Sometimes taking the simple view is correct: It's a bad thing to prevent sites from linking to one another. It's a bad thing to interfere with the ability to access information on the Internet for reasons of nationalist politics.
Would this prevent embedding links into your posts? I thought it's about platforms displaying enough information discouraging the person to visit the news site. I get that they want people to stay on their platforms 24/7 but I also get the other side wanting a slice of the advertising cake.
"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."
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...
It's not just a matter of the targeted companies being Google and Meta, even though these two especially deserve it.
It's the simple realization that good journalism requires good money, and that the current balance between news organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task. It is also true of other type of content creators, by the way: there is a structural imbalance between content creators and content brokers. This is even more true with Google's zero-click efforts.
While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt.
The problem is media companies have been pushing this exact blueprint for d years. decades. It is a terrible, terrible template.
If countries want to tax big tech and give the money to media organizations, they should be honest about it. Laws like this distort reality.
>the current balance between news organizations and internet brokers isn't up to the task.
This doesn't make sense. Newspapers want links to their stories. I've even seen media organization paying "internet brokers" to advertise stories.
The law has the economics of the internet backwards. To receive a link is to benefit, everyone knows this except the government.
What's happening here is that publishers and their owners somehow figured these pesky internet wiz kids owe them more money.
Then we’d not only have enough financial resources to subsidize a free and healthy press but also for other worthy endeavours like better health care, open source software, science, etc.
All without hampering with basic pillars of the web.
Nobody owes anyone else a business model.
Let's go 100%. Will journalists then pay people who they report on?
I normally agree with release early, collect data and iterate. I'm not sure the law, with a bill of this impact, dependent on a bunch of politicians with obvious bias, who just went on summer vacation for 3 months, falls into this category.
As seen in Twitch.tv vs Kick.com where streamers are dropping Twitch and migrating en-masse to Kick. Abusing the content creators can backfire. However Google is in a different situation; they have a virtual monopoly on content discovery and not existing on Google basically means not existing at all. How do you fix that? Is Google an internet-utility? Should it be regulated as such?
If this were about good journalism then the law wouldn’t be necessary at all. The revenue these companies are generating from the journalism content is from displaying a headline. The whole point of the law is that the actual content of these articles is so utterly worthless, that users can’t even be bothered clicking on it. A substantial portion of those users derive all of the limited value that they believe it has by reading the headline alone. There is no legislative solution to that problem. This is law is only a solution to the problem of useless businesses being selected out of the market by their consumers.
CBC has received $1.2 billion annually from the federal government (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporat...) and is very ... government friendly ... in matters like the trucker protests.
I remember more independent press around 2000-2010, where there was true opposition in the media. I see nothing like that now.
then why were most news publications as bad as they are now 20 years ago? maybe they just suck. I learn more from HN that some news site ever did.
When I read american aerticles about my country, they are just plain WRONG.
First attempt for Canada maybe. Australia did it a few years ago:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56163550
But Australia wasn't the first either. The Australian media companies got their idea from the French(?):
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/21/google-agrees-to-pay-french-publishers-for-news.html
It was obvious it wouldn't work, and clearly hasn't worked in Australia. The newspapers are still posting large losses, still shutting down newsrooms. It's inevitable they will disappear in their current form. The newspapers business wasn't selling news or doing investigations to create news. Their business is the same as Google's: selling ads. The news was always just the bait they used to get people to read their ads and they shamelessly copied it, often with only a few words changed, between mastheads. Each had their own little area they sold to, the size largely determined by how far you ship dead trees in about 6 hours. Now the BBC, CNN, The Guardian and the other remaining big ones can reach the entire world now, so we don't need thousands of little mastheads all repeating the same news items. These big news rooms do a far better job that the little ones at gathering news, and selling ads. And so, the little mastheads will die.
It's bad law because in order to cover this use case, they banned creating 10 or 20 word summaries of a 200 or 300 word article, expanding copyright accordingly. That had to do that because at least in Google's case, as all Google every did was post a few words and a link to the actual content, on the newspapers site. Copyright terms have already been stretched well beyond their utilitarian justification, probably by an order of magnitude. This stretches the definition of what is covered by copyright by a similar amount. Admittedly this stretch is fairly harmless here, but if it leaks into other domains we will have a mess on our hands.
