Canada says Google will pay $74 million annually to Canadian news industry under new online law::Canada’s government says it has reached a deal with Google for the company to contribute $100 million Canadian dollars annually to the country’s news industry
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is bad news for everyone who is using the internet.
What gets defined as the “news industry” and who gets to define it? We already have too much foreign owned corporate news media in this country so how much of that money will just go right into the hands of the propagandists to tip the scales further in their favour?
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.
It’s about time Canada got some of that internet money that it so rightly deserve.