Google and FB can easily drive 30%+ of a news site's traffic. If that's not value to a news site I don't know what is.

News agencies and websites have their content reproduced on Google Search and News. That's massive value for a search portal.

Publishers specifically provide that content however, via techniques like open graph. They already can control how much text or what images are displayed in results. They can also indicate they don't want indexing at all.

Yet they publish articles with the entire headline and backing images marked for free display on Google/Facebook. Almost like they are trying to help the search engines to attract traffic.

Then ban that, don't ban linking.

Who's banning linking? The new law tried to get tech companies to pay to show the links with previews (similar to Australia and France, etc).

To be clear, the bill is fundamentally broken. It would require Google or Facebook to pay simply when links to news sites are served, rather than for reproducing or condensing the material in the news article as a "preview" sort of be thing (as in other countries). The bill isn't banning links explicitly, but the government should have seen this coming.

> The bill isn't banning links explicitly, but the government should have seen this coming.

Perhaps they could have listened when the two companies they are trying to impose this on provide suggestions - or maybe modeled it more closely after legislation in other countries where such media taxes have been successful.

From the perspective of the newspapers:

Google is exploiting copyrighted content to make profit and create audience.

If the search index of Google was empty, the people wouldn't use Google, it's that simple.

So the newspapers are asking for royalties for feeding that search index.

But they could easily opt out with robots.txt. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the free traffic from search engines AND want google to pay them for the privilege of bringing them traffic.

robots.txt is not an actual Internet standard, and there are no standard controls for when a bot ignores its contents. You're on your own to protect your pages.

Granted, I have `disallow: /` in mine because I don't want my stuff scraped, but I still see Googlebot sometimes, and others, try to crawl my site.

It's not a very effective opt-out, because it requires the 'attacker' to honor the file's settings.

Feel free to enable it on your own server and watch the logs for a few days after sharing some links.

Have you tried crying about the fact that you are getting traffic to your website that nobody would see otherwise?

I hope daddy government treats you well.

Count on Big Brother to save you, and they will beat you down when it's time as well.

That's like demanding that Rand McNally pay a fee to each city they print onto their maps. Or demanding that World Book Encyclopedia pay a royalty fee to every entity they write an article about.

Noting that something exists and including it in reference material should by no means incur royalties.

As it turns out artists detest being paid in exposure and prefer money.

Paid for what? If Google and social media sites didn't send people to the news sites for free through links, then the news sites would have to pay for a lot more advertising to get the same visitors...

Traffic is money. But if you are right, I guess the media corporations don't care since as you said, mere exposure is worthless.

But they care a lot. So clearly that exposure must be worth something.

"Traffic is exposure"? What are you talking about? People see links in Google and FB, a significant amount click on those links and visit the news site. How does FB keep the ad revenue? Your comment makes no sense.

That makes no sense. Social media drives people to the news site. Google and social media aren't showing all or even large parts of the articles. If the news website fails to monetise those visits then it's their problem...

>News agencies have THEIR content posted on Facebook, giving it value, not the other way around.

The relevant legislation isn't just taxing the platforms for "content", it's taxing the platforms for merely linking to the content.

Facebook needs content, but it doesn't need news content.

In fact, you could probably make the case Facebook would be made better without news content. It's interesting that they chose to remove all news content for Canadians, rather than just Canadian news. I assume this was a good opportunity for them to try out some user testing.

> Facebook would be made better without news content.

This. Times 1000. My neighbor's cat's incredible Easter Island vacation photos are much more interesting that 1000 articles about presidential politics.

Facebook posts their content, and in return the agencies can run ads and beg for subscriptions from the traffic that Facebook drives to them. They both benefit.

Now nobody benefits.

People post links to their content. Not the content itself - this is a very strong misconception that has been at the heart of all of these bills and laws (Australia, this one, etc.) - from the start, there seems to be a determination to treat posting a link with maybe a headline and one sentence of preview as being the exact same thing as posting the entire article, which is incorrect and ludicrous!

Facebook doesn't post anything. These websites post things to their own pages and individuals post links to news articles.