The idea of a link-tax rears its ugly head again in Canada - France and Australia being used as examples

[Delicieuxz]

Those who use media content should pay 'fair share’: heritage minister

Quote

Speaking to participants at this year’s Banff World Media Festival, Guilbeault said he has been monitoring developments in France and Australia, both of which are on track to roll out rules requiring online giants that aggregate news feeds to pay media organizations whose content they feature.

 

While he stopped short of describing what such a model might look like in Canada, and whether new legislation would be required, Guilbeault said he is looking at France’s use of “neighbouring rights,” which traditionally govern the use of copyrighted material in the music business.

 

“I think that those who benefit from the media content of our news and information agencies in Canada should be paying their fair share,” the heritage minister said during his 45-minute talk.

 

“If they are making money out of this, then there should be a system where part of that money goes to people who create it.”

 

Pay to Link?: Canadian Heritage Minister Guilbeault Backs Bringing the Link Tax to Canada

Quote

This payment – effectively a tax on linking – raises a host of concerns, not the least of which is that the proposal was not recommended by the government’s own copyright review last year. Copyright reform in Canada is always complicated, particularly given that responsibility for it is shared with Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains, but delving into reforms that sparked protests in Europe could be politically risky for a minority government.

 

News organizations already benefit from large platforms linking to their content since the links generate visitors that increase advertising revenues and paying subscribers. Organizations that do not want the links can easily opt-out of appearing in services such as Google News or Facebook. In fact, after Google shut down its Google News service in Spain, studies found publisher website traffic dropped by 10 per cent.

 

...

 

These incidents suggest that a Canadian link tax could lead to the removal of Canadian news from internet platforms, leading to less Canadian content and reduced traffic and revenues for Canadian news organizations.

 

Moreover, given that the plan effectively targets U.S. companies, the link tax would also raise the prospect of retaliatory tariffs under the new Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade agreement. Those tariffs can be levied on any sector, enabling the U.S. to target sensitive industries such as dairy, lumber, or steel.

 

Mr. Guilbeault found himself backtracking earlier this year when he expressed support for regulating the content of online news services. But his shift away from his own government’s policies on news media support and his plan to tax links to news stories signals that the tax and regulate-first approach is still a big part of his plan.

 

 

I heard of the news from a newsletter by digital rights group Open Media. I couldn't find any further information about what they're planning to do to oppose the idea once again.

Quote

Last year, we told Parliament that the Netflix Tax was a terrible idea, and the committee agreed with us.
 

But now the Netflix Tax is back from the dead. Lobbyists for big media corporations have slipped the tax into an upcoming new version of Canada's Broadcasting Act. And worse, they also inserted the EU’s terrible Link Tax, putting a charge on sharing hyperlinks containing news content.
 

The Link Tax would decimate free-to-use websites like Reddit that depend on sharing content, and the Netflix Tax would crush innovative new streaming services. These are two of the most destructive threats to Internet freedom that we’ve seen in a long time.
 

Under the proposals in the new Canadian Broadcasting Act, websites like Facebook would be forced to pay a tax just to link to news content—a cost that would be passed on to us.

 

Worse, this cost would be more than many websites like Reddit could bear, forcing them to shut down, just to benefit corporate publishers trying to protect their bottom lines and outdated business models.

 

Meanwhile, the Netflix Tax tries to do the same--instead of finding new funding models for media companies based on new technology advances, the tax would charge Internet companies for streaming data—a cost that would be passed on to the customer and throttle startup, innovative competitors that could be the next YouTube or Netflix.

 

When the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review was released, the Link Tax and Netflix tax were nowhere to be found. But now corporate lobbyists are trying to slip these in and get them passed while we’re caught up in pandemic news.

 

I think that it's not enough to just have really bad ideas simply not talked about or looked-at. The policies and values which preclude their entry into society need to exist so that they can't keep returning until some government that's unscrupulous enough finally passes them.

