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What I'm hearing is that meta/google are threatening the government through public opinion on a piece of legislation that doesn't benefit them... How could anybody side with meta/google?

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I’m on Google/meta’s side because link taxes are a bad idea for the internet as a whole. That anyone (even Meta, who I generally dislike) should have to pay to link to a news article is morally offensive to me.

I've skimmed the legislation multiple times, and the only thing close to a "link tax" is the theoretical ability of the government to create one if that's what's deemed fair.

I've yet to see anything that explains how a negatiations framework translates to a "link tax", but explaining it wasn't Google's goal when it coined the term to fight the bill.

Because one of the things the negotiating framework covers is how much money google and meta must pay to news providers when news content is “made available” to canadians, and “made available” specifically includes when “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 if the negotiated value is anything over $0 then, yeah, it’s a “link tax”.

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