I’m not surprised of their reaction to the new law C-18, but I’m pretty worried of its impact on the information reaching citizens and democracy.

  •  jarfil   ( @jarfil@beehaw.org ) 
    3•1 year ago

    This has happened before. Several countries in Europe introduced similar laws, which played out like this:

    • News sites cried foul for letting Google “profit” from “their work”
    • <Country> passed law to force Google (and everyone else) to pay
    • Google de-listed all news sites from <country>
    • News sites suddenly realized that most of their visits were coming from Google and other news aggregators, so cried foul because their ad revenue would plummet
    • Law in <country> got reversed
    • Google re-listed news sites from <country>

    At this point it’s kind of “charming” that news sites in ANY country would not learn from other countries’ examples. Google has it down to a standard procedure at this point.