[williamcll]

Don't need to browse google news when you can get all the news you need to know from linustechtips.com

[TetraSky]

Honestly, just the fact that they allow the sharing of their articles through built-in social media buttons on their websites, basically goes against all that they are "fighting" for here. Since that's hundred/thousand of people "linking" the articles.

And lets face it, this is totally what is going to happen : 

 

They will see a large drop in traffic and then they'll somehow blame that on others.

 

IMO, it's ridiculous to even consider "taxing" for linking to your articles.

It would be like telling Google they need to pay you, to have to privilege of listing your site in their search engine... Bitch, you're the one benefiting the most from them linking your shitty website.

 

Though services which basically copy wholesale an article without pushing users to the publishers's website, those gotta go. But that doesn't seems to be the case for Google News, it's just showing links to various articles to me.

[wanderingfool2]

Link taxes are bad concepts in my opinion.  It prevents innovation in my opinion, or rather it causes the suppression of smaller sources

 

The Netflix tax I can understand (although I believe the $10,000 in revenue is too low).   [Actually I feel it should be a more country wide tax, makes things easier to manage for the beginner]

 

While it might not be a popular opinion, I think LTT forum actually goes to far in terms of the amount that is quoted.  Even though articles are linked, I find a lot of the time the meat of the article is quoted (making a lot less incentive to click and read the article)

 

34 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

IMO, it's ridiculous to even consider "taxing" for linking to your articles.

It would be like telling Google they need to pay you, to have to privilege of listing your site in their search engine... Bitch, you're the one benefiting the most from them linking your shitty website.

 

Though services which basically copy wholesale an article without pushing users to the publishers's website, those gotta go. But that doesn't seems to be the case for Google News, it's just showing links to various articles to me.

I completely agree.

 

 

[vanished]

57 minutes ago, williamcll said:

Don't need to browse google news when you can get all the news you need to know from linustechtips.com

Ironically, not if this went through, since the forum would have to pay to allow people to provide sources I guess? lol

[wanderingfool2]

9 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Ironically, not if this went through, since the forum would have to pay to allow people to provide sources I guess? lol

Well if it was like other implementations around the world, it would be more like only providing a link and then providing the opinion *without quoting anything*

[divito]

Forum policies, like those here, are part of what is causing some issues. With the requirement of quoting, explaining, and offering an opinion, I've almost never had to go to an actual source for information.

 

Ultimately, I almost hope places that showcase news opt not to pay and pass on the cost to users. They're trying to piggyback off of websites with substantial traffic, and they'll slowly learn that they only get the traffic because people enjoy the other sites due to community or features. Unless media companies can compete with Google News or RSS on curation and personalization, they're unlikely to gain much from people just perusing. Nobody wants to visit 15 different websites looking for stories that interest them.

[vanished]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Well if it was like other implementations around the world, it would be more like only providing a link and then providing the opinion *without quoting anything*

17 minutes ago, divito said:

Forum policies, like those here, are part of what is causing some issues. With the requirement of quoting, explaining, and offering an opinion, I've almost never had to go to an actual source for information.

[...]

I see.  A terrible name then, as it's not links that are the issue, but copying/embedding the information, leading to not need to use a link.  Not that this should be taken as support for the idea, but that does make a lot more sense.

 

[freeagent]

I already pay to use the internet, twice! At home and on my phone. Fuck these old guys in suits. Want the worlds problems to go away? Quit letting big business run it.

[Trik'Stari]

Now taking bets on this all being because government types hear the word "tax" and think it means more money for them to play with.

[wanderingfool2]

16 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I see.  A terrible name then, as it's not links that are the issue, but copying/embedding the information, leading to not need to use a link.  Not that this should be taken as support for the idea, but that does make a lot more sense.

 

Yea, the name isn't the best but it gets clicks and roughly expresses how horrible of a concept the law actually is.  I could be wrong, but the European countries that have done similar have essentially labelled copying any snippet of an article as requiring the tax (even just the headline article, thus effectively making it link tax).  Overall the laws itself I find are quite terrible.

