Much of Europe is privatized and their prices are much less than here. The main reason our prices are so high is the special alcohol tax the government puts on to discourage drinking.

I much prefer corporations owning rental housing than individuals. They at least have staff and somewhat understand the laws. The idea that all sorts of individuals will choose to be landlords of one or two properties and deal with all the toxic shit that comes with it is incredibly naive in my opinion.

Yes, the blocking in Australia was part of the negotiation as it is here in Canada. In the end the Australian news companies did have to negotiate, they did not get to demand whatever income they want like many people here seem to suggest and want.

From the article:

“If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second – but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag.”

They are comparing to time now. If you assume a quasar expels stuff at the same rate through all time, then when you look far back in time you should see pulses coming from the distant stars at the same rate as now. Yes, that light took billions of years to get here but the pulsing rate should be the same.

They found that it isn’t, it’s five times slower, which implies that time then must be five times slower than now.

Apparently there are a lot of temperance league members on this site.

Retroactive penalties absolutely are a thing. I’ve known people who have gotten bit by that when tax laws change retroactively. Also, Google hasn’t yet blocked anything, but implementing a block like that doesn’t happen overnight. So yes, they do need to start writing the and testing the code to do the blocking now, not at the last minute. The announcement is also part of their negotiation, making it clear that this is in fact a possible outcome.

I have no sympathy for ad driven businesses. Let me buy access to ad free news and I’ll be interested. Fundamentally this is because the traditional news business model stopped working and they never bothered to update to a model that does work. Instead, they want to legislate that they get paid without even trying to adapt or improve.

Yes, which is literally why Google said they are preparing to remove links. They are not going to incur completely unknown penalties. In Australia Meta and others also pulled links for the same reason. It was only after they negotiated a price that worked for both sides that they came back. If I ran Google or Meta I’d do exactly the same thing.

It’s called negotiation. What Canada is doing is not that. They are demanding unbounded amounts of money.

In Australia they ended up negotiating a price that worked for both sides. No doubt a predictable among each year too.

Hopefully we change this law. Trying to charge people for links is incredibly bad. There is no need for any law. If the news sites want to get money for links they can just put all their articles behind a login gate and make them not scrapable.

Hah yes true, I could see that. For those that don’t know Bell owns CTV.

CTV news is honestly one of the most bias free and accurate sources. It sort of surprised me to find this out, as they don’t get a lot of attention nationally. I base that statement on https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ctv-news/ as well as my own experiences.

It doesn’t seem like an overreach to me. The CRA can ask for any tax related data they want. I’d think you’d actually want them to do this as it might might reporting taxes easier.

All companies report employee income tax and now most people can just download that information from the CRA instead of having to enter it manually.

If they were asking for non-tax related data that would be a problem.

Actually it’s fairly straight forward to fact check and rank media on accuracy. The narrative that there is no real truth is just more misinformation.

Hmm and then what all the admins of the fediverse have to pay them? No. They should remove this stupid law and yes THEN they should be here and forbid crawling with robots.txt and other means.

Yes, and all that has been legal, and now it’s not and they are choosing not to incorporate it. That’s fine and their right. Law makers need to focus on the source of the problem not make nonsensical “patches” that don’t work and instead only serve to further break the ideal of the internet.

We didn’t need a law for news sites to stop Google and Meta copying headlines and summaries. The news sites could have done that easily on their own.

Yes agreed, but the problem is far wider than just Canadian news sources. The solution is not to try to tax them, because they will just disengage and make the problem worse. I don’t have a good solution right now but if we were to pass regulation it should be something about automated recommendation systems (ai) not trying to make people pay to link to things.

None of this has anything to do with trying to force people to pay for simply linking to content on the internet, which is what this stupid law does.

Re taxes, of course they don’t pay income tax in Canada. Why would a US company pay Canadian or income tax in any other country? That’s beyond stupid. As I said, WHEN THEY OPERATE HERE, e.g. employ people or sell things, then yes they do pay Canadian taxes. They have Canadian subsidiaries for these things and those all obey all our laws and pay our taxes.

Also, I’m not “defending” anyone. I’m explaining to you how taxes work as you don’t seem to understand.

Sure, I completely agree, but I don’t think any of that has to do with this situation. I don’t think anyone should even have to pay simply for an http link to another public website. That’s what this is about.

If the news websites don’t want people linking to their website for free then they should change their robots.txt so that they are not indexed and put stories behind a free login gate. Then they can negotiate to give headlines/summaries to Google or Meta or whoever.

They won’t even for California. And they shouldn’t. News organizations need to figure out how to make money in this system. If all people do is read headlines then don’t put headlines out for free. Put it behind a pay gate and ask Google and Meta to pay for access.

This law is indeed ridiculous and embarrassing. It’s completely unnecessary. But the end result is the same. News sites effectively asked for Google and Meta to pay, and they declined.

That’s business. It’s unfortunate but such is life.