Are instances of fediverse platforms going to be affected by this law? Does it apply at all to the fediverse?
No. The act would only apply to “digital news intermediaries that occupy a prominent market position”. Unless an instance starts pulling in millions of dollars, the act wouldn’t apply.
From what I’ve heard they’re going to keep a list of big platforms that count. Nobody is going to put a little Lemmy instance on there unless the law is being deliberately misused.
That’s sounds vague, if that ao I bet there will be a lot of lobbying from people that don’t want to be considered “prominent”
Bill C-18 is a ridiculous law that’s going to harm Canadian news outlets.
Why do you say that?
Canada’s new bill forces companies who shares a link to a Canadian news outlet to pay the outlet called a “link tax”. Google doesn’t want to pay the “link tax” so they got rid of every search result to Canadian news outlet in response. This effectively ensures nobody can see the news from Canadian news outlets through Google.
Don’t worry, Google is bluffing. They don’t want other countries to do anything similar so they have to make a big show of fighting it, but their massive power to fight it is exactly why C-18 is necessary. Google backed down in Australia, and sooner or later, they’ll back down here — there’s still a lot of money for them to rake in even after paying to use the news outlets’ work.
My understanding is that Canadian news outlets are already suffering specifically because of Google. Wouldn’t keeping the status quo also be causing harm to these outlets?
Google has a monopoly on search engines. They should have been broken up a long time ago.
I don’t know what the solution to helping Canadian outlets other than promote an alternative search engine or educate people on how to do proper research.
Hedge funds are the problem - look who owns the owners of Canadian newspapers and you’ll see why newspapers are suffering. Shareholders want to see cash flow and if you can’t get it selling subscriptions and classifieds, or getting a bailout to not cut staff or close papers, then you convince your buddies to pass a law forcing some other rich company to give you some of their cash flow. Google and FB are the current evil-du-jour so they pin this one on them.
If you’re depending on Google or meta for news you’re doing it wrong.
I’m not but I know plenty of other people are.
Google prob won’t remove news from other countries tho
Heck if they only remove Canadian news that Bill C-18 defines as “news” then most of us probably won’t even notice! One thing that doesn’t get discussed enough is the narrow definition of news within C-18. Most of my news won’t see a penny, because they’re just rando web sites even though most of them are seasoned investigative journalists who lost their jobs (see my previous post re: hedge funds).