 

Similar to Netflix tax in terms of naming.  It's not a tax on Netflix, but rather a tax that existed before internet services (but internet services were exempt because there was a need to stimulate growth in the online world)

[Mihle]

18 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Yea, the name isn't the best but it gets clicks and roughly expresses how horrible of a concept the law actually is.  I could be wrong, but the European countries that have done similar have essentially labelled copying any snippet of an article as requiring the tax (even just the headline article, thus effectively making it link tax).  Overall the laws itself I find are quite terrible.

 

Similar to Netflix tax in terms of naming.  It's not a tax on Netflix, but rather a tax that existed before internet services (but internet services were exempt because there was a need to stimulate growth in the online world)

With the European one, you don't have to pay if you just link it and show the headline, but if you start snipping the article you can be. Aka, it's not a "link tax" at all. More correct word would be "snippet tax" or something.

 

The reason why people call it "link tax" is spesifically to make it seem worse than it is.

[Master Disaster]

This seems like the first step to a corporate controlled internet to me. I hate the slippery slope argument as much as everyone else but this ends with fast lanes, pay per site access and heavy restrictions of what can and cannot be said. YouTube is slowly becoming the beginnings of that model.

[Kisai]

14 hours ago, williamcll said:

Don't need to browse google news when you can get all the news you need to know from linustechtips.com

Not if these people have their way.

 

If you run a site in Canada, or link to a site in Canada. Pay up.

 

The thing about "news" is that there is more than one place to get the same news, including twitter and facebook, where people will just print screen the paywall'd article and share it anyway. Video clips? take a video with your camera phone. 

 

News is somewhat unique though. I get where the general indie, local news should be paid for, credited, but the reality is that the people making the noise about this are big media companies who are trying to squeeze the ISP's the same way the CRTC squeezes the Cable/TV companies to pay into a Canadian content fund, and the private copying levy that the music industry wanted to levy on everything from floppy disks and blank CD's to hard drives by capacity and iPod-like devices (eg smartphones) fortunately the latter half of that never happened, and thus nobody EVER buys recordable media in Canada.

 

Oh and they still exist: https://cb-cda.gc.ca/tariffs-tarifs/certified-homologues/2019/2019-12-14-2021.pdf

 

I'd argue that the "copying levy" was an utter failure, as it made pirates more willing to pirate anything, for any reason with the claim that they're already paying the copying levy, even though that would never have applied to anything else. There are far reaching consequences for trying to tax digital goods, of which one of them is that it discourages using that medium entirely. So if you were to "copyright levy" links for example, what would happen, as I stated above, forums like LTT would disable linking to news sites, and no citations from news sites would be allowed. You'd only be able to plagarize wikipedia's version of the news item, when someone eventually plagiarizes a news article to make a wikipedia article

 

And here's the big thing. All these privacy initiatives about accepting cookies? Well, that completely boned any possibility of having a link tax. Because you need to track that data, and if google is no longer allowed to mercilessly track it's users, than the news sites will stop getting referral information from google, and they will have no idea where their visitors are coming from. 

 

This is why the illegal piracy/adult sites typically have the very annoying multi-stage redirects. It's to disguise the true site sending the user somewhere so they can keep collecting their referral money without showing where the referrals are truly coming from.

[Arika]

Yes, I can certainly see why they need more money when all of their ads are broken up by an article 

 

[Trik'Stari]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

Not if these people have their way.

 

If you run a site in Canada, or link to a site in Canada. Pay up.

 

The thing about "news" is that there is more than one place to get the same news, including twitter and facebook, where people will just print screen the paywall'd article and share it anyway. Video clips? take a video with your camera phone. 

