Facebook warns it could block news in Canada over proposed legislation | Hacker News Reader

Facebook warns it could block news in Canada over proposed legislation

theverge.com

27 pointsTomte28 comments

> …Facebook parent company Meta says Canada’s proposed Online News Act falsely presumes that it “unfairly benefits from its relationship with publishers.”

Great, I hope the Online News Act passes and this is tested. Facebook built a for-profit Skinner box on the backs of commercial and user-generated content that they paid virtually nothing for, and now they're simultaneously threatening countries over proposed legislation while telling news organizations that "most people do not come to Facebook for news"¹.

¹ https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/28/23283078/meta-facebook-ne...

You want to have to pay the owner to be able to have a link and snippet to any publicly visible webpage?

Wouldn't this be a disaster for the Internet Archive?

> You want to have to pay the owner to be able to have a link and snippet to any publicly visible webpage?

I want Facebook to pay for building a predatory and privacy-eroding monetization machine around access and engagement related to that link and snippet.

> Wouldn't this be a disaster for the Internet Archive?

How to avoid splash damage should be seriously considered, for sure. It's worth noting that Internet Archive is in a much different position as a non-commercial entity that hosts content.

It sounds like you essentially want to pick favorites based on your feelings about the company's virtues.

Either you can have a link, a basic right of the internet, and a small snippet, something covered under fair use for all of copyright's history, or you can't. The second is the beginning of the end of fair use.

Internet Archive is not a snippet, it is the whole cloth. The whole point of the Internet Archive is to have an archive of the internet as it was and is.

Fair use is inherently about picking favorites based on how something is used, for what purpose, and what impact that use has on the original source. A fairly big argument in favor that the Internet Archive falls under fair use is that the Internet Archive do not commercially compete with the original work. Can Facebook make the same argument?

Facebook is free to make their own internet archive that is a mirror of the internet. That is to say, they are free to make a copy of the internet as it is without adding anything, without collecting any user information, without serving any advertisements, and without any user generated content. I do not know why Facebook as a for-profit company would do so, but in term of copyright they should be allowed to do so.

This isn't a "feelings" argument but an argument against monopolistic, rent-seeking behavior.

But I don't see how charging a link tax is supposed to fight "monopolistic, rent-seeking behavior". It's not going to make it easier for another social media upstart to enter the market, so I don't see how it's supposed to stop "monopolistic behavior". Insofar as whatever "rent-seeking behavior" facebook is engaging in (mind elaborating on that?), I don't see how giving rent collection authority to a particular industry fixes that. At best it allows more rent seekers to collect money from the original rent seeker.

> "the Online News Act compels online platforms like Facebook and Google to share revenue with the publishers they aggregate their news from"

Does internet archive aggregate news? Does it have revenue from that aggregation?

Once news outlets establish that they can squeeze money out of the entities that send anyone to their websites in the first place and shift the window to their crazy world view, it's not a stretch that they'll start whining about deserving money from the Internet Archive et al too.

This shit is way more nuanced than news good facebook bad. This is news organizations who bet the farm on social media as distribution platforms not realizing that it completely devalues them and then making a big fuss that somehow search engines and social media platforms should pay to allow their users to link to news sites as if that makes any sense at all.

These are the gasps of a dying industry trying to have their cake and eat it too. I would ban links to news sites entirely if this passed too. News orgs realizing that individuals don’t pay for news are just reaching for anyone with deep pockets.

They didn’t bet the farm on social media, they crawled onto it like rats onto a… floating thing, or however the hell that metaphor goes.

Social media set their business models on fire and then the rats swam from over here to over there, squeaky-like

> This is news organizations who bet the farm on social media as distribution platforms not realizing ...

which news agency in Canada did this?

Don't they all have their own sites?

https://www.cbc.ca https://nationalpost.com https://www.thestar.com

Some do use facebook's "comments" function, but even that is not a universal lock.