That was exactly the sentiment in Australia when similar laws were passed there. Many, many people just said "Good, it's about time Google and Meta paid their fair share of taxes".
But they completely misunderstood they are not taxes at all, it's the Australian government collecting money, by law, to give directly to Rupert Murdoch (by law)
There needs to be a distinction between reference to content and the content itself. When platforms start to profit from other people's work without their consent that shouldn't fly. Google search's primary purpose is to make links discoverable and I don't think anyone ever took offense to that. But in recent years companies have started to deliberately blur that line by showing more content upfront, essentially to turn themselves into a middleman and choke content producers. It's perfectly legitimate to not allow this.
Or after 20 years, non Americans recognize information control should be more nationalized instead of under perview of US companies.
This is Canada but it can easily be any country. We need a fix, big tech has monopolized ad revenue and is choking out the publishers. The quality of newspaper stories has deteriorated over the years and local news has suffered to the point of almost being nonexistent. Also, we now have very few companies that dominate the news. Look at how big the New York times has gotten. It's now the national newspaper in the US. All the other newspapers are nipping at it's ankles. It's a direct result of the fact that other newspapers can't compete without a steady flow of ad revenue. Big tech has sucked all the money which makes it hard for any newspaper to survive, specially regional ones. We need a fix.
I’d happily pay good money for high quality news / journalism presented appropriately for the medium. That means a lot of concise real time information, coupled with long form discussion and debate. All packaged up in a modern, high quality web app, with auxiliary mobile applications.
It wasn't that long ago that Google was forcing AMP onto the same publishers by making it a requirement to appear in the news carousel. That forced a lot of unwanted intrusion into content that wasn't Google's to mess with. Including a forced banner in the most valuable space, hijacking right/left swipes to navigate to competitor publisher sites, etc. They have a strong demonstrated history of doing the wrong thing in this space.
Though, I agree, this law and the outcome aren't the solution.
Many of the biggest tech have origins in US and any country trying to make a law regulating businesses and technology within its borders is bound to impact American companies one way or the other. We can take the easy route and call it just nationalism or we can try to understand the intention/reasons behind the law. We may not agree with their laws but it is their right.
Very unlikely, IMHO. The CRTC isn't in the habit of making decisions that harm large Canadian companies.
"We may not agree with their laws but it is their right"
This statement can be used to justify any law. We are also not debating whether it's their right but if it's a good law.
Spot on. In Canada it's about the handful of the oligarchs who have control over almost everything. It has nothing to do with the average plebs
I don't see how Meta and Google weren't completely predictable, and I don't see how Canadian media benefits from getting shut out. I am so confused.
Mike Masnick's schadenfreude alone could have powered a small nation for a week.
> Last November [2021], Spain overturned the 2014 law and instead signed on to a European Union copyright directive that lets publishers negotiate their agreements directly with platforms.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/06/after-8-years-google-news-...
But realistically this the current Canadian government trying to shake down google and facebook for money to transfer to the ailing news industry in canada. The merits of the position for a link tax are pretty bad, and don’t really matter to the issue at hand. The government already gives hundreds of millions in grants and tax incentives to make the current journalism landscape in canada possible, without even looking at CBC the national broadcaster.
This is just a shake down job. They see google and facebook have a ton of money and the government thought they could threaten them into parting with some of it. The government doesn’t care about the implications of a link tax on the web, or mutually beneficial relationships, or any of that. It’s a shakedown.
I agree; I'd argue you don't have much of a valuable service if all users need is a headline. Print media needs to give up the traditional shallow breadth fueled by advertising and go niche, and go deep. Cable TV should learn this lesson as well.
Then the solution is to modify your `robots.txt` file to prohibit these snippets.
Of course, no-one actually does this because they're well aware that the headlines are what drives attention and clicks.
To paraphrase a great Canadian -- Yes they probably do. And don't call me Shirley.
In hindsight the whole internet bubble looks strange. Nobody cared about monetisation only users!
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree unfortunately.
This is really the icing on the cake for me. Not only are you losing a lot of search traffic, but now those users are going to be directed to international sources so they won't even be looking for you. What a great way to screw over national media.
