festus @ festus @lemmy.ca

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268

Joined

2 yr. ago

My worry is that there's so much NIMBYism against building housing so that if we slow down immigration for housing to catch-up then with the lower urgency we'll just not build.

For what it's worth I believe Meta should pay taxes here too - but let's tax them on their revenue and not on something arbitrary like how much traffic they send news organizations. That happens to be the view of Michael Geist as well - he'd rather that we just tax Meta & Google directly and then use the money to create a fund to support news organizations, instead of this roundabout way where we try to force them to pay some unknown amount of $ directly to the organizations.

My understanding (getting this all entirely from Michael Geist, who's been remarkably consistent advocating for an open internet for years now) is that the government's ability to set regulations for this bill are quite limited.

Now that the bill is passed and could take effect at any time, and that there really isn't much the government can offer in negotiations at this point, is that Meta is just moving on and putting all this behind them. From an implementation standpoint, Meta also needs time to make sure that their news blocking is done correctly as any bugs in that process after the law takes effect could be extremely costly.

Plus, the government and supporters of the bill are slowly being forced to realize that Meta wasn't lying when they said that they could live without news content. Engaging in a negotiation process, especially one that won't deliver what Meta wants, will only delay when the bill's supporters eventually recognize that the assumptions underpinning this bill (that Meta is stealing value from news organizations) were false.

From the text (very end of the bill):

180 days after royal assent

(6) Despite subsections (1) to (5), any provision of this Act that does not come into force by order before the 180th day following the day on which this Act receives royal assent comes into force 180 days after the day on which this Act receives royal assent.

The bill received royal assent on June 22nd, 2023, which actually means this law takes effect in December at the latest.

EDIT - I think we were updating our messages at the same time as I added the above before yours was finished.

I think it's clear that Meta would be covered if it links to news given this section:

This Act applies in respect of a digital news intermediary if, having regard to the following factors, there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news businesses:

(a) the size of the intermediary or the operator;

(b) whether the market for the intermediary gives the operator a strategic advantage over news businesses; and

(c ) whether the intermediary occupies a prominent market position.

7 (1) If this Act applies in respect of a digital news intermediary, its operator must so notify the Commission.

There's doesn't seem much room for Meta here - if they link to news they'll be covered by this law. The only possible escape might be in Section 11 where it allow the Governor in Council to write regulations that exempt organizations, and if the government is going to exempt Meta they might as well just repeal the law.

While I'm sure there are some messaging aspects to doing it early, it's worth pointing out that by January, unless the government repeals the law, Meta will be penalized for allowing links during emergencies. This specific law comes into operation regardless of whether the government has published any framework or not.

This is a power play protest about avoiding being subject to other countries’ law.

Meta is complying with this law. The idea behind the law was that Meta was stealing ad revenue from news organizations by linking to them, and that if they wanted to continue linking to them they needed to compensate news organizations. Meta has thus stopped 'stealing' the ad revenue. That's complying with the law. It did exactly what it was expected to do, in the same way that when you tax cigarettes you expect some people to cut back on smoking. Even better, Meta stopped 'stealing' before the law even came into force!

Seriously it's like there's nothing they can do to satisfy their critics - they get accused of stealing news so they stop it, and then they get accused of harming news sites by not stealing.

Which is it? Is Meta beneficial to news organizations or harmful to them? If harmful then there's no problem with Meta blocking news links. If beneficial, then maybe this is a dumb law that's akin to the government putting a tax on exercising.

Should they? Not if we punish them with fees for linking. I mean, imagine you're trying to warn your neighbours about an approaching fire and a police officer pulls up to tell you that you'll have to pay $50 for each neighbour you warn. I wouldn't blame you if you stopped, I'd blame whatever law stopped you. Similarly here, I don't blame Meta for not linking but I blame the government that will penalize Meta the moment any link points to a news outlet, emergency or not.

In addition there can also be serious legal implications for a company if they have workers working in another country. Is the company now subject to the tax laws of that country because the employee visited? How about labour laws? Do their products now need to be translated into another language because the employee worked while in that jurisdiction? Etc.

Musk 'lost' when he had to spend the $44 billion. I can totally believe that he's burning Twitter out of spite from having to buy it.

There was some TV show in the 2000s that was a workplace drama / comedy set in a warehouse (or like a Costco?) and I remember something about two characters making like a hide-out at the top of some shelves. Does anyone remember the name of that show?

Not really, no. I used Ubuntu Touch for about a year a few years ago and the method for running Android apps is essentially to run an emulator layer on the phone (anBox), which in practice is nearly unusable. It may have improved somewhat since then but I suspect you're still going to need a relatively beefy phone at minimum to run whatever solutions there are at a decent speed.

I like it but it's missing the low-quality 'non-fiction' relationship post porn I loved to binge on.

It's purely psychological and only of note to those that regularly convert between the ruble and USD. That doesn't mean it isn't unimportant though - many Russians may now change their behavior (like buying foreign currency ASAP, which can further weaken their currency).

Haha good point, eyebrows are okay.

I greatly despise all facial hair.

Disney+ (at least in Canada) gives a 15% discount if you pay for a year up-front.

Similar story. I was in the ER today and most staff weren't wearing masks, despite another patient just a few curtains down testing positive for Covid!

I think it's worth noting that news organizations are struggling not because less people are reading news but rather because advertising is so cheap now. When newspapers were the only advertising source they could charge high prices. Then TV came out which hurt them, but this was balanced by TV spending some money on journalism. Now with the internet the prices newspapers can charge for advertising is sooo much less than they could previously.

Anyway, I think it's worth noting this because there's this narrative that news organizations helped build up social media (and maybe deserve a cut). I mean really, how many people decided to make an Instagram account or Facebook account because CBC happened to have a page they could follow? Of the people I know who use Facebook or Instagram, none use it for news. This also means that utilizing social media to drive traffic may still be a good strategy - if the government hadn't effectively blocked that.

The bill penalizes Meta even if they link but do zero scraping. Regardless though, news organizations can breathe a sigh of relief as Meta is terminating the totally one-sided relationship where only Meta benefited at news organizations' expense.

And none the container names or link aliases conflict? Like you don't have multiple db containers? Perhaps try renaming the Nextcloud db to something like nextcloud_db if you aren't already.

No, because these licenses can't bind the copyright owner themselvess. AGPL is the terms that OwnCloud allows us access to it, but as it's their code they don't need a license to do whatever with it.

Let me put it another way - OwnCloud would be the only folks with standing to sue someone for violating the AGPL on their code. That means that the only people who could possibly sue OwnCloud for having a non-AGPL version is... OwnCloud. So even if the AGPL somehow claimed to bind the copyright owner it still wouldn't work legally as the copyright owner just has to not sue themselves.