work-around Google was planning to use to bypass a the more narrow "the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced".

Like, I can see Google pivoting to providing custom links and a script that runs in the users browser that will dynamically produce the snippets on the pages without the content technically going trough their servers...

[gspencley]

A couple things of note:

1. Meta was the other "initial target." And so if we're in a mindset where we just dislike Google or "big powerful corporations that will stop at no end to ... whatever" then the application of the bill ALREADY hit a point where we can start to see how loosely the regulators will interpret Section 6. And according to the wording of that section, they just need to consider the "size" of the entity,"strategic advantage", and "prominent market position" in order to determine if they decide that the digital news intermediary has "a significant bargaining power imbalance."

2. With respects to what you think Google might do in order to try and "work around the law" ... I'm not a lawyer, but from what I've heard from lawyers, courts tend to be very intolerant towards people who try and apply a strict interpretation of the wording of a law in order to try and skirt around what it makes illegal. Common law, precedence and judicial interpretation really exists in large part to try and avoid that type of thing. Judges will look at things like the intent of the legislators, past court decisions and the intent of the accused in order to determine whether the accused is in violation.

In other words, Section 4 "Purpose", would be considered:

> Purpose 4 The purpose of this Act is to regulate digital news intermediaries with a view to enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contributing to its sustainability, including the sustainability of news businesses in Canada, in both the non-profit and for-profits sectors, including independent local ones.

As well as Google's intent. If the court were to gather that Google's intent was to try and work around the law, they go back to the Purpose, look at Google's actions and the EFFECT of their actions and will say "Sorry, you don't get to do shit like that to try and weasel your way out of the law. It still applies." And those types of actions can often be used as evidence of an intent to break the law, so any lawyer would likely advise their client to not even consider doing slimy shit like that.

[SiempreViernes]

Ah, its a good point that the main target is the even more bad faith actor in the form of Facebook! Even more reason the technical criteria has to be broad.

I am however confused why you think the law being applied to the company having 91% of search in Canada is mission creep, you never actually say why claiming that Google has a "a significant bargaining power imbalance" is "loosely" interpreting the criteria....

And sure, the state might have a good chance of winning the court case about Google and Meta trying to avoid the law by not technically delivering the snippets themselves, but it'll take years for sure to go trough the courts. And why would you accept those several years where the damage the law is trying to prevent continues because you wanted the technical definitions to be narrow as when you already had criteria on company size.

[gspencley]

> I am however confused why you think the law being applied to the company having 91% of search in Canada is mission creep, you never actually say why claiming that Google has a "a significant bargaining power imbalance" is "loosely" interpreting the criteria....

I think you misunderstood my point.

I'm not talking about applying the law to Google, specifically. I'm not even saying that the government & regulators are "loosely interpreting the law." I'm saying that the criteria, as set out in Section 6 is itself intentionally loose to the point where it gives broad, sweeping and arguably arbitrary power to the regulators in order to decide who qualifies and why. That, if challenged in court, they only have to argue that a "significant bargaining power imbalance" exists because of some degree of consideration to "size" of the target, "prominent market position" and "strategic advantage." If that's not extremely broad and sweeping, I don't know what is.

Personally, I don't want my government and it's regulatory agencies having that type of unconstrained broad discretion. It allows them to:

- selectively target certain entities over others

- while in doing so, has the potential to create an unfair market environment while claiming that their goals are to achieve fairness

- it gives them a very broad paintbrush with which to select these entities

In your follow-up point about legal cases and years and cost of going through the court system .. if any target of this law wanted to challenge being targeted by the CRTC ... that's the exact type of lengthy and costly legal process that they would have to go through in suing the CRTC for exemption. It would be incredibly costly for the entity targeted, while having virtually zero consequences for the CRTC and the government if the courts were to rule in the entity's favour.

Just imagine how open to corruption this law is. The CRTC can "punish" certain entities while giving "favours" to others by choosing to leave them be and not target them.

[supriyo-biswas]

Now that you say that, I wonder if this is what SXGs[1] were about.

[1] https://web.dev/articles/signed-exchanges

[jsnell]

Except that the actual text of the law does not match your claim. It's about "facilitating access to news content by any means" including an "index" or "aggregation". Not about reproducing large chunks of the original content.

And it should be pretty obvious that this is the case. If your interpretation was correct, Meta would not have removed Canadian news sources entirely. They'd just have removed the previews (hell, the news companies could have removed the previews themselves; they already have the controls for that).

[llm_nerd]

>If your interpretation was correct, Meta would not have removed Canadian news sources entirely.

Meta's actions prove absolutely nothing. I could similarly say that Google didn't remove any news, therefore the law has zero effect?

Meta has, for months in advance of anything coming into force, embargoed Canadian news and replaced it with an appeal to the reader. That is political action, and it seems to have failed given that the government didn't blink. Now that Google has an agreement, it looks especially silly.

If Meta continues their embargo of Canadian news, personally I consider that a good thing. The Canadian public accepting that Meta is not a good source or "homepage" for news is a wonderful outcome of all of this.

[ipaddr]

I welcome it for the opposite reason. The few powerful families that control the news cartel in Canada need less reach.

[SiempreViernes]

You "welcome" media control going from a "few families" to a single person?

[ipaddr]

When you mute corporate media all of these little voices get louder.

[wesapien]

If I had to choose a lesser evil it would be Facebook

[brushfoot]

The act targets more than content previews. Notice (b):

> (2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if

> (a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or

> (b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.

[Dylan16807]

I'm pretty sure I've seen multiple critiques that this specific law is in fact a link tax, and doesn't care if there are previews or not.

Is that wrong?

Sure, google currently has previews, and a law could be written to target previews, but I don't think this law targets previews.

[SiempreViernes]

It does target previews very explicitly, but it also has a much broader condition that I imagine is there to prevent Google and others from making previews something technically not provided by them but instead created by some payload they give the users of their website.

[CivBase]

Are news articles considered intellectual property, like books? If so, wouldn't it already be considered piracy for Google to copy and redistribute significant portions of the articles? If so - and if this law is not actually a "link tax" like you claim - then what is this law really preventing?

[nradov]

How many characters of preview would be reasonable? 50? 100?

[soganess]

Why would you even use number of characters?

A better criteria is: what fraction of people does it stop from visiting the source (because they got the information they were looking for from the summary). Yes, yes that system has it's own problems, but it is more holistic that string.length().

[nradov]

Determining that fraction would require the search engine to run a series of A/B tests with varying preview lengths, and keep detailed records of test results. That seems like an unreasonable burden.

[kridsdale1]

That’s exactly the kind of activity the google is doing every single day, thousands of them in parallel.

[CivBase]

How much am I allowed to quote from a book before I'm considered a pirate?

[nradov]

In the US we have fairly clear guidelines for fair use of copyrighted materials such as books. Rules in Canada may be different.

https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html