• Lol, what do they expect to be done about this? Is the government supposed to force Facebook to show their content, yet also pay to do it? I hate Facebook but I’m so glad they’re doing this because link taxes are fucking stupid.

    •  312   ( @312@lemm.ee ) 
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      81 year ago

      Yeah, I am not Canadian so I’m sure there’s some information/nuance I don’t understand here, but from what I can tell from looking at a few articles from different sources:

      • Canadian government passes a law that would require Facebook to pay and/or share ad revenue for every link out (posted by the media outlet, not by Facebook) to an external news website

      • Facebook says they don’t want to do that, and will stop showing news links to comply with the law

      • Canadian government says “no not like that” and now wants to force them to allow links to news outlets, which de facto forces them to pay/share revenue with those media outlets

      Like I said, I’m assuming there may be something I’m missing here, so please any kind Canadians who can help fill in the blanks would be appreciated

      • It’s not the government that wants to force them, it’s the media outlets that lobbied for this law in the first place that are trying to claw back a win after they called a bluff and lost.

        Yes, the government is also upset about the outcome despite being warned about it beforehand, but they know that Facebook hasn’t broken any laws.

    • I don’t like the idea of link taxes myself.

      But even setting aside the question of whether link taxes are a good idea, I don’t understand why they’re making a – what to me sounds dubious – antitrust argument. It seems like a simply bizarre angle.

      If the Canadian government wants news aggregators to pay a percentage of income to news companies, I would assume that they can just tax news aggregators – not per link to Canadian news source, but for operating in a market at all – take the money and then subsidize Canadian news sources. It may or may not be a good idea economically, but it seems like it’d be on considerably firmer footing than trying to use antitrust law to bludgeon news aggregators into taking actions that would trigger a link tax by aggregating Canadian news sources.