Canadians no longer able to share or view news articles and other content by publishers and broadcasters, including international outlets. Online News Act requires tech giants to compensate Canadian news outlets for content shared on their platforms.
The problem is that what Facebook does is harmful to society because it is using economic power to destroy a public good—journalism.
Sure, Facebook can do it. Should they be allowed to? Fuck no.
How is it destroying a public good?
The public good is being destroyed by themselves. They’ve been acquired and are running 90% AP Wire service pieces. My local news in a top 10 CMA area is basically nothing but opinion pieces.
Our news has been declining for years as people have moved away from a subscription model. People don’t wake up on Saturday morning and read a paper cover to cover anymore and they have failed to adapt.
It’s like you’re saying, to a man who has been gut shot, “you should just adapt more. “ — There’s no route for them to adapt. Corruption in small and big cities is growing, and there is no one to shed light on it.
So what you’re saying is there is no model besides complete subsidy for news to exist?
It would be impossible for them to you know build a subscription model where you get access to all of their news sites for one fee? Kinda like credit unions do with their ATM networks.
Perhaps offering better value to consumers and incentivize upsells rather than demote them. As someone who had a paper version of the economist they tried /real/ hard to convert me to digital only. Which is a far worse value proposition.
Facebook isn’t destroying journalism. All those news links have been shared and posted on Facebook, driving traffic to those news websites. Now the Canadian government passed a law that is hurting the traffic to those news websites.
The law is BS, no argument there. But Facebook and Google are absolutely destroying news. They’re each operating a rigged market where they are both the broker and the seller. They eat into everyone’s profits to make themselves fabulously rich. The only reason news outlets play the game is because not doing so would be even worse.
Imo the only solution is to regulate the ad markets that they’re both running. Not this dumb link tax.