We appear to be standing our ground!
Not my preferred choice of source but NatPo has more detail than some of the alternatives I saw. It includes some numbers as well as comments about the difference between Meta’s and Google’s approaches. Hint: they’re not the same, so there’s already cracks in the effort to make an example out of Canada.
I strongly recommend the book “The Four” by Scott Galloway. He does an excellent job of breaking down how the Four Horsemen (Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook) destroy regional competition by leveraging their power as content gateways yet constantly skirt regulations that apply to broadcasters. Their cries of “we’re not a broadcaster, we’re just an aggregator” ring hollow when their algorithms determine what articles & headlines people see and they have shaped public opinion on various topics (e.g. elections, supreme court decisions, labour negotiations, public demonstrations, etc). He outlines how Google outmaneuvered the NYT and became the defacto gateway to all journalistic content because they were able to freely link to content created by others, while still putting an editorial spin on stories through their aggregation (eg should the story talking about “BLM protestors” appear before or in place of the story about “counter-racism demonstators” (narrator: they are the same story).
In fairness, they are probably more like newspapers, which are also not subject to broadcasting laws. In fact, I was reading through some newspaper archives (early 1900s) the other day. The newspapers contained pages upon pages of:
“Mr. and Mrs. James Smith hosted friends from the next town over this past weekend. A good time was had by all.”
It turns out Facebook was invented centuries ago.
Might have to check that out.
Keep in mind my main opinion is that the LAW is written so broad and bad that it would essentially penalize any competitor to google or Facebook as a linking source.
The internet is literally based on linking, way back Netscape Navigator was THE BROWSER, and included a homepage with links to news and sites, then there was Yahoo, another mostly LIST based site.
Facebook doesn’t really go out and link news, users share news they discover with others, IE word of mouth.
Any manipulation of rank I see as a separate issue, however this bill seems to convolute the two of them. Might be better as a separate bill about search bias, one about content summarization and lets drop the whole pay per link thing.
Like many bills that have GOOD parts we have to look at the whole and many bills and laws are just turd sandwiches…