The Online News Act passed last Thursday and would force platforms like Google and Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, to strike deals with Canadian media publishers for sharing, previewing and directing users to online Canadian news content.
It does include just linking.
Indexing includes showing a basic result in search. Plus you can’t show a normal search results without pulling at least a portion of the news content. I can only assume the author and those that voted for this have literally never searched for a news article online before.
That’s just a horrible decision all around. It’s blatantly obvious that this will hurt the producers of the content far more than help. Why is it that the people making decisions about the internet always seem to have never used it?
I really wonder if this would effect individuals such as ourselves that post/share news links on social media platforms as well.
Could you imagine your Grandma needing to pay a fee to post a news article on her Facebook wall? 😂