I believe that it’s actually the news organizations that are benefiting more from Google and Facebook then the other way around.

Both should block all news from their platforms until laws are passed requiring news publishers to fairly compensate Google and Facebook distributing their content.

Because everyone reads news, but ad blockers skew those numbers, the rate can instead be based on total population and adjusted yearly by either census or projected population change.

> Facebook built a for-profit Skinner box on the backs of commercial and user-generated content

Like reddit, youtube, tiktok twitter, google any many more?

Anyway, if I was big tech, I would just ban all domains from those publishers who demand part of my revenue and watch them quickly die.

Oh no!

Anyway…

News and especially politics are banned topic in many social circles. I think Facebook has simply illustrated in grand fashion why this was the case. Leaving the garden was hard, but good for the Eloi, which we are slowly turning into.

What is the issue exactly?

People use google and Facebook to discover news sources, and google/Facebook curates those news sources via some algorithms and decides who to promote.

On google, you only get the headline it looks like. On Facebook, do you get to read the story without visiting the site?

I understand if they want control over how discoverability works, because that is a huge amount of centralization… but as an indie game designer and writer, discoverability is just super hard these days. It seems like the news is using social media for discoverability and… wants to be paid for it?

I think I’m missing something big because I don’t understand the revenue sharing argument

This doesn’t solve the issue with centralization either

I wish it could be as simple as FB sharing ad revenue with the news site.

On YouTube 55% of ad revenue goes to the creator. In their new YouTube shorts revenue share model, the record companies get a cut based on how many videos use copyrighted music, along with Google and video creators.

It’d be nice if we got wealthy Canadian reporting agencies similar to wealthy YouTubers via a FB ad revenue sharing partnership program.

That would be a big win for Canada

Meta: It’s only 3% of posts, it’s not a draw for our users, and it’s a trivial portion of our revenue. We may just shut it down.

Also Meta: Please please please please don’t pass this law.

I don’t know how anyone can take this company seriously.

I don't see how the points you stated are contradictory. Suppose you have a side gig that makes up 3% of your yearly income (eg. if you make $200k/yr, that works out to $6k/yr), and the HOA wants to shut you down. Sure, it's not your main job and is a trivial portion of your overall revenue and shutting it down is certainly an option, but you'd be pretty pissed that you're getting shut down and you'll probably show up to the next HOA meeting to stop that ban from getting passed.

Ha. This would be like going to that HOA and telling them all about how little you care. Just stop lying and admit you care.

There seems to be a provision in the bill which would not only impact the 3% but also the other 97%. IANAL

Under that logic, Facebook's position would make the most sense.

Plus, the words undue and unjust are all over the place and Canada is all over the map on that one.

I mean it’s not that crazy to not want to have to suddenly implement link filters to every news site in existence.

Facebook already has this info, and every news source is already filtered on a per-user basis. This is how Facebook is able to shake down news providers (and other companies, fan pages, etc.) for additional revenue by effectively forcing them "boost" placement.

interesting, considering FB stated stances re piracy

Can you elaborate? Is it like piracy because of story previews?

when someone has an expectation to be paid, for an authored story, in whole or, in part [regardless of validity] someone that re authours or disseminates that material, gains from it and refuses to pay anything from, they usually get more than DMCA takedown, are labeled pirate and taken to court.

FB has made numerous statements against piracy, but seems, at face value to be doing that, with news media, providing no prior standing agreement exists between them.

> when someone has an expectation to be paid, for an authored story, in whole or, in part [regardless of validity] someone that re authours or disseminates that material, gains from it and refuses to pay anything from, they usually get more than DMCA takedown, are labeled pirate and taken to court.

Your framing of this (specifically. "re authours or disseminates that material") glosses over the difference between what actually happens when you "pirate" something vs when you link something. In the former case, you're reproducing it verbatim or using it to produce derivative work, whereas in the latter you're merely referencing it. I don't see why you should owe the original author anything for merely referencing the work.

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