Both Meta and Google have said they would remove Canadian news from their platforms to avoid having to compensate the news outlets.
What a time to be alive! Could 2023 see the end of corporately owned social media platforms? We can only hope!
They’re doing a good job at killing their own platforms. Let’s hope so!
I’ve been waiting for this since Google released AMP! They had no business doing it in the first place.
Is there a good de-amp link extension for Firefox?
Yeah, https://duckduckgo.com
As much as I like to use duckduckgo, it’s still lacking when searching relevant stuff. But Google is annoying with it’s link redirect thing.
You can use bangs on ddg to use other search engines through duckduckgo. So !g <search terms> would do a google search.
Ohhh, thanks that’s gonna be my goto now.
People always say DDG search isn’t good but I never have any trouble. Can you give me an example?
I can’t give you one right away but usually when I switch to ddg as default, looking for examples say coding/stack exchange, or specific trobule shooting usually google’s result list is better.
If you are really specific terms and there are only a couple available, then there is less difference.
Ddg would have improved so we can’t really compare then and now.
Honestly, I switched to ddg as soon as Google rolled out amp, and found that it was better than google at finding relevant results
What if Canada became the first country to run it’s own Federation?
Hear me out. There would be different pages for federal, provincial, municipal, news, but also ones for local events and hobbies. The big draw to Facebook was that you could reads news and see what your friends and neighbours had to say about it. I think that’s a big part of what’s missing with individual news stations.
Of course, we would have to put serious limiters on government input on the sites to make sure that we keep free speech. I don’t even mean that in the sense of “I want to say hateful things!” but in the sense that I don’t want heavy restrictions on the news that I see, especially not by any one political group. (Looking at you, elections time).
If Canada runs their own Federation separate from this one, they could still run ads to support the journalists.
There has to be a happy medium between “good luck finding news if you don’t want to use a slow, buggy website” and “most of the profits go out of the country”. There HAS to be.
Yes there does! Having bought subscriptions to a few of my favourite news sites, I’m struck by how much worse the experience is than something like google news. I’ll need to figure out something, because I only just want news, not a digital version of the newspaper and i certainly don’t want another 100 MB app.
Aggregation is a killer feature for news, and providers need to figure out how to make it work without a tech company eating their lunch. Either through activitypub or something else, but hopefully a public standard of some sort so they aren’t beholden to a corporation.
The unix greybeard method would be to use RSS and Baysean scoring of articles. A competent emacs user can whip up their own solution in an afternoon.
As a Unix greybeard I haven’t had time for that in decades!
Of course, we would have to put serious limiters on government input on the sites to make sure that we keep free speech. I don’t even mean that in the sense of “I want to say hateful things!” but in the sense that I don’t want heavy restrictions on the news that I see, especially not by any one political group. (Looking at you, elections time).
You could set up a crown corporation similar to the CBC where it’s given a mandate to do the things you want but has some amount of separation from government control, outside of funding.
This is frigging excellent!
Probably the only good thing to come out of the bill.
I don’t think Meta or Google are great companies but this is just greed by the news companies. They obviously benefit from these incoming links or they would just disable indexing via robots.txt. If they really think they should get more compensation they could have negotiated with Meta and Google directly. But they know that their requests are dumb so they instead lobbied the government for special rules.
Of course this is the exact same thing that happened in Australia. The news companies need Google and Meta way more than G&M need them. So they just blocked these links and the news companies cried uncle.
The news companies tried to sign deals with Google and Meta. Google and Meta yawned and ignored them. The Australian government brought in their laws. Google and Meta tried blockading. The Australian government yawned and ignored them. Google and Meta now have signed remuneration agreements in place with over 200 news outlets in Australia. Australia still has its News Media Bargaining Code in place in law.
I hope Canada cries uncle the way Australia did!
Yes, the blocking in Australia was part of the negotiation as it is here in Canada. In the end the Australian news companies did have to negotiate, they did not get to demand whatever income they want like many people here seem to suggest and want.
Google & Meta send their money to the shareholders in NYC that own 85% of Australian media, not to the journalists in Australia. Simlilarly Bill C-18 will be a windfall for a little NJ company.
Of course this is the exact same thing that happened in Australia.
You need to explain that.
