Don’t be misled. This is not government trying to protect Canadian journalism. This is a few rich, mostly billionaire-owned telecom/media companies working as hard as they can to keep out competition.
It’s not Google’s fault that Canadian media oligopolists have no interest in paying for good journalism. Their only interest is in continuing to profit from lackluster offerings while holding down the pay of journalists by ensuring they have very few employment options in the country.
I'm pretty sure a link tax is a terrible idea anyway, but how does charging google a tax for linking to news articles prevent journalists from working for other news companies or starting their own?
I hope this short comment gets the up votes it deserves. Access to news information is a boon. Restricting it is a step backwards. If lack of access dissuades people from finding information, the people as a whole will be more likely to see an unbalanced picture and be less well informed overall.
Which, as it turns out, is exactly what the government and large business syndicates that fund it (Rogers & Bell & co in this scenario) want. An open internet is a very dangerous thing to people in power worldwide.
That seemed to be the message I was getting; spent last week in Toronto and one of the major private broadcasters was running a lot of ads saying "Nasty American platforms won't allow you to see news, so download our apps to see it instead."
Meanwhile, I was pleasantly surprised to see the CBC app festooned with links to low-bandwidth versions of content for regions under wildfire advisories. I appreciate that they understood that emergency situations call for something a bit different than "we have 23 extra pixels, can we cram another banner ad in?"
Any time you come across the tired "billionaires are evil" line, you are likely dealing with some sort of political rhetoric instead of an actual argument/position.
As-if there's any practical difference between a billionaire-owned publication and a millionaire-owned publication within this context.
> This is a few rich, mostly billionaire-owned telecom/media companies working as hard as they can to keep out competition.
There's many holes in this particular argument, such as non-billionaire owned publications - are they incapable of astroturfing and gatekeeping? Absolutely not, of course.
I agree, the link tax idea is bad already - we do not need to add cliché talking points into the mix.
As an aside, I personally find it interesting how this mantra started off as "millionaires and billionaires" being evil, until the movement's leader became an overnight millionaire himself. Now, apparently, it's just billionaires that are evil.
Canada's billionaires are akin to Russia's oligarchs, they're leveraging personal connections with the elite to have effectively taxation power on the population. Whether you like American style billionaires, the Canafian ones are not the same thing, more like kleptocrats which is why they've got the government pushing for this tax.
> As an aside, I personally find it interesting how this mantra started off as "millionaires and billionaires" being evil, until the movement's leader became an overnight millionaire himself. Now, apparently, it's just billionaires that are evil.
Not sure who you're referring to, but I think it's more likely that, thanks to inflation and other "growth", a far larger portion of the population have reasonable expectations to be "millionaires" on paper in their lifetimes. Even by now the word covers much of the upper middle class by the end of their career (the median US net worth at end-of-career age is ~$250k [0]). All else held equal the median peak wealth could reasonably cross $1M in the next 40 years, and of course half of the population will be above that.
Maybe the more apt word is "oligarch", but the West prefers to deny having those.
After a failed Presidential Campaign, Bernie Sanders became a millionaire due to a very lucrative book deal[1]. Overnight, he dropped the millionaire bit from his stump speech, converting what used to be a screed against "Millionaires and Billionaires" to just "Billionaires"[2].
His base didn't seem to notice, and slid right into the modified "billionaires are evil" mantra. The hypocrisy is amazing to see.
While the formal definition of a millionaire or billionaire is based on net worth and assets, I think the issue is likely "philosophical" billionaires.
It's a fundamentally different lifestyle, culture, and philosophy.
We can tell the difference between "Inherited Grandpa's house in Los Angeles, net worth $1.4M, hobbies include PC gaming and woodworking" from "Owns the lion's share of a mining conglomerate, net worth $680M, hobbies include holding Congress hostage to preserve his future revenue streams."
The resurgence of this screed as a political movement was a creation owed to Bernie Sanders, without any doubt. He made is fashionable.
At the time, the "millionaires and billionaires" thing went global, and subsequently, when he dropped billionaires from his screed, so did the rest of the world.
