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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

> Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, blocked news from its apps in Canada in 2023 after a new law required the social media giant to pay Canadian news publishers a tax for publishing their content. The ban applies to all news outlets irrespective of origin, including The New York Times.

> Paying publishers would most likely cost Meta, which generated $164.5 billion in revenue last year, 62 million Canadian dollars a year, or about $44 million.

Banning news was likely an economic decision. The amount they would have to pay publishers and the costs associated with payment outweighed the benefits of having news on the platform. So Meta responded accordingly based on a law that would make them pay publishers.

I think it says more about the Canadian law-makers and publishers that pushed for this law than it does about Meta, AI generated content, and fake news. Who benefits from this law? Seems like everyone is worse off.

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I think it also sets a precedent. All the news publishers who lobbied for the bill expected it to be an easy payday, and now they lost one of their largest platforms.

If you run a similar Facebook-adjacent company, you’ll think twice before trying to squeeze any money from them.

Note that Google decided to pay $100M per annum because of this law. So it seems lawmakers successfully chose close to the maximal amount. Much higher and Facebook's example indicates that Google would likely have not paid. Much lower and even both paying would have been less than $100M p.a.

In other words, it sounds like the subgoal of "subsidize the news" is partially being reached.

The open question is whether "subsidize the news" is sufficient for society's real goal, "trustworthy news".

The two aren't really comparable. Google runs a news service, and shows ads on that service. Google News isn't a feasible business without crawling and aggregating the content that media organizations provide, so signing deals with them (whether forced or not) makes sense.

Facebook meanwhile would have to pay publishers for news links that you and I post on our feeds. That is much closer to a shakedown, and the service can work just fine (better, one may argue) without this category of links. So regardless of the dollar amount saying no is the better option for them.

IIRC Facebook would have had to pay for links posted by the media companies themselves too. It was ridiculous and poorly thought out law.

Plus it's probably nice to not have the journalism get in the way of all the made up garbage that people share instead.

> Paying publishers would most likely cost Meta, which generated $164.5 billion in revenue last year, 62 million Canadian dollars a year, or about $44 million.

What a deceptive sentence. First it quotes worldwide numbers instead of only the Canadian share, and then uses revenue instead of profit.

Of course. This is written by the New York Times lamenting that meta doesn’t pay them the infinitesimal millions it wants.

Why deceptive? It shows how much their revenue was compared to how much they’d have to pay. No judgement, no misleads. Only facts. Anyone who reads can immediately have an idea of their financial strength. How does using profit help as opposed to revenue? And it’s not like FB can only use Canada’s profit to pay for expenses there.

Did you channel your own bias?

> It shows how much their revenue was compared to how much they’d have to pay.

I bought an oil tanker for $100,000,000, and sold it for $100,020,000. My revenue was $100,020,000, so an extra tax of $400,000 should be no problem for me, right?

It's billions in revenue vs millions in extra expense. There's the real deception.

Even their net income was over 60 billions.

Looks like Meta studied their game theory and the news outlets didn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainstore_paradox

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