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Meta won’t negotiate with publishers, will end Facebook news in Canada - ArsTechnica
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Strongly agreed. I think a lot of commenters in this thread are getting derailed by their feelings towards Meta. This is truly a dumb, dumb law and it's extremely embarrassing that it even passed.
It's not just Meta. No company wants to comply with this poorly thought out law, written by people who apparently have no idea how the internet works.
I think most of the people in the comments cheering this on haven't read the bill. It requires them to pay news sites to link to the news site. Which is utterly insane. Linking to news sites is a win win. It means Facebook or Google gets to show relevant content and the news site gets users. This bill is going to hurt Canadian news sites because sites like Google and Facebook will avoid linking to them.
I don't disagree.
But where I see a small nugget of good intent in this law is in the fact that I'd be willing to wager a very large percentage of people read the blurb on Facebook, which summarizes the entire story, and never click over to the actual article, thereby robbing the news site of ad revenue.
This isn't (supposed to) be about paying to post links. It's about paying to summarize their content so that users don't have to leave Facebook.
Right. It’s like if I stand at a street corner telling people to try out a local restaurant. And then the local restaurant says that I should be charged to recommend them. It makes no sense.
I hate Meta, but this is just a dumb law.
It's worse.
The preview Facebook or whoever is providing is the content the site literally explicitly provided for the purpose of linking to their website. It's like the restaurant gave you a stack of flyers then tried to charge you for handing them out.
Is it actually a provided preview, or a preview they are generating.
I know part of the legit problem is when a website summarizes something and then people don't click on the link, which reduces ad revenue.
But maybe there's a provided summary (which should be fine) and the other way it gets summarized (which could arguably be deemed bad)
But making them pay to just link with is batshit insane.
They'll do a really empty stub I think, but all the fancy previews are tags sites add that are basically "when you link to me, could you show me like this?"
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/what-is-open-graph-and-how-can-i-use-it-for-my-website/
Ya, if the news organizations are using open graph and that's all Google and Facebook and whoever are using that's stupid.
Show our preview so people will click the link! OH NO our preview is too good and people aren't clicking the link! Government make them pay us!
This will essentially break Google News and the like in Canada. It's idiotic in so many ways.