Canada wildfire evacuees say Facebook’s news ban ‘dangerous’ in emergency situation::The ongoing fight between tech company Meta and the federal government over subsidizing news publishers means links to news sources are being blocked on sites like Facebook and Instagram. Wildfire evacuees in the Northwest Territories say that’s making it harder to share life-saving information during an emergency.
The downvotes are weird. Seems like a large block of people are ready to destroy the Web because it harms Facebook.
I think that’s correct, a lot of people also just buy into the allegations that Meta/Google are freeloading and harming on Canadian news and do indeed not care because it’s big tech.
The reality is that neither of those companies are required to provide news content, especially Meta who don’t even have a news service at all, just people sharing the news and the link preview opening up using HTML tags that they literally invented for companies to be able to control how the link previews expand on Facebook.
Also a point nobody is talking about is that the legal system forces them to protect their bottomline or they’re liable to be sued by shareholders for failing their fiduciary obligations. If we want good guy companies we need to protect them for being good. Same as if you don’t fight for your patents and trademarks, you can lose them, which forces companies to hit on small companies they’d otherwise be okay with.
In all cases, there’s literally nothing preventing media companies from keeping up with the times. They could just spin up a Mastodon like the BBC did in the UK. Bam, they have their own social media where people could get all the news in a way they control and pocket 100% of the revenue. But no, the conversation is entirely centered around extracting money from big tech, not about making a bill that’s fair and equal for companies of any size. Big tech bad, must harm big tech.
Then we wonder why big tech pulls out of Canada and we whine about it.
TechDirt wrote an article titled “Do People Want A Better Facebook, Or A Dead Facebook?” back in 2019. I feel like that tells you that a fair number of people won’t be happy with Facebook even existing, no matter if the position that it’s taking is one they would normally agree with (ie not having to pay to link to something). Sadly, I think you may be right that some might take the pyrrhic victory, even at the cost of linking on the web.