Next they'll sue for monopoly on eyeballs and they'll have a strong case, as evidenced by how these two companies were able to starve an entire country's news medias by merely ignoring them.
I think what the Canadian govt is legislating is silly but it's not like there's no problem: foreign governments in the US-sphere are losing a ton of tax revenue to US entities that are capturing all the value. This essentially strips the residents of wealth, further putting them at a comparative disadvantage in all other fields. Eyeballs are at the center of the largest commercial entities on the planet. There's a lot of value here being sent to the US with no obvious return mechanism.
Not recognizing this will prevent any mutually agreeable solution from being found. Canada isn't keeping up with the US and things aren't looking up either.
If they simply acknowledged that and said "we are making a tax on tech social/search companies" and then that they were distributing the proceeds of that to news/media? I'd be fine with it. It's the theatrics that are the problem - pretending the underlying issue is social/search "stealing" content from news media.
This isn't benign - setting precedents that linking to something is stealing it is toxic to the whole concept of the internet itself. It may take a while to seep through but that precedent is going to get built on by every other aggrieved party who sees an opportunity there eventually.
>This isn't benign - setting precedents that linking to something is stealing it is toxic to the whole concept of the internet itself
this is why we need to care. doing theatrics to hide their dirty spending is one thing. but they should at least do their dirt in a way that doesn't have the side effect of breaking how the internet works.
I think what the Canadian govt is legislating is silly but it's not like there's no problem: foreign governments in the US-sphere are losing a ton of tax revenue to US entities that are capturing all the value. This essentially strips the residents of wealth, further putting them at a comparative disadvantage in all other fields. Eyeballs are at the center of the largest commercial entities on the planet. There's a lot of value here being sent to the US with no obvious return mechanism.
Not recognizing this will prevent any mutually agreeable solution from being found. Canada isn't keeping up with the US and things aren't looking up either.