• BuoyantCitrus@lemmy.ca
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          2 years ago

          I did, because it tries to regulate merely linking to content, something I consider absurd. What I did not say is that it is “ridiculous to ask them to share some of the profit they make from Canadian work with Canada”. So I responded as such. I’m not terribly interested in engaging with someone who puts words in my mouth. If you’re curious for more of my thoughts on this topic, I intend to respond to the interesting comment by @[email protected] when I have time to be more thoughtful.

            • wvenable@lemmy.ca
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              2 years ago

              Does your employer pay you by paying taxes and then government distributes them to you? If there was a real business here, then an arrangement would be made between Facebook and these news organizations. Facebook wouldn’t want to lose out on the profit so they’d pay news agencies for the content. But the truth this, the news agencies are profiting far more than Facebook is from this arrangement. They literally need the government to step in because there is no actual business here.

              The news agencies can absolutely pull out of Facebook. They can opt out of summaries and photos. But they don’t.

                • wvenable@lemmy.ca
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                  2 years ago

                  My employer pays taxes and I profit from it.

                  That’s not what I mean and you know it. Your employer pays you directly for your services because it’s a benefit to them. Which is basically how all commerce works.

                  You think an arrangement could be made by individual news agencies where the freaking government couldn’t?

                  No. I think the government has to force this business arrangement because it’s completely backwards. Media companies benefit from linking (they’d literally have no traffic if they didn’t) and they’re trying to extract some value where none exists.

                  News agencies don’t profit because people don’t click

                  And stores won’t profit if people don’t buy stuff. And streaming services don’t profit if nobody subscribes. That’s life. If, as a media company, you’ve giving up all your value by providing summaries and images then that’s your problem. If Tim Hortons can’t sell any donuts because they give out a free Timbit and a shot of coffee, it is not for the government to fix that. They should just stop doing it.

      • jadero@lemmy.ca
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        2 years ago

        It doesn’t, though. Facebook is grabbing more and more of the content making it less and less necessary to actually go to the news site. As a result, Facebook gets to profit from ads instead of the news site.

        This is a well-intentioned but horrible law. There are a couple of things they could do instead.

        Ban large scale data collection on end users without the combination of oversight and properly informed consent that happens in medical research. That still allows for some of the things that are actually beneficial to individuals and society while stripping the power to use the data for such frivolous things as ads. Doing micro-targeted ads requires a level of surveillance and data processing that is beyond the means of any company that has anything else as it’s core competency. That would put ads back a few decades to when an advertiser did not choose a customer via surveillance, but chose a market based on interest (context ads). This would put the original creators and publishers of content back in charge. This would have the added benefit of increasing privacy online.

        They could ban any practice that interferes with the end-to-end principal of communications. This is the principal that says “the stuff I specifically request is the stuff that is most visible.” Right now, Facebook et al are poisoning feeds with “pay to promote” crap so extensively that I’m likely to see something from a bunch of right wing nut jobs at the top of my feed instead of the Marxist outlet I’ve actually subscribed to. Worse, I might never see the people and organizations that I explicitly follow unless those people and organizations pay up. That could have the side effect of pouring water on the dumpster fire that passes for discourse, because fringe movements would have to actually gain traction through the quality of their ideas and arguments instead of by just throwing money around.