 

News is somewhat unique though. I get where the general indie, local news should be paid for, credited, but the reality is that the people making the noise about this are big media companies who are trying to squeeze the ISP's the same way the CRTC squeezes the Cable/TV companies to pay into a Canadian content fund, and the private copying levy that the music industry wanted to levy on everything from floppy disks and blank CD's to hard drives by capacity and iPod-like devices (eg smartphones) fortunately the latter half of that never happened, and thus nobody EVER buys recordable media in Canada.

 

Oh and they still exist: https://cb-cda.gc.ca/tariffs-tarifs/certified-homologues/2019/2019-12-14-2021.pdf

 

I'd argue that the "copying levy" was an utter failure, as it made pirates more willing to pirate anything, for any reason with the claim that they're already paying the copying levy, even though that would never have applied to anything else. There are far reaching consequences for trying to tax digital goods, of which one of them is that it discourages using that medium entirely. So if you were to "copyright levy" links for example, what would happen, as I stated above, forums like LTT would disable linking to news sites, and no citations from news sites would be allowed. You'd only be able to plagarize wikipedia's version of the news item, when someone eventually plagiarizes a news article to make a wikipedia article

 

And here's the big thing. All these privacy initiatives about accepting cookies? Well, that completely boned any possibility of having a link tax. Because you need to track that data, and if google is no longer allowed to mercilessly track it's users, than the news sites will stop getting referral information from google, and they will have no idea where their visitors are coming from. 

 

This is why the illegal piracy/adult sites typically have the very annoying multi-stage redirects. It's to disguise the true site sending the user somewhere so they can keep collecting their referral money without showing where the referrals are truly coming from.

I'm sitting here wondering what, if any, action they could take if people just simply did what they wanted and ignored this law if it were put in place?

 

"Pay up"

"No, make me"

*gasp*

[Thaldor]

I need to say that I understand the need for this kind of law. At this time people don't want to read news, they want to read summaries of the news and that's it. This is why clickbait headlines became a thing, something that sounds crazy and makes people to click the link and read more and getting served ads. This far it's okay for news site that people and other sites link their news because it generates traffic but where the line comes is that when the sites summarize the news article removing the need to click the link eating the profits and the traffic.

 

It would be okay for me if the summarizing article would just give oversight to the article and has something added to it (more insight, opinion, whatever that shows the writer actually worked for the article) and still keeps the quoted article somewhat interesting to go take a look.Of course this is something crap news sites, Google News and other bot run crap doesn't want to do, they want to grab the headline and the summary of the original article, zero effort included and post it to show their own ads to generate their own profit and "who cares about what someone else did". And this should be fought against, tax the hell out of it and hopefully kill it away because not only is it morally, at least, questionable but it also creates the situation where clickbait headlines become more and more clickbait and included summaries become less and less relevant and the quality of news goes lower than Verges video production because everyone is desperate to generate traffic and fight the bot news and incomes start to fall which means there isn't money to hire more people and give them time to really do their work.

[wanderingfool2]

8 hours ago, Mihle said:

With the European one, you don't have to pay if you just link it and show the headline, but if you start snipping the article you can be. Aka, it's not a "link tax" at all. Notre correct word would be "snippet tax" or something.

 

The reason why people call it "link tax" is spesifically to make it seem worse than it is.

Ah, yes, thank you.  I knew I was probably misinterpreting it somehow

[dalekphalm]

There are definitely two sides to this.

 

@Thaldor did a really great breakdown as to what the problem actually is - and unfortunately to say, sites like LTT are part of the problem. I hardly ever need to click on the source for a news post to get the overall story. Sometimes I will to get some minute but important detail, but most often won't need to.

 

The main concern is really news aggregation sites "stealing" stories, providing enough of the story that most people won't bother clicking through to the source, and thus preventing the source news site from earning ad revenue. On top of that, the news aggregate site does earn ad revenue for their summary of the same story.

 

This is a problem, and a lot of news organizations are already struggling financially to begin with.

 

I don't know what the solution is, really. I don't want to force "link taxes" (or rather, "summary fees") on companies, but I also don't want sites to intentionally summarize a news article and encourage users to not follow the link to the source.