So much of global political trends follow the US. See the various Trumpesque figures that popped up seemingly in every country, and note that despite the country of origin, you will only hear about evil billionaires these days.
I think the point is that this is being sold by the government as them against big evil (billionaire) tech companies. When in fact it's genesis is the lobbying of local billionaires.
So let's discard the billionaire card, and discard the government's equally clique angle: we are against Facebook so we are right and don't look any closer.
>Don’t be misled. This is not government trying to protect Canadian journalism. This is a few rich, mostly billionaire-owned telecom/media companies working as hard as they can to keep out competition.
IIRC, a few big Canadian youtubers like Linus and Mutahar, who went into details on this, threatening to leave Canada. Yeah it's definelty bs that reeks of corporate protectionism.
> It’s not Google’s fault that Canadian media oligopolists have no interest in paying for good journalism.
Crap journalism is not a uniquely Canadian problem. I would argue that like in most things we lag a bit behind the states (US journalism leads the pack in volume of crap per unit of time).
The internet and specifically advertising (and classifieds) is absolutely a big part of what caused a massive reduction of quality journalism. Google is also definitely part of this problem as most people's gateway to the internet and basically the largest advertising company in the world. Inevitable though for sure (if not Google, then someone else). I don't know about the rest of your post, but this statement at least is a bit distracting.
I should add that I think the Canadian link tax idea is doomed before it even begins. It's also kind of funny that our (Canadian) answer to everything is to just tax it... sigh.
This is a nice example of the terrible decision making that goes on in the Canadian government. Canada is a lovely country, filled with hard working, friendly people, that kind of chug along in spite of the disastrous leadership by those in power.
Exactly! Don’t just blame politicians for this. I have had multiple heated arguments with my idiotic compatriots over this one. They don’t get it at all! They just stand on the sidelines and cheer:
“Yay Government! You stand up to those big tech bullies! Boooo Facebook and boooo Google!”
Correction: Canada is a country with a small number of large cities that determine the national government. There are whole regions of the country that have no representative voice within the governing parties.
They also should not be worth more depending on how many neighbors live nearby you.
The balancing act is quite difficult: voting advantage to less populous areas may improve land stewardship (protecting against tyranny of the majority ruining large areas of land due to a minority of people who would have to live with the consequences there) but it would be quite negative to enhance votes to wealthy land owners in particular while doing so (given that a good chunk of the few who live in rural areas own huge amounts of land and thus capital already).
I honestly do not know the best solution, and I agree that "citizens in less densely populated areas get more or stronger votes" by itself does little to solve it, but I also guarantee that "everyone gets one vote issue over" also does not solve it.
In these cases, usually the simplest solution is best, because none are perfect and trying to "engineer" perfect in politics (and economics) is doomed since there is no objectivity.
That often ends up completely eliminating several viewpoints and regions from national politics. Who gives a crap about something that affects farmers? There's like 10,000 of them. You could get that many votes with a billboard in a big city.
Looking at Canada's population distribution, you could win an election with just 82% of the votes in Quebec and Ontario or 67% of those + British Columbia.
The intent of these systems are for the people to be represented in and governed by their province, and their province to be represented in and governed by the federal government. Everyone and everything is equally represented to the governing body above them, but not necessarily to the level above that.
Tangentially, the federal government is meant to primarily rule over the provinces, not the people. Laws are supposed to be passed at that level by a majority of the provinces, not of the people. Quebec has every right to pass whatever law it wants to rule over its people, but what right does it have to use its large population to subject Manitoba or Prince Edward Isles to whatever rules it wants?
It breeds divisiveness. Why would Nunavut or Manitoba still want to be part of Canada if their votes don't matter in any conceivable way? Even banded together, they're 3.7% of the population and no politician is going to listen to them. Nunavut is 85% Inuit; it wouldn't shock me if their political inclinations are different than Quebec/Ontario both due to cultural differences and geographical differences. Why wouldn't they just try to go back to having their own tribal government, since the federal system has devalued their input to nothing?
Federal systems are meant to let provinces emphasize the needs of their own citizens, and to let provinces be unique as a result of their population.
