Comment on [deleted]
darkevilmac@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
He didn’t ban news on their platforms in Canada. He disabled links to news platforms because the Canadian government passed a bizarre law that forced them to pay news agencies for the privilege of hot linking to them.
floo@retrolemmy.com 17 hours ago
If one company is able to profit from the content of another, they should be fairly compensated. That’s what the law was about, and Facebook decided they didn’t wanna play that game.
NarrativeBear@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
What about search engines? These provide links as well.
eternacht@programming.dev 16 hours ago
Google does pay Canadian news companies to show their content.
Part of the issue is that Facebook and Instagram can show news stories without linking out to them, so users don’t get the opportunity to see the news companies’ ads or to sign up for a subscription.
floo@retrolemmy.com 17 hours ago
What I can imagine is a fair and equitable ecology of media sharing. While some commercial producers - as well and indie ones - would offer their content for free linking (perhaps with a daily/weekly quota) while others may work out mass licensing deals with the platform owner.
So, FB would pay an annual licensing fee to all of the content producers whose content it profits from.
FB is already built on hundreds of more complex systems that the one required for tracking license payment obligations.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 17 hours ago
The problem with that theory is that 99% of news are not by the company running the news website either. Not to mention that they wouldn’t get any traffic if nobody was allowed to link to them.
floo@retrolemmy.com 17 hours ago
That certainly does sound like a problem for Facebook, and that’s why they told Ken to fuck off and stopped publishing Canadian news.
That doesn’t make it right, and it’s certainly pretty shitty on that part of Facebook, who could easily afford to pay for the content that they make so much money from.