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Canada says Google will pay $74 million annually to Canadian news industry under new online law
(www.independent.co.uk)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Obligatory fuck Facebook.
But reminder that laws like this would require link aggregator sites like Lemmy (or instance owners more specifically), to pay money simply for hosting links to news sites. Terrible law imo.
I think it's reasonable to require fees for rehosting an article or pictures on your web page, but charging just to have a url link is totally antithetical to the structure of the internet. If anything those links drive traffic to news websites, where they are free to host advertisements or require subscriptions.
Edit: as below this particular law won't affect lemmy servers. I still disagree with the idea that posting a hyperlink alone to a website should cost money.
The Canadian law in question has specific provisions in it that would pass any lemmy instance by.
source (archive)
That's literally half the country, by the way.
There was never any chance this law was going to impact any lemmy instances.
The astroturf is strong with these people.
The only groups affected by this law are the obscenely wealthy. It amounts to whining about having to pay more fair share. There are dozens of ways to see that happen; perhaps this isn’t the most efficient, but you won’t see me crying for Google, Meta, Twitter, or any other social media giant.