wvenable

Does your employer pay you by paying taxes and then government distributes them to you? If there was a real business here, then an arrangement would be made between Facebook and these news organizations. Facebook wouldn't want to lose out on the profit so they'd pay news agencies for the content. But the truth this, the news agencies are profiting far more than Facebook is from this arrangement. They literally need the government to step in because there is no actual business here.

The news agencies can absolutely pull out of Facebook. They can opt out of summaries and photos. But they don't.

If it doesn't drive traffic then the news sites shouldn't at all be worried about sites not linking to them anymore.

I'm going to keep with the old-school internet dweller opinion on this law.

And sure, hosting links to those news stories is mutually beneficial, except that almost no one clicks the links. The headline, teaser and photo are scraped and displayed on the third party app, and that’s all anyone cares to look at. We’re all to blame for not clicking, but those same tech companies are especially to blame for fostering this culture of five-second attention spans

News organizations have all the control in how their links are displayed. They can opt out of the teaser and photo, etc. They don't because nobody would click on the link if there wasn't a photo and teaser. Nobody would read the article at all now if there wasn't some way to find them -- this is a service provided to them. It's like charging news stands for people reading the headlines as they walk by!

Hating Facebook is one thing but siding with the corporate media monopoly that is using regulatory capture to keep their failing businesses afloat is not the solution.

The only reason foreign corporations are extracting the most profit from journalism is that the price of journalism is so low that the only way anyone can make money is aggregating it together by the millions. Why should I pay for some random person's opinion when I can just read your opinion for free. I can get real time video of situations from hundreds of people all at the same time. The market has fundamentally changed and it true Canadian tradition, a small monopoly of Canadian corporations have lobbied the government to keep them alive for another quarter. I'm not saying journalism is dead but, in the past, it was mostly profitable because of the monopoly of attention -- if you wanted to the read the news, you had maybe 2 local choices that got delivered to you in the morning. Now you're one click away from everything everywhere.

I don't believe their hosting costs are that high. But they did go from about 700 employees to somewhere around 2000 employees. I suspect a lot of their overhead is headcount.