 

If you're going to essentially repost the news article - enough that the average person doesn't need to read the source, you should pay for that. I think that's fair. But it's tricky when you get governments involved to force things.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, Thaldor said:

I need to say that I understand the need for this kind of law. At this time people don't want to read news, they want to read summaries of the news and that's it.

This is not Google's problem however. That's the news sites own SEO working against it. News sites want to be found, and they want to be the only source for an exclusive article, but if they only put the headline in the landing page, google's only going to see the headline and rank it lower than another site carrying the same news item with more detail, including sites that plagiarize the site who initially broke the story.

 

Now what would be an appropriate fix for that? To that end the appropriate way would be to file a quality rating (eg primary source (this is where the story originated), secondary source (this source cites the primary source,) and if it's a News source, Entertainment source (opinion/editorial/comedy/satire), or an archive source (eg wikipedia or archive.org) 

 

So when you go look at a news list, google news would only list the primary sources, no secondary sources, no entertainment sources until you click on the primary source summary. Once you click on the primary source summary, it will list the first 150 characters of the article and a (read full) link which links to the article, not a landing page, not a "subscribe now" page. If the primary source is subscription-only, then the user can opt to "hide paywalled content" so they only see secondary sources or editorials, and if they select "hide entertainment media", it will hide all editorial, comedy and satire on the same story.

 

A lot of the editorial junk is what buries actual news and spreads misinformation. An editorial or comedy riff on something should not be read before the original story is read, otherwise it taints your reception of it.

 

Archive sources can be tainted by editorial, which is why they should not ever serve as a primary source.

[Thaldor]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

So when you go look at a news list, google news would only list the primary sources, no secondary sources, no entertainment sources until you click on the primary source summary. Once you click on the primary source summary, it will list the first 150 characters of the article and a (read full) link...

This IS the problem. If the news article isn't about something person really is interested, only thing they read is the summary and how Google News works is that they take the headline and the summary, rank them and publish them so most of the traffic is there. Also if the news article is well written the first paragraph will summarize the article which then will dive deeper and that first paragraph usually is the 150 first characters.

 

(Google News as example, this probably is mostly applicable to every news aggregate site/app)

Everything would be okay for the news sites if Google News would take the headlines, rank them by relevance, interest and whatelse and show them to people and people would click them to go to the news site and at least read the summary. Google however has made it so that Google News will rank your news article lowest if there isn't summary and then by the relevance of the summary and other parameters. So, if the news site wants to be found they must include summary that bot can find (usually the first paragraph), it must be relevant summary and most likely interesting one too which basicly means the news site must make the summary most of the people will only read and Google News shows it, meaning most of the people won't visit the site at all and only Google profits from the news article.

You could say that Google wants to push people from the Google News to the news sites by making the service where news articles can be easily found but the harsh reality is that Google wants people to spent the most of their time in Googles services and on Googles sites, not anywhere else.

 

To combat this news sites could start to make clickbait summaries or summaries that for a bot would seem like relevant but actually were more like gibberish (remember old style "search engine optimization" where pages metadata was filled with one or two dictionaries to maximize the visibility) and Google would fight this by using the first paragraph as summary to which news sites would throw their ages old morals to the recycle and make that also clickbaity and probably then Google would make a bot which would read the news articles and make its own summaries. And for all of the shit news sites could do to fight Google, people will only and especially blame the news sites and look at Google News as "the best time saving service ever to keep up with the news" and even protect it.

And cherry on the cake: Most likely news sites must pay Google to be the "featured" article, so not only Google steals the traffic by requiring the summary that most of the people read but the news sites must also pay Google for that little traffic that is interested enough to even look at the full article.

[justpoet]

Good luck getting a content linker in someplace like China, Switzerland, or similar to pay a content provider in Canada.

It just isn't going to work that way.

 

Companies like Google have already fought this in other places and just decided to not use that content and highlight other content instead as well.

