The Government telling meta and Google they'd have to pay to link has led to this entirely predictable result, and the companies said they would block links since very early on in the process. Independent experts (e.g., Michael Geist) also said that C18 was a bad idea.

It's ridiculous to complain about someone complying with laws that you (the government) drafted and passed.

They told Meta that they had to pay to so much as host links to news sites on their platforms.

ie they had to pay to literally direct users to news sites, where news sites would make money off advertising to them, allowing the news sites to double dip. If anyone's got good PR, it's the news sites (would you believe it, the news sites have good connections with the press?)

There were ways to stop Meta from scraping news sites, but they decided to effectively stop them from even sharing news. They could've stopped the bill at purely "reproducing" news, but no, they got greedy and decided to make them pay for the privilege to give news sites free advertising. Why on earth would Meta agree to that, and why is it surprising that they just turned around and said no?

I seriously do not understand where this idea of "profiting off someone else's work" even comes from. I am on Meta's side here 100%.

If I need to pay a news company every time I decide to text you a link to their site because I thought it was interesting, I'd stop linking to them too.

I didn't pay much attention when this was happening. Are there size requirements or something? How does lemmy.ca or sh.itjust.works avoid paying?

I hate meta and I actually went out of my way to get my family and friends off of their platforms, but in this case I don't think they're in the wrong. Even if we roll with the logic that they should be paying for these links, then what is wrong with them deciding to not profit off of the links now by not showing them? Isn't that the right thing to do?

It seems to me the news agencies and the Canadian government just wants extra revenue, and when their plan didn't go as expected they're now just crying and bit**ing about facing consequences of their actions.

i mean, i mostly agree. i don't get my news from facebook, and most people i know who use facebook say it's a generally more pleasant experience without news on the site.

but when i say "now they're complaining" i don't just mean random people. the people that are complaining are Justin Trudeau and David Eby. If they want facebook to link to news sites, they shouldn't charge facebook money to do that. most websites pay facebook money to link to them.

so facebook stopped linking to news. and now they’re complaining because facebook isn’t providing the valuable service that they used to. so does facebook provide value by linking to news, or not?

Same thing happened in Australia with similar legislation... the problem is, local county fire authorities who don't receive sufficient funding utilise social media to provide regular updates.... Meta (facebook at the time) shut off access for the day, and people went batshit. It definitely exposed a real flaw in that sparsely located, small county fire authorities don't have a good way to communicate to the people during bushfires.

The problem here is that they want to reach a wide audience... and the wide audience are more likely to be using something owned by Meta to seek information.

I hope someone stands up to the Meta mafia. Governments listen the fuck up and make it so your people aren't reliant on foreign entities to obtain vital information.

[EDIT] I'll also add that while the county fire authorities in Australia might have apps to communicate, these are run by the state governments, so the reach of the individual apps is pretty variable. People who live in bushfire prone areas will probably have an app and their radio going to listen out on alerts to leave, but visitors, new residents, people passing through etc are pretty unlikely to think to download the CFA app for the state.

Yeah this feels like people with terrible habits being forced to learn new ones

If more people learn to get their info from reliable sources, that's a win imo