> Looking at Canada's population distribution, you could win an election with just 82% of the votes in Quebec and Ontario or 67% of those + British Columbia.
The governing party got 33% of the votes country wide. They govern like a majority because of a supply of confidence deal with a party that got 15% of the vote. The party that got the most votes at 34% essentially had no power. This all worked out because the winning party won a lot of seats in Ontario.
Do you think it would be drastically different if the NDP ceased to be, or would actual-NDP voters likely bite the bullet and vote Liberal should their party drop out? More directly: FPTP is a problem, but the Conservatives wouldn't have won the last federal election regardless.
...within the region the person lives so as to avoid a few large clumps of city dwellers living on 2% of the land area ruling it all over the 'rednecks' in the 98% 'flyover country'. Those city dwellers would not like to have countryfolk lording it over them either so why should the opposite be taken as a given? This may work for a small country like the Netherlands where a fast cyclist can cross the whole country within a day but it does not for a large one like Canada where there are provinces the size of large countries with a population less than a large town - Nunavut covers a larger area than Mexico with a population below 40.000.
A better solution would be to split the vote into a few parts, each relating to specific areas of government. National matters - national defence, international relations, more or less the core tasks of a narrowly defined "small government" - can go directly according to the 1 person/1 vote principle and as such will be shaped by city dwellers. Regional (or 'state' in USA terms) matters are a different story, here it makes more sense to let the people living in the region have enough of a voice to be truly represented without being outnumbered by the large voting blocks in a few large cities on the other side of the country. Local matters should be decided by those living in the directly affected area - city, town or county.
This ends up looking quite a lot like the structure theoretically used in the USA which also shows the problems which arise when such a model is used with larger governmental domains - national and state - expanding their powers by taking them away from lower levels.
It's actually the opposite [1]. The largest ridings tend to be in the largest cities and vice-versa. Remote areas like Nunavut and Labrador have way fewer electors in their ridings than the big population centres, by a factor of over 6. So a vote in Nunavut is worth 6 in Brantford.
How many seats do the "small number of large cities" have compared to the rural parts of the country? I would argue the rural parts have more seats hence determine who gets in power.
A lot of democratic votes in the west recently, end up on the wire, where you have to vote for the known crook just so the fascist doesn't win. So not an ideal situation that results in a competent, efficient and incorruptible government.
I think a big problem in the West is we don’t have great leaders anymore. The election is between a few nincompoops that all make you kind of sick to your stomach. Where are the Winston Churchill’s or the Abraham Lincoln’s?
Churchill wouldn't be a great leader in current politics. It doesn't work that way. You get 'great leaders' when you lead your nations events, and 99% of the time those are major wars.
Churchill was a marginally important political figure until he basically lucked into premiership in WW2.
Lincoln came to power over a particular issue, resolved that issue in a war and got killed.
Neither of those things are happening. And with Churchill its questionable how good he was other then basically deciding not to surrender.
Even if you look at FDR, he came to power during a great economic downturn but by the end of his second term, if not for WW2, he would be remembered very differently. The economy wasn't doing well. And his initial upswing happened mostly because he came into power when the Great Depression was very much ending.
Ornery times when leaders face long term issues like population, immigration and climate change will simply not produce such leaders. And the leaders who do handle these topics well are almost never actually popular and are not guaranteed to win many reelections.
Well sort of, except the distortions of First Past the Post and regionalism mean that some votes are more valuable than other votes.
This has direct outcomes on the legislation that the government produces.
In this particular case of this particular legislation, we have the government focusing strongly on an issue of particular importance in Quebec, because those seats are critically important for them remaining government.
If we had a proportional representation system then regionalism wouldn't be as important and we'd see the government focus on different policy objectives.
Shut up with that… you vote for the least worst option you got in a full panel of… 2? 5? Maybe 10 people? If you don’t vote, it’s held against you, but when someone is elected it’s somehow your fault and you deserve it? Even if you didn’t vote for that person? Even if you voted for them and it happens they were lying? You make no sense, and this whole rhetoric makes no sense.
“Fully democratic” implies this is as good as it gets, yet no one is happy with it. The so called democratic process objectively sucks.