 

If you put the content out publicly, everybody can access it.  If you don't, most of the public will ignore you and your site forever.

The other option is a paywall, but paywalls generally create less revenue than advertisements.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

44 minutes ago, Thaldor said:

This IS the problem. If the news article isn't about something person really is interested, only thing they read is the summary and how Google News works is that they take the headline and the summary, rank them and publish them so most of the traffic is there. Also if the news article is well written the first paragraph will summarize the article which then will dive deeper and that first paragraph usually is the 150 first characters.

I think there is a deeper debate missing. If these short snippets are all people (and by "people" I mean the mass of non-adblock clicks needed to generate substantial revenue) are interested in, then there is a question of how much value is being created by the original article. Why is it longer? Is it a glorified tweet full of filler? Is an in-depth discussion that doesn't attract enough attention because I (the reader) just want two lines to quench my thirst for pitchfork material? I never used Google News nor find any appeal to it, but for those who use it: if, as many have posted here, they find that reading Google News without clicking anything covers their needs/interest, then that means Google News is making a better news editorial job than their sources. A news site providing the same amount of information would render Google News useless. In fact, that's what a newspaper is supposed to be, except Google "personalizes" it (with very dubious effectiveness and a great deal of "not what you are interested in, but what paid us to appear here"), which others could do as well.

There's something amiss with worrying about lengthy articles we never click on ceasing to exist: it's either something we value, and therefore click and read, or is it something we don't use, and therefore won't notice if it goes missing. Notice that this is independent of quality (there could be great articles we choose not to read; it would still be something we don't demand, don't consume, and therefore, won't really miss), although a large part of the news space is made of recycled tweets and regurgitating other's' articles, just in a less efficient way than news aggregator, and claiming it's an article on its own.

 

Regarding the "this is pushing news sites to clickbait" argument - I have my doubts about it. Clickbait headlines are mostly due to not having anything interesting to say, or having very brief piece of information to convey and try to turn it into something else than the one or two lines it deserves.

It may be the case that "SpaceX ship arrived safely to the ISS" is all I need to know, and I don't click on an article that provides more detail. It may be the case that a more detailed article appeals to a more specialized audience that will read it in full. The question is whether such specialized pieces can be sustained, and provide enough quality to its specialized audience, on the basis of serving ads to large masses of visitors (since each individual visitor is almost worthless in ad revenue terms). I don't think changing their headline to "You won't believe what this ROCKET did!" will help them, and  i don't think the existence of news aggregators is at the root of their problem.

 

Quote

And cherry on the cake: Most likely news sites must pay Google to be the "featured" article, so not only Google steals the traffic by requiring the summary that most of the people read but the news sites must also pay Google for that little traffic that is interested enough to even look at the full article.

This last part  is a bit confusing: you are saying that having your article linked to for free is not profitable enough, requiring a compensation, yet it is profitable to not only get paid zero but actually pay for being linked to?

 

 

All in all, I'm very skeptical on a tax or mandatory scheme (in Spain, for instance, it isn't a tax, but a mandatory compensation to news sources that these sources can't waive even if they want to). II'd rather enable news sites (if currently unable) to exclude themselves from news aggregators, or to negotiate a compensation with said aggregators as they see fit. Let's see what news aggregators, and news sites themselves, look like in such an environment. The news industry may (continue to) change as a result, and it's worth monitoring what becomes of it, but let's not pretend that its current state is some kind of endangering species worth preserving. The question is not how we generate revenue for the different actors so everything continues as it is, but rather how do we get the content we want to be produced and to reach us. That may very well involve the demise of current entities and the emergence of a new business model (or i should say, a new array of agents with interdependent business models).

[Kisai]

55 minutes ago, Thaldor said:

This IS the problem. If the news article isn't about something person really is interested, only thing they read is the summary and how Google News works is that they take the headline and the summary, rank them and publish them so most of the traffic is there. Also if the news article is well written the first paragraph will summarize the article which then will dive deeper and that first paragraph usually is the 150 first characters.