Probably depends.
In some cases, Google scrapes the interesting bits and people never click through to the host site. In other cases, Google has provided a way for people to circumvent paywalls.
Some of this was a strategy by news organizations - but it seems it might not work long term. I, for one, click through to far fewer Wikipedia articles now that Google includes the synopsis embedded in search results...
I feel like a similar thing was tried in Europe somewhere a few years ago and then quickly ditched, because all the publications saw their traffic crater.
Looks like something similar was enacted in Australia, and Google/Facbook settled: https://www.reuters.com/technology/australia-says-law-making...
And an update from Google's blog from 4 hours ago: https://blog.google/intl/en-ca/company-news/outreach-initiat...
It's like California but on a national level, still not quite as insane thankfully.
Actually, no.
It might be a symbiotic relationship for a small-time blog, but for a major news organization, it isn't. The Toronto Star and Global TV don't need freepub from Google.
One example among many: Most people see the headline – the headline written by a paid headline writer based on an article from a paid journalist on a staff of other professionals with families to feed - and then move on.
Very often a headline is all someone needs or wants. That has value. Without anyone clicking through to the web site, Google is getting the value from the headline, and contributing nothing to the web site in return.
It's like saying that when Google steals content from web sites and presents it as an answer card in search results that the web site somehow gets something out of it. That's completely false. The only one getting anything out of it is Google.
Very often a headline is all someone needs or wants. That has value. Without anyone buying that newspaper, the newspaper stand has got value from the headline, and contributed nothing to the newspaper publisher in return.
The reality is that headlines are advertisements for articles. That's why there are headline writers in the first place. Make a better advertisement, get more sales.
In the case of Google, publishing links with headlines means publishing free ads for that website. The website most certainly benefits from that relationship, if they didn't, they would just use robots.txt to block Google indexing their website, which someone has always been free to do.
The real problem is that newspapers would just like to take a percentage of Google revenue, because they're a big company.
So have those publications opted out of search and Google News? If not, it's pretty clear that they're getting more benefit from those links than they're losing to people "reading the headline and getting all they needed from it".
I assume these news organizations don't even bother writing the article, right? Because your story obviously applies equally well to their own site. Users will open the frontpage of the site, read the expertly crafted headline, and leave.
So the solution Google is proposing works out for everyone. Canadian news sites can ensure people go to their site for headlines and Google can no longer show information for those sites. The Canadian news sites should see increased revenue in terms of subscriptions and advertisements.
News sites could get rid of their <title> and OpenGraph tags, and people could share the raw story URLs without any context. No-one would click through as they'd have no idea where the URL went, though, so news sites provide these titles willingly and have full control over how they write them or what level of detail they share.
The idea that headlines like "Queen Elizabeth has died", "Madonna discharged from hospital", or "Interest rates go up" replace the need for the rest of the story for any substantial part of the target audience seems far fetched to me, and if the meat of the story is given away in the og:description.. they wrote it!
For those unfamiliar, Pablo Rodriguez is the Minister of Canadian Heritage under whose auspices all these censorship and control schemes are being pushed forward.
Ironically, Pablo Rodriguez is the son of an Argentine Peronista (the far-left populism that cripples Argentina to this day). The family fled the country when the war broke out. Pablo was old enough to see first hands what happens when there is no free independent press, and now he's eagerly fostering those same conditions onto Canada.
[1] Source: https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/politica/2023/04/50899...
The scare quotes are actually warranted here. I’d love to see how you can come to fair terms when the other side know that you cannot walk away.
I just opened it on a browser with no ad blocker and scrolled to the bottom. There are no ads in there. It's all news.
So, how does Brazil stop them from withdrawing from Brazil entirely?
Ultimately, this is the wrong approach. The internet should be "open," and people or companies should be free to link to whatever they want without penalty.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech
> Break up the ad-tech sector, open up app stores, end-to-end delivery
I thought they stood for freedom, and now they want to pass laws on how software can work?!
Their literally saying this software code can't be this way, you need to submit a PR to change how it works to match this law. If this isn't the antithesis of freedom I don't know what is.
These news organizations want to have their cake and eat it too. They rely on these platforms for traffic. Now they also want to be paid for getting that traffic. That's not how this works.
