This is the result of the Canadian government giving in to the lobbying from the media conglomerates instead of actually addressing the real problem.
The real problem is the Facebook / Google advertising duopoly. The fix would be to break up that duopoly. Instead, they tried to create a “link tax” so that any time Google / Facebook linked to a news article (for select lucky news corporations) they had to pay for that link. The obvious response from Facebook / Google is “ok, we won’t link to Canadian news then”.
Now, instead of Google / Facebook getting ~30% of the cut from news-related advertising, they get 0%, but because there’s no traffic, the media conglomerates get 0% too. It doesn’t really hurt Google / Facebook. If your feed / search would have included breaking news but now includes a cute cat video instead, they get their cut from that cat video and are just as happy.
This is the result of the Canadian government giving in to the lobbying from the media conglomerates instead of actually addressing the real problem.
The real problem is the Facebook / Google advertising duopoly. The fix would be to break up that duopoly. Instead, they tried to create a “link tax” so that any time Google / Facebook linked to a news article (for select lucky news corporations) they had to pay for that link. The obvious response from Facebook / Google is “ok, we won’t link to Canadian news then”.
Now, instead of Google / Facebook getting ~30% of the cut from news-related advertising, they get 0%, but because there’s no traffic, the media conglomerates get 0% too. It doesn’t really hurt Google / Facebook. If your feed / search would have included breaking news but now includes a cute cat video instead, they get their cut from that cat video and are just as happy.