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Unpaid-for links:

Bill C-18 at Justice.ca

CTV’s Explanation

Read more: Bill C-18, a fools’ legislation.

A Turkish folktale tells of a beggar attempting to capture the smell of a vendor’s cooking soup with his last piece of stale bread. The shopkeeper demanded payment, but the beggar had no money. The town’s judge decided the shopkeeper’s smell of soup should be paid with the sound of money, so he took two coins out of his own pocket and rattled them. Today, the Canadian government has demanded that large internet companies like Meta and Google that share Canadian news content pay news companies for sharing links to their news. It is very much like trying to force them to pay for the smell of soup.

When I share news online, I typically copy the hyperlink to the news story and paste it on my Facebook page. An image and lead are generated. When someone clicks on my post, they are redirected to the news story on the news site. The news story is not copied into Facebook’s post, there is no text, there is no content, there is no plagiarism, and there is no copyright infringement. There is only a hyperlink back to the source material. It is virtually no different than me telling someone verbally, “Hey, check out the news story about Bill C-18 on CBC’s website.” or CTV’s. or The Globe and Mail’s. or wherever I tell them to go. I am not sharing news; I am not printing out the story and peddling it on a street corner; I am just saying, hey, you might want to check it out and here’s where to go. Nobody would ever dream of making me pay CBC for sharing that information. Meta and Google are not sharing news content; they are sharing links to information. Links are the sound of that information.

The free sharing of links is how the internet works. This Open Web concept is deeply ingrained, and it works to everyone’s benefit. Information is made more available and easier to find, discussion, debate, and of course the associated trolling are enhanced, and the world is much more connected than before the web. Bill C-18 levies a price on the sharing of information. Imagine a world where all links need to be compensated. It would be the end of the Open Web as we know it.

If you do not want your online presence freely shared, you build your own paywall (or firewall) to control the flow and sharing. Anyone is free to do this. It is your information, you can control access to it. You can even prevent sharing of it. You can tell your internet service to only accept direct requests and block any hits from other sites. This is rarely done, because sites want traffic. News sites do not do this because they want as many visits as they can get.

*Did you know that copying a news article for a school paper or project is considered plagiarism but sharing a link to the source is not? That’s because a link is the sound or smell of information, not the information itself.

Proponents of the C-18 Bill complain that Meta and Google earn money from sharing news links through advertising revenue and have become multi-billion-dollar companies doing so, but Canadian news providers are struggling to exist. It’s unfair for Meta and Google to earn money on the backs of news companies’ links.

And why should Meta and Google have to pay for only news material? Why shouldn’t they have to pay me for my blog articles? I’ve had a few hits; I’ve generated revenue for Facebook and Instagram. Why should they not pay me for the images I create? And why not pay me for my opinions and local observations? I mean, dozens of hits are generated every time I post something of my own. Why shouldn’t they pay me for discussing American football or nutrition science or the latest political cretin’s speech? My activity makes them money. Shouldn’t they share their ad revenue with me?

If every link had to be paid for, that would be the end of the internet as we know it. Do I really need to say any more? An internet where every link needs to be compensated is the opposite of open sharing. Bill C-18 is on one hell of a slippery slope.

I am not against earning money with web content. Many do it. Meta and Google are multi-billion dollar companies because of it. But money, whether it is advertising, a paywall, or sales should be generated at the source of the information. If Canadian news services are struggling, they need to look at their own practices. We cannot suffer an ignorant government breaking the internet.

Have you visited CBC’s website? CTV’s? any Canadian newspapers? How much advertising did you find? How many paywalls did you hit? I visited many sites. Some sites like the Telegraph Journal in New Brunswick are fully paywalled, some sites like the Globe and Mail have paywall restrictions where you have to pay for premium content, some sites have some advertising but nothing like in American news sites, and some news sites have any no advertising at all, including CBC and CTV, Canada’s two biggest news sources. Why don’t news companies in Canada advertise? Is it too demeaning? Is it too American? Does it make their pages ugly? Why should they receive money from Meta’s advertising efforts when they won’t do any of the work themselves?

There will be unintended consequences of such a bill.

  • The biggest risk is other governments will try the same. Give this movement enough momentum, the free sharing of information could be in jeopardy. The internet as we know it today could cease to exist and we’d be living in a glorified 1970’s view of the world where only the wealthy can afford to find anything online.
  • Have you ever seen online robot posts? I am in some Facebook food groups, and every such group has robotic members that constantly post recipes that are found on their own pay-for-view sites where their advertisers pay for hit frequency – the more people that visit their page the more they earn. These fake accounts generate massive amounts of links to their site. Once Meta and Google are required to pay for the sound of news, you can be sure the pernicious news providers – and according to many conspiracy theorists, CBC is the most pernicious – will create robotic accounts to generate post after post after post to their content. Why would Meta and Google make a contract for something like this that they cannot control?
  • And why just Meta and Google? Why shouldn’t everyone who shares news links have to pay? Email a news link to friends, and your email provider should be charged; post a link in a blog, and the blog host should have to pay — if that were the case, I sure wouldn’t be allowed to post the two informative links at the top of this blog; text news to a friend, and your phone company should have to pay; yell the story from a street corner, cough up some cash. When sharing services have to pay, we’ll all have to pay. Again, the free-sharing of information would come to an end.
  • Pick-and-choose laws like this will not stand up in court. If you apply a standard of payment to one service or industry, you are obligated to apply that standard to all such services and industries. It cannot be done without destroying the open web, and hopefully, this bill will die in the first court it gets challenged in.

The World Wide Web was designed for the free sharing of information and links. It has enabled access to huge audiences for information providers, and companies like Google and Meta have certainly cashed in on that accessibility. But don’t punish success; only we users will suffer.

Meta and Google have greatly expanded traffic to news provider sites. If news organizations are struggling to survive, maybe they should try advertising on their own sites and maybe they should be expanding their own online presence.

Meta has done the right thing by not allowing links to news for Canadians. If the Canadian government wants to charge them for the link to news, Meta has said we’ll pay you with the sound of clicks. It cannot allow a journey down this dark path to a paywalled web.