TechDirt’s Mike Masnick gets it exactly right in covering Canada’s C-18 bill:
If you believe in the open web, if you believe that you should never have to pay to link to something, if you believe that no one should have to pay to provide you a benefit, then you should support Meta’s stance here. Yes, it’s self-serving for Meta. Of course it is. But, even if it’s by accident, or a side-effect, it’s helping to defend the open web, against a ridiculous attack from an astoundingly ignorant and foolish set of Canadian politicians.
And just generally points out the huge holes in Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez understanding from the Power & Politics Interview.
I have seen worse behaviour and bias from corporate media than independent. I think we perhaps have very different pictures of what this means.
My 20 years of seeing people denigrated as “bloggers” while opinion columnists are platformed and not held accountable hasn’t made me feel good about the information coming from corporate media.
And yeah we’re in a tough spot. We need much better discussion tools. I don’t think the CRTC is the right entity to do a good job here.
The CRTC is never the right entity. But since there’s no other entity that can do this kind of thing, they end up with the job.
Yeah the prominence of opinion is a problem everywhere. But just filter out that stuff. But I find when I do that there’s some articles left on mainstream sites. When I do the same for indy sites, there’s basically nothing there.
Journalism costs money. There’s only enough money there for there to be just a few businesses to have actual journalism. Those sites will inevitably be labelled as mainstream an biased by alternative sites.
I’ve yet to see any alternative to mainstream media that isn’t just political activism that’s making on like it’s news.