Which RFC is that?
I find that a puzzling comment. EFF has a strange way of showing its allegiance to "Big Tech".
What do I not know? How does the EFF demonstrate its allegiance to them?
I took the EFF's work on privacy as an impediment to "Big Tech"'s business model. How am I wrong?
Are you calling the media woke, or are you saying that Conservative leaders are calling the media woke?
This is also a new development in journalism at CBC, older journalists tend to value reporting over opinion pieces, whereas younger journalists feel like it's their "duty" to push their opinion onto the readership which is an extremely toxic ideology.
Your comment, "Top Bell Media executive urged CTV to avoid ‘negative spin’ on coverage of parent company" equally applies to CBC and the current government or leading political party.
The CBC is the only chance left for some sort of even keeled news in Canada.
Otherwise maybe some YouTube personalities might make a showing - I'm sure the farmer into the middle of Alberta will watch that.
https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/fair-re...
https://mediapolicy.ca/2022/11/09/nanos-survey-shows-public-...
"Man Bites Dog" More discussion: CBC, National Post, Toronto Star, CTV, etc.
However, Google doesn't want to pay human beings, they want to "borrow' other people's content to make a profit.
People seem to conflate "indexing your story on our search engine" with "borrowing your headline and photo for our own news site".
There are plenty of web sites that will be happy to take the free traffic and it isn't like it matters to Facebook's bottom line if their mostly elderly users are arguing over some article from Fox News (which supports the journalism cartel bill in the US) or some article from Breitbart (which opposes the journalism cartel bill). I imagine it won't take long for Murdoch to change his mind and stop trying to shake down tech companies for the privilege of sending his media outlets free traffic.
The only options are to accept the rigged negotiation process and pay all news business vastly inflated rates, or to link to none of them.
The problem with this is there's no direct relationship between the two. So Google and Facebook can arbitrarily decide to "punish" a paper by demoting or flat out filtering their content.
These platforms aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. They put this content on their platform because it made their platform more popular and provided value for them, and now that they've monopolized user attention, they're directly weaponizing it.
> There are plenty of web sites that will be happy to take the free traffic
So.. it's a race to the bottom. News sources are no longer selected based upon quality or user demand, but on their willingness to be used by billion dollar tech giants. I'm sure the quality of the reporting will be identical.
My impression is it's something like "news websites provide content that creates engagement which drives ad revenue, and the news websites want a piece of that revenue."
Is my understanding correct? Also, I can see how it applies for Facebook, how does it apply to Google?
The Liberal party is also trying to protect Canadian content (again, not to defend or advocate for this policy), and I'm sure this is part of it, even though it may ironically backfire and end up hurting Canadian news outlets.
Independent of the elections I think social media websites had by this time “perfected” engagement-driven algorithmic feeds and online news had started getting good at optimizing their content for those purposes. And around this time, anecdotally, is when I think a lot of older people started taking the internet more seriously, as real-world services like Airbnb/Uber/Amazon prime (to be fair, started earlier) became popular and middle aged people started using social media more. This, in combination with the polarizing content of the elections, made the internet into the hostile and echo-chambery place it is today. And it also attracted a lot more Government attention leading to things like GDPR (good in theory, bad inasmuch as it led to the current cookie banner bullshit) and link taxes.
Don't they allow to show the contents of those feeds on websites?
And isn't showing the content of the RSS feed "fair use" anyhow?
When I look at the content of the Toronto Star for example:
https://www.thestar.com/content/thestar/feed.RSSManagerServl...
My gut feeling is that showing those short snippets with a link to the articles should be fair use. Am I wrong?
If Google and Meta just generate free traffic for the news site, then I'm not really sure why they're complaining. If their write is straight up reproduced without permission then I understand.
Fair use and copyright are 'artificial' legal constructs, so if they were defined in an 'arbitrary' way to begin with, they can be redefined to add or remove provisions. These online publishing laws could tweak those provisions.
Also: when an RSS/Atom feed is published, it is still copyrighted, and the terms and conditions would/could perhaps be defined what "fair use" is by copyright holder (maybe?).