 

 

Yeah, but I don't want to read news items about stuff I don't care about.

 

This is the entire window, one news item, 5 sources.

Now what happens when I click on certain things:

 

If I click "view full coverage"

 

I see 4 news items, of which three of those are big TV networks, and one of those is a newspaper. Three of the sources cite "The Canadian Press", of which Yahoo just aggregated CBC's article of "The Canadian Press"'s article. 

 

Now let me be clear about something. I don't live in Toronto, yet this news item was pushed to the TOP of my news feed. In the initial load, the Dawson Creek Mirror is the "local paper" in that listing as it's in BC, and Dawson creek is 3800km from Brampton, and 1200km from Vancouver. So ask yourself this.

 

"Did that news item have local interest?" No.

 

It's not of local interest, people get killed all the time, and the news doesn't headline anyone's death unless it's unusually horrific, or a mass-causality incident. So what made it popup on my feed? I would normally not even click on the article, but for the purpose of this thread I did, and yes, it does hit both the "horrific" and "mass casualty" buttons.

 

But that doesn't change the fact that aside from an emotional "how horrible!", I could have figured that out from three of the four headlines and both tweets shown by google news. So how would you not give away the details in "just the headline" ?

 

"Family killed in Canada" is about as narrow you can make it and still have curiosity strike. However if every headline is a short useless click-bait type of headline, then nothing gets clicked on and news aggregation assumes every clickbait title is the same article. And I've seen that. I've seen that in looking up sources for things on LTT.

 

My point, is that this is a lost cause, and the most likely consequence will be that Google just drops the google news product entirely from countries foolish enough to implement it, which will instead push Canadians to use other link aggregation systems which the newspaper sites will get not a cent from anyway.

 

As I mentioned previously, when you impose a tax or levy on things, that changes peoples behavior to try and pay the least amount of taxes on things. The copyright levy on cd's just made people not buy the Audio CD's the first time around, and stop buying DVD and didn't even start buying BD media. Heck this might have single-handedly killed the market for BD players in Canada. If it didn't come as part of your game console, you really have no reason to own one since it's cheaper to buy a flash drive and play it on your smartTV.

 

What would happen here is that Google News would just stop posting Canadian news altogether. So the newspaper's would suffer more. Not less. I'm sure as hell not inclined to buy a newspaper owned by a a company based in Toronto. I'm don't subscribe to any Canadian papers for that reason alone.

 

[divito]

22 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Now let me be clear about something. I don't live in Toronto, yet this news item was pushed to the TOP of my news feed. In the initial load, the Dawson Creek Mirror is the "local paper" in that listing as it's in BC, and Dawson creek is 3800km from Brampton, and 1200km from Vancouver. So ask yourself this.

Your selected view is "Top Stories." The algorithm balances a lot of things to arrive at the top headlines for that view. The Dawson Creek Mirror is simply another source that the algorithm picked up. It has nothing to do with proximity.

Does that story show up under the "For you" view or "Your local news?"

 

Location is only a small part of the algorithm. I get top headlines in that main view that aren't local, but mostly are based on prior articles I've read or searched for. Other instances, if a story is gaining traction online and through social media, trending items often end up there as well. 

 

The other factor that people ignore when lamenting Google News is the ability to hide stories from certain publishers, or indicate whether they want to see more or less of a certain topic through the options button. If I see things that I really have no interest in, a simple thumbs down takes it and related items away, and now my feed contains more relevant information.

 

 

Ultimately, I'm not sure there is a simple solution to this problem of a "link tax." Social media makes disseminating information fast and easy. Aggregators make consuming and performing triage on worthwhile stories immensely easier. Even if something like this was implemented, there are a whole host of ways that will arise to get around it.

In my opinion, going this route will lead to more publishers going under. Outside of leaning into the technology surrounding social media and sharing as a way to drive traffic, they'll probably have to band together towards creating some sort of service.