Interesting article with some unexpected nuance.

Great move on the part of the BBC. Given all the issues on Twitter, hopefully the CBC will also make a move to Mastodon. I recall when Her Excellency the Right Honourable Mary Simon, Governor General of Canada, closed comments on Twitter due to abusive garbage, that I wrote her office and suggested Mastodon. Alas, they did not follow through. But hopefully this move from the BBC will inspire some of our Canadian institutions (particularly the CBC) to reconsider and to make the move to the fediverse.

No loss for me. I don’t give a rat’s ass about AI chatbots. And I myself have excluded Google from my online activities. I use Debian Linux. My phone has LineageOS without Google Play Services – instead I use apps from f-droid, including OsmAnd~ for mapping. I never use Google search (I rely on DuckDuckGo). Any YouTube videos I may wish to view I use either FreeTube or Invidious (the latter via the Firefox addon LibRedirect). For translation, it’s LibreTranslate. If I wish to see news articles I’ll go directly to media sites such as The Star, The Globe and Mail, CBC, or via the news search on DuckDuckGo. Anyone who is still allowing themselves to be a product of Google is misguided, as far as I’m concerned.

The law makes sense to me. He says, regarding Google, that “Linking is what a search engine does.” But Google, as we know, is gleaning information from users, who are its product, to sell to advertisers (for more targeted advertising.)

So, links are not its business. Links are props to attract the product (us, its users) to it, to prepare us to be sold. Like all other businesses (IE, pubs) that have props (IE, barstools), Google should pay for some of its props.