But what is the situation in Canada now? Did they really put a law into place which says "When you link to a page with a short excerpt to show what the link is about, this is now a copyright violation"?
Wouldn't that also make search engines illegal?
Does anyone know what’s different this time? Is the law different? Is Canada a less valuable market?
Showing news is a net negative for Facebook and probably not very positive for Google. Facebook's short and long term metrics were better without news. Facebook and Google are basically doing charity when they link to local news sites. These laws make absolutely no sense when you think about that.
If this is the primary concern, though, then wouldn't it make more sense to draft a law regulating content caching, rather than the pay-per-click approach? It seems like a law that said "Sites that serve any content which wasn't part of a 'you can cache me' section need to pay for that content" would address the concerns of both parties here.
This would solve the alleged issue that news organizations are bringing up, while also making it totally clear what the consequences are. If you don't want Google to be able to use your content within search results that's totally fine, but you can't then also be mad that they don't surface your content in search results.
Seems like letting news site determine what content Google can cache for its results, and then letting Google determine ranking based only on that data would be a completely reasonable compromise. As it stands now, though, Google is directly incentivized to just never surface these websites, which hurts everyone involved.
Because you can't have your cake and eat it too. If Google can't cache the whole article, they can't provide search for the article. That's why publishers are serving the full, unpaywalled article to Google: how do you index an article you can't cache? The publishers—today—can simply serve the paywalled versions to Google.
The publishers want Google to keep a copy of their data to offer search services to Google's customers, but then want Google to pay for the privilege.
Bill C-18 changes the rules for linking by requiring two companies, including Google, to pay Canadian news publishers simply for linking to their sites.
Was it just linking? Or was it providing a useful summary that essentially renders no need to click the provided link? + the link
Otherwise I can see why Google and Meta got the law, while Reddit, Apple news and others don't.
That's an odd sentence. Shouldn't it just say "From the government"? Seems weirdly leading to point that it out as "because of the liberal government". I dunno, I don't read much news.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_of_Canada
So the (capital-l) Liberals are currently running the government. So Liberal government.
There is also the capital-c Conservatives:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Party_of_Canada
But fair is fair. If publishers want to force social media to pay for news content. Social Media has every right to refuse to pay and refuse to redistribute.
The way i see it, it's a clear case of "we tried nothing and we're out of ideas" on BOTH sides. The canadian medias are boring and are mostly opinions and a few Reuters/AFP articles. On the other hand, GOOG and Meta are not even acknowledging that they're trying to bully nations around while providing a slowly worse service as time goes by and profiteering from work they acquire for free. I do understand that people weren't forced to use this service in the past and can (with some level of difficulties) remove their content.
It's not as clear an issue some would like it to be. I know that I will remove myself of both these services in the future as they are hostile (and really, i should move to my own domain for lots of reasons).
Most news outlets have rss feeds
The category of each individual item doesn't help filtering, most of them are just labeled News/Canada/Toronto.
I love RSS but I don't find these news company feeds compelling. They just pump out too much junk to fill the void of real news.
However I would definitely click through links to their site when searching for news about specific events. But they have shot themselves in the foot. Now I am just going to be directed to US sources instead.
Problem with this model is that it's too simplistic. Big tech doesn't sell news. They sell ads. In fact, the main reason why news companies are ailing today is because big tech siphons off much of the ad revenue that they would have sold directly before the Internet. Google or Facebook can take the 5% that news companies might ask for and just... deduct it from their ad revenue somehow. They control the analytics behind this and news companies are in no position to credibly question them. The only way to stop this madness is to ban economic centralization - i.e. enforce antitrust law by breaking up all these companies and forcing them to be sold to different competing owners.
Governments, of course, don't want to do that. This is not because they've suddenly become right-libertarians or ancaps. This is because large monopolies are both legible and corrigible[2]. Google, Facebook, or Reddit is far more likely to pay a 5% link tax than, say, hundreds of individual Fediverse instance operators. This is, of course, a regulatory curse - the bigger you make the organization, the more likely that organization can exert power back upon your government. This is not solely the function of generalized abstract "corruption." Economic power is itself a form of political power and letting companies grow too big is like Congress delegating legislative power to the President.
[0] Legible meaning that the organization can understand it at an institutional level.
