•  CoderKat   ( @CoderKat@lemm.ee ) 
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    391 year ago

    Honestly, I don’t know what the lawmakers expected. The bill is dumb. It’d be perfectly fine to require payment for copying a substantial amount of a new article (eg, if they want to prevent google from offering a public cache that gets around paywalls). But the bill outright requires paying to link to Canadian news sites in search results. That’s outright madness.

    Y’all can hate google and meta all you want. That’s totally fine. I encourage you to use competing search engines (it’s bad that Google has a near monopoly). But this bill is a bad bill.

    The folks on this site might know about alternatives, but the average person doesn’t. When the average person can’t find Canadian news sites on Google, they’re not going to switch to duck duck go or whatever. They’re going to just use a non Canadian site. This bill is going to hurt Canadian news companies and it’s disappointing to see people cheering it on because you’re happier to see Google and meta hurt than you are sorry to see Canadian news sites hurt…

    • yeah the scraping content is the issue, not the linking. So this bill is pretty stupidly formed. They can simple require google/meta only provide line, title and max 250 letters abstract/trimmed first paragraph(excluding space and punctuation.)

      They(Canadian medias) want the traffic to their site so they can display sponsor ads or sell subscriptions.

      • I believe the meta data of the links are scrapped from the meta tags in the header of the site. The info you see before clicking a link was configured by the host for that purpose.

    • Exactly. I’m not sure what lawmakers were expecting. Don’t Canadian news sites make money off of ads and traffic to their site? Why would they require special treatment and compensation for merely linking to their news sites and articles?