> The so called democratic process objectively sucks.
It's not the democratic process that's the issue, it's the first-past-the-post. Fortunately the party to win the 2015 election vowed: "To make sure that every vote counts, the Government will undertake consultations on electoral reform, and will take action to ensure that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.", so it must be fixed...
Depends how you determine “democratic”. The current government is the outcome of less than 30% of the people voting for them. If that’s democracy then I don’t have much hope for it.
The Caveat being that we use first past the post, so the majority of the (already poor % of) votes get tossed, and we end up in a situation like we're in now where the party with the most seats actually lost the election. They also all lie through their teeth, so you have no idea what you're voting for, and can't kick them out for 4 years. That's all without mentioning that a vote in Quebec or PEI is worth way more than a vote in Alberta or BC.
Do they? Some 70-80% of the time, it’s the liberal party. That makes Canada almost a single party democracy. On top of that majority governments have almost unchecked power. When the government in power is a good one, they can really get things done. But I don’t think I was even alive the last time that happened. When the government is a bad one, they have unchecked incompetence. I’ve seen a lot of that, including when the liberals are not in power.
This kind of drive by shit posting is pretty unfortunate. All countries have pros and cons. As a Canadian I am opposed to this bill, and don't love the current government. But we have this government to avoid having an even worse one.
People here typically vote to avoid a particular party getting in power rather than for a given party. If we got rid of first past the post and adopted some form of proportional representation maybe we'd have a better time of it, but every government who promises to do that (including this particular one), break that promise. It's hard to blame the voters for the state of our voting system.
As for elsewhere, aside from possibly some places in Europe, Canada is pretty damn good in my eyes. I suppose if you don't care about having healthcare for everyone and other social protections and instead just focus on making money there could be better places, but that's certainly not my cup of tea.
Canadian government just keeps taking Ls in this saga. Facebook and Google aren't going to give in to your extortion. Linking to websites is free, and always will be. Just kill the bill so everyone can move on.
They won't see foreign sources either, the bill applies to showing news in Canada rather than just Canadian news. They'll have to visit sources directly.
Is it desired? Probably not, but there could be silver linings. Fewer governments posting important information exclusively on social media, for example, and people being conditioned to look directly to news sources for their news.
I know that people like to hate on social media, and for good reason. But remember when it was encouraged that people look to multiple sources in order to find the truth somewhere in the middle? Yes you can still do that without social media but ...
Social media is a multi-source aggregator and then some.
I know there have been charges of social media creating echo chambers. But consider who made those charges to begin with. Typically traditional media.
And people who don't take conscious active measures to expose themselves to a broad point of view are just going to stick to their comfortable world-affirming sources anyway like they did before social media.
Something to consider is that when virtually every single person now carries around a video camera with them 24/7, with the ability to instantly upload footage to a potentially unlimited audience ... what use is there for traditional journalists in the majority of cases?
We still desperately need investigative journalism that uncovers events not widely exposed. But when there's a car accident, a fire, a weather alert? Why rely on your local NBC or Fox news outlet? What's the benefit to getting information plus spin when you can just get the raw first-hand footage from the people who were there? And not only do you get it without bias, you get it faster.
The bill is not about social media, but the fundamental sharing of information on the internet. Google searches are affected as well. As are aggregators like Reddit (and HN). And literally everywhere else that can display a link in text form. The only criteria (for now) is the company's revenue.
It's not clear to me how this is "taking an L" in any way.
The only people I know who think getting news from fucking facebook of all places are boomers caught up in the doomscrolling dopamine treadmill who are also caught up in the milquetoast Canadian version of MAGA.
Forcing people to go outside their shitty echo chambers for news seems like an astronomical win.
It's taking an L in the sense that the government doesn't want Facebook to ban news, they want Facebook to pay for linking news. Forcing people to leave their shitty echo chambers is good, but it's the opposite of what the government wants in this case.
You need to go out and meet more people then. Upwards of 50% of an average news website's referrals come from Google. Add in Meta products (FB, Instagram, Whatsapp) and that can easily cross 70%-80%. All that traffic is about to drop down to 0 in the coming weeks.