[1] As in, if all you have is copyright, everything looks like a nail.
[2] Corrigible meaning that the organization is capable of maintaining regulatory controls over the target organization.
But since I'm in Canada, I suppose I'll go back to RSS or maybe AP news.
- Your revenue goes up, because people are now visiting your website and giving you ad hits instead of just seeing a blurb on Facebook.
- Your revenue goes down, because nobody cares about news unless it's dropped in their feed, and the few page views you were getting are now gone. Not to worry, you can strike a deal with Facebook and Google for them to reinstate your links for $0.
The secret third option is that your revenue goes down, you go to Facebook and Google to ask them to show your links again, and they ask you to pay them for the privilege of having your links shown.
Diclaimer: I have not yet read the bill.
Edit: After reading the bill, it looks like if Google links to any news at all in Canada, it has to participate in the bargaining and arbitration process, so their only winning move is not to play. Looks like Option B won't work unless all of the news outlets decide on it together.
That option does not exist in practice.
The companies cannot strike a deal with just one publication and not others. After having made one deal, even at $0, the other publications will just be able to name their price, because the law sets up forced arbitration with parameters that basically tell the arbitrators to give the publication what they want.
The fact that this is being lead by the Minister of Heritage should tell you how little this has to do with actual business and technology justifications.
I see why this "works" now. The effect is censorship and silencing of disfavoured outlets with the pretense of deniability. This country is a lost cause.
... "if the internet platforms drop all Canadian media as a result of this law, it demonetizes all Canadian media, and then the only Canadian media that survives is what is directly subsidized by the government at its discretion."
Does Canadian media have no other revenue stream other than the Internet?
I won't miss google news. And I never saw any real value in facebook.
So, my response to this, as a Canadian, is "who cares, eh?"
Probably hyperbole, but catastrophic failure of our economy/institutions/society isn't something I would choose to experience.
This nihilistic attitude is dangerous, IMHO. In the extreme, it is a self-fulfilling approach with severe consequences.
Seems like we should be able to do better than that as a society.
I honestly figured it would not even help the big sites - users would have to start deliberately going to those sites directly without first arriving there through an aggregator/search. Apparently that’s incorrect for major news organizations though still true for smaller ones (which I guess have not enough brand awareness for users to directly go to the site). I guess as it long as link taxes appear beneficial for major news organizations that can afford to lobby for them, we can sadly expect this to happen in more and more countries.
IANAL but I understand that most Anglosphere countries outside the US have very different interpretations/not as strong guarantees of freedom of expression as in the US and some other Western countries. In countries with stronger protections I can’t imagine a link tax having legs. Given that a link itself is not IP/content (I think), what would be the legal basis for displaying it on a website requiring compensation to the linked site? Though I suppose there is some precedent for requiring link removal from eg Google through DMCA, it seems different because in that case it’s driving traffic to “stolen” content.
If you're not on Google, you don't exist to 99% of the world.
I expect their readership to fall at least 50% overnight.
This seems like an incredible self-own. News aggregators drive traffic and relavence. If anything news sites were getting the better end of the bargin
Luckily the beaverton is unaffected: https://www.thebeaverton.com/2023/06/editorial-with-news-blo...
Also, I have to believe that some of these outlets will go under without social media traffic. You can get Canadian wire service content from any US website that decides to publish it.
If it wasn’t Canadian outlet favouring, a generalized form of this bill would be like saying, aggregate feeds shouldn’t aggregate their competitor aggregate feeds for free.
I guess this could potentially make the ecosystem less organized around a few big sharing platforms, but I don’t feel like this helps a lot of the smaller outlets. It feels like it maybe just works for the big ones who already have a lot of mind share and can worry less about being linked to in a feed.
Google and Facebook (along with other social media sites) are the primary method by which news orgs have their individual articles percolate through the population. This law cuts that exposure off at the knees, and by proxy, any revenue gained from having readers pulled into these articles.
Most people don’t go directly to a news org website to read news. I don’t. No-one I know does. We just see interesting articles as they pop up in our social media.
this might also be a leeway for charging the same cost to social media sites. might this be an insidious form of censorship?
given the canadian government's strong ties to its government-funded media, this sounds like it could be concerning.