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.
More proof Google and META are anti-democratic
More like more proof the Canadian government isn’t living in reality
Huh? People bellyache that the government does nothing to hold these greedy democracy busting tech-bro individuals/companies to account, and then they also bellyache when they DO hold them to account. What’s up with that? 😆
What ethical search engine would you recommend instead? Is DuckDuckGo still the way to go?
A vote for DuckDuckGo + Firefox here and DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials/Adblock Plus
AdBlock plus hasn’t been very good for a long time. uBlock Origin is so much better.
I’ll have a look. Thank you 🖖🏻
DuckDuckGo’s pretty good for non-news / politics / current events searches, but if you search any of those three things all your top results are going to be right-leaning to far-right “news” sites. Freaking RT is pretty consistently one of the top results I get!
But for any other searches, it’s pretty decent.
Personally switching to Kagi. It’s paid, but it lets me block or boost certain domains in my personal search results.
I’m trying Bing. Seems pretty good. Not anti corporate but it’s not google.
Ghostery is pretty good
It’s going to be pretty significant. I’m sure the vacuum will be filled by American and international news, but that’s terrible for democracy.
Yeah. Just goes to show what a terrible bill it is - having the opposite of it’s intended effect.
Not so fast. This law is asinine. The gist is everyone would have to pay the Canadian news sites for a link to their websites. Like the owner of this instance would need to pay cbc.ca for the link in this post. This isn’t going to work.
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.
Its very similar to the law passed in australia, and facebook and google ended up caving. So it ended up working, mostly
I think the law here is trying to get the same result. However I agree with you OP, Im not sure how successful it will be, especially if the result is more vulnerable canadians being directed toward unreliable, unverified sites, misinformation, etc…
I think there might have been better ways to boost trustworthy Canadian news
A ham-fisted regulation with clearly foreseeable repercussions. The problem which they are trying to address is real, the declining funding of real news, in Canada and the US. This stupid bill was not the right way to do that though.
