104
Canada says Google will pay $74 million annually to Canadian news industry under new online law
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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Obligatory fuck Facebook.
But reminder that laws like this would require link aggregator sites like Lemmy (or instance owners more specifically), to pay money simply for hosting links to news sites. Terrible law imo.
I think it's reasonable to require fees for rehosting an article or pictures on your web page, but charging just to have a url link is totally antithetical to the structure of the internet. If anything those links drive traffic to news websites, where they are free to host advertisements or require subscriptions.
Edit: as below this particular law won't affect lemmy servers. I still disagree with the idea that posting a hyperlink alone to a website should cost money.
The Canadian law in question has specific provisions in it that would pass any lemmy instance by.
source (archive)
That's literally half the country, by the way.
There was never any chance this law was going to impact any lemmy instances.
True, thank you for pointing that out. I still disagree with the idea that you should have to pay to link to another web site. If they're rehosting content from that website, like an article summary or picture, than absolutely. A link alone makes no sense, that's driving traffic to that website. In any other business you'd be paying for referrals/finder fees for new customers, not the other way around.
Yeah, I fully agree. The goal of most websites is to get linked by Google, the argument that Google should then have to pay for giving the websites what they want anyways is weird.
I also don't feel like the argument that it's ok just because it targets wealthy companies changes whether the actual law makes sense or not.