Canadian lawmakers are locked in a dispute with internet technology companies over a law that would compel them to pay news publishers for content, years after a similar regulatory saga played out in Australia.
Some reflections on the Australian experience and what they might mean for Canada.
After Google’s move on Thursday, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez sent a written statement calling the companies’ moves “deeply irresponsible and out of touch … especially when they make billions of dollars off of Canadian users” with advertising.
Australia’s regulatory experiment – the first of its kind in the world – also got off to a rocky start, but it has since seen tech companies, news publishers and the government reach a middle ground.
The government should be providing basic communication services. It’s criminal that private companies like Twitter are the de facto alert and information system for life saving government services. That kind of infrastructure needs to be socialized. Likewise we should have channels for publishing journalism that are not controlled by private capital.
Especially now that I can’t even click on a twitter link without being asked to create an account and log in. It’ll be chaos if some big situation is going on and people without twitter accounts are scrambling to find critical information from other sources.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !canada@lemmy.ca
The government should be providing basic communication services. It’s criminal that private companies like Twitter are the de facto alert and information system for life saving government services. That kind of infrastructure needs to be socialized. Likewise we should have channels for publishing journalism that are not controlled by private capital.
I 100% agree with you.
It’s crazy that our gov is even using Facebook or Twitter for advertising their message. Why not use the fediverse instead ?!
Or just RSS and a blessed set of clients for consuming it
Especially now that I can’t even click on a twitter link without being asked to create an account and log in. It’ll be chaos if some big situation is going on and people without twitter accounts are scrambling to find critical information from other sources.