Welp, if the Canadian government proved anything today, it's that the American government doesn't hold a monopoly on making ridiculously stupid remarks about things like news links, platforms, and technology in general: https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/CHPC/meeting-101/notice
https://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/Harmony/en/PowerBrowser/PowerBrowserV2?fk=12451690
This was after Meta dropped news links and 21 days away from Google presumably doing the same thing. There's no talking any sense to them, is there?
@freezenet what am i looking for here?
@mmasnick There's a video where there was a hearing at the Canadian House of Commons talking about how platforms like Google and Facebook are somehow evading the law by dropping news links among other things. The second link is the direct link to the video. Michael Geist was on the panel and seemed like the voice of reason for the most part, but others were there making all kinds of absurd claims.
@mmasnick One of the claims during the opening statements was that Facebook has full editorial control over users content. That guy said the evidence of this is the fact that Facebook dropped news links in Canada, so, therefore, they can control everything that appears on their platform. It's... insane some of the stuff that came out of that hearing.
@freezenet of course, now that google caved... it undermines basically everything else.
@mmasnick Hmm, I was away from the computer for much of the day and had no idea that a deal was struck. Will look into it.
@mmasnick From the sounds of things, it looks like the Canadian government pretty caved to Google on virtually everything. Google was always open to a fund model and that's generally what they got. I guess if a deal was going to get struck at all, Google would end up getting most of what they asked for. Makes sense since they held all the cards throughout it all.
Sure, it would've been ideal for Google to just pull news links altogether, but I get to keep my job after all.