Well this bill is not about facebook, but links posted anywhere on the internet. Google is also blocking Canadian news from search, news and other products. Sites like Reddit will follow if they cross $1B in revenue.
My point was that the person was specifically disparaging Facebook users, although the text of the bill is also not remotely as clear as it should be.
The entire entity of Facebook (not meta) could go away tomorrow and the only people who'd care are probably the ones who voted this government in, property boomers and their forgotten gen x offspring.
The rest would just switch their messaging platform if they use messenger, and go back to Craigslist for classifieds.
Edit: To clarify, I'm still being hyperbolic. All kinds of people voted for all kinds of candidates, but in my city most of the extremely wealthy neighborhoods voted for Liberal candidates, so it's a bit fun to poke at. Likewise, the only people I personally know who still use Facebook directly for anything unrelated to selling stuff or direct messaging, are just quite a lot older
Facebook has 4 billion active users across the world. They are not all "boomers" and whatever else you want to call them. There will be much more negative impact on the world if all Facebook properties disappeared tomorrow then all of Canadian news media put together.
You keep roping in other properties into this, if you want to do that, use their parent company name. 4b users on facebook as in Facebook seems a bit of a reach to me at this point. 4b on all properties, ya maybe. Either way, while I could see it having a negative impact, it would mostly be as an advertising platform, and the net positive of that going away might bring it to neutral.
I know it's imused in some places as their primary messaging service or something, but it seems likely they're not doing much unique here.
Maybe I'm looking for logic where there is none, but could someone explain what, precisely, the CA gov't is proposing to tax here? Is it a percentage of revenue from any ads that appear on the same page as a news link? A percentage of global ad revenue even if the ads are on different pages than the news links? Just Canadian news links or what?
Also, what is "news"? Do links to Hacker News count?
Would, let's say, a blog about cars based in another country get a tax bill from Canada if it ran ads and also included a link to a news site somewhere in its content? What if users post a news link in the blog's comments?
Do "real" news sites have to pay tax for links to other news sites?
The mind reels once you start thinking about all the potential gray areas in something so vague. But maybe it's simple and I'm just missing the core concept. What the hell is going on here?
Don't try to find sense in the hundreds of pages of meaningless legalese. They are nothing but a reverse justification of a single directive – the Canadian government simply wants Google and Facebook to pay 4% of their annual revenue to Rogers, Bell and CBC.
The law only applies to businesses deemed by the government's regulatory agency (CRTC) to be "news intermediaries". So far, it looks like only Facebook and Google will be covered by this. The law has guidelines on who qualifies as a "news intermediary", and it requires you to be of a certain size (large revenues), so this isn't going to apply to Joe Blogger's Car News.
The whole bill C11 is the scariest form of censorship that is sold as some national pride benefit. Control over information is only tightening with this new link tax to line up Google and other social media to the party line.
I was little confused after reading the article exactly how this would work. I checked out the actual regulations and found this formula and explanation:
> (Intermediary global revenue) × (Canadian share of global GDP [≈2%]) × (Contribution rate [4%])
Proxy for “Canadian revenue”
Intermediary global revenue
This figure refers to the annual global revenue of a digital news intermediary. It excludes other unrelated revenues from the company operating the intermediary.
Doesn't seem like a very fair or accurate way to implement it regardless of whether this is a good idea or not.
There is the clear subtext here that the current Canadian government are desperate to be able to control the narrative heading into the next elections, which may still be years away.
I can get weather from satellites, traffic from platforms, local crime from social media, regulatory changes from professionals and blogs, and markets from market data. So long as we can get news from outside the country, news within Canada doesn't matter because it's all state narrative anyway. For an increasing number of people, mainstream news outlets offer nothing of value.
Just today I ran into a random hiker in the woods and the conversation turned immediately to political corruption and how the media won't touch it. The govt in Canada likely wants the internet and news restrained, as they need to pull some things and probably don't want the news to foment popular cross border support again. Sure, link tax, whatever, there is no expectation the media or government are anything but hollow facades for some minority interests that have captured them. The popular mood talking to people in the street is very dark.
