This is protectionist law but it’s not protecting independent media in Canada, it’s protecting big players like PostMedia, Bell, and Rogers. If anything this will just kill off the remaining small media companies in Canada, or force them to be bought up by the big companies.
> Canada is concerned its culture is at risk from globalisation, and those concerns are not without merit.
I don't think that preserving Canadian culture is a factor in any of this, nor does it seem to be a concern of the current government.
These same politicians have been bringing in an absolutely staggering number of foreigners each year for many years now, with most of them from cultures that are extremely dissimilar from, if not outright incompatible with, what was Canadian culture.
Why does it matter whether they’re big players on a global basis or not? Those companies have an oligopoly over Canadian media. They also abuse their dominant position over Canadian wireless and broadband internet service, leading to some of the highest rates in the world.
Yet the government is passing even more laws to try to give them cash grabs. These companies should be broken apart and the spectrum sold off to smaller players. Canadians need more competition in both media and wireless / internet access, not less.
As someone who grew up from outside of the US/UK/Commonwealth, you really have to stretch the imagination to see the difference. Quebec is the only place in the US/CA I can feel is different.
Also: PostMedia, at least, is owned by an American hedge fund. I see this as more of an internecine war between U.S. capitalists over how to divide the spoils than anything else. Canada is only involved in a secondary role.
How exactly does Facebook and Google blocking links to news in Canada ensure that there are Canadian media? I'm having trouble seeing the connection from "fewer inbound links" to "sustainable Canadian news media".
Presumably he's talking about the intent of the law, which seems to have been to ensure news outlets actually receive money for linked articles. It seems that the government didn't expect Google or Facebook to just stop linking to Canadian news instead.
Canada appeared to be attempting to emulate countries like Australia, Spain, France, etc that have passed very similar laws. It seems like the tech giants were perfectly happy to just cut ties with Canadian media rather than make a deal however.
Its more like if instead of dropping you to a cinema a bus driver was showing you the full film so that you don't have to enter the cinema and spend money there.
Your analogy would only make sense if the bill were only trying to tax including all or part of a news article on Facebook/Google. It sounds like instead any link would be taxable, so it would be more like the bus driver having to pay the cinema for the privilege of driving you there.
"Clause 2(2) stipulates that news content is “made available” if two conditions are met:
that it, or any portion of it, is reproduced; and
that access to it is facilitated by “any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.”
"
Just linking does not satisfy the first part of the clause according to the bill.
Edit: mannerheim points out that OP is quoting from an outdated version of the bill, and the final version is much worse. I'm going to leave my original reply because I think my objection is also valid, but mannerheim's point is more important:
I think that's ambiguous enough to be problematic. For example, does a slug (headline-with-hyphens-in-it) count? If so, links often do. What about the headline? And what if a user copies a paragraph into their post?
"Any portion" is language that gives away that this is intended to be read pretty broadly. There's no qualifier, no "significant" or "substantial". If the goal were to prevent the kind of abuse that your bus driver analogy suggests, they should have been more specific.
'Any portion' seems very much key (although the final version of the law is apparently even worse). Sites linking (that is, driving free traffic to a news website) often include the time and a one sentence or so (or even just a truncated sentence with ellipsis) so people know what they're clicking on. Sometimes a low-res thumbnail from the meta info.
Obviously this is entirely beneficial for the news source for this to be shown - this bill is like trying to go after people for copyright infringement for showing somebody a movie trailer (since the movie trailer contains "any portion" of the full feature film).
How does forcing some companies to pay to link TO a news story (and send traffic to that new story) do anything other than give an incentive not to link to news stories any more? How is making it impossible to discover news stories good for Canadian media? How is it good for Canadian citizens and Canadian democracy?
The underpinning concept in HTML is:
My document can link to your document without asking, and without cost.
This whole, if you send traffic to me you have to pay me for it is backwards.
Many countries have protectionist laws and this isn’t much different.