Canada O Canada. When will thou learn. Innovation has to be created in the country. That is the only way out of the mess you find yourself in. And it will only get worse.
The language of the bill is "makes available." It is intentionally broad.
> digital news intermediary means an online communications platform, including a search engine or social media service, that is subject to the legislative authority of Parliament and that makes news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada.
A URL is not "new content". I really don't see how they can interpret it as such. And if they are not sure, they should ask. Or is the issue that they have asked and have not received clarification?
I once had a post removed from Facebook (not sure if it was DMCA, but it was a copyright claim). My offense: I had linked to a page that linked to a page with pirated content.
Of course, the reporter had zero copyright claim on the URL I posted. But that didn't matter at the end of the day. And expecting politicians to willingly understand this instead of doing big political posturing is serious wishful thinking, I'm afraid.
Where does "new content" come from? I'm confused as to what part of the legislation makes the concept of "new content" relevant or important. The part of the legislation that I copied for you does not include the words "new content." It's about "making news content available."
A bare URL alone I think yeah very arguably isn't news content, but a URL wrapping a headline and a photo is certainly news content. Generally we're seeing the latter.
The URL can have a headline and I think even an image - no "wrapping" necessary. This will allow a publication to specify exactly what content social media can present. If they present more, they are in violation and should be fined. Seems a good compromise to me. And perhaps that will be the agreement that allows both sides to get what they want. So perhaps C-18 will prove beneficial for forcing the two parties together.
Yes, someone has read it: Michael Geist, the most expert and independent voice we have on this topic. I’m not qualified to parse this bill, so the best I can do is be careful about my sources, and every source that I respect thinks this bill is ridiculous, harmful political corruption, and that the meat of it is a tax on links.
At some point some government is going to have to pass this.
The idea clearly isn’t going to go away until somewhere feels the consequences that come with passing it.
Just like Google News failing to show French news sites due to a law. Of course France seems to decided to fine Google for not complying correctly with what they hoped would happen.
The nature of a link tax makes no sense anyway. Can I charge someone for citing an article? Can I charge someone for mentioning an article even if they don't use MLA style? Can I charge someone for obliquely referencing the existence of an article?
Despite chasing links (heh) for a while, I have been unable to find a description of what the Canadian act actually does, only page after page of "Whereas…" intent/caveat.
Google News was closed in Spain between 2014 and 2021[1] because our conservative government ~of blithering idiots~ decided it would be a good idea to change copyright law and force companies like Google to have to pay AEDE (Spanish Diary Editor Association) for linking to articles of members of that organisation. And it wasn't until the EU Copyright Directive was transposed to Spain that we were able to use Google News again.
I hope search is exempt from this tax... it's of historical and educational importance that people can search for news articles. On social media, fine whatever, tax it in a similar way to Australia where Meta and Google pay for it.
I was thinking about that. A site like that wouldn't meet all the tests of eligibility in the bill, but it would probably not meet the eligibility to be copyright exempt for one reason or another. That's as much as I've thought of that.
The thing at issue is not URLs, it is these sites' ability to pull and serve above the fold content. I think that's something the term "link tax" is obfuscating.
Meanwhile, they complain that news can't be shared on Meta anymore, which Meta very explicitly told them would happen if they passed their last act along these same lines. I wonder what big tech will do if they pass this... /s
To provide an alternative take / a couple thought fragments on the idea of a "link tax"... the problem is that the Internet has turned anything involving news into a ruthless race to the bottom. Good journalism, surprise, costs serious money - you need to pay journalists, and if you're actually willing to step on people's toes, you need to have serious budgets allocated for lawyers and damage claims, should the courts not interpret the facts as liberal as you did. And on top of that, the Internet has won the fight against stuff printed on dead trees for convenience reasons.
Unfortunately, the business model of the Internet is at its core rabid capitalism: the one with the lowest cost for the end user usually wins the most eyeballs, which means free, ad supported tabloid/outrage bait. And as we've seen with COVID or with the conspiracy peddlers that ended up pushing the 45th to office, that can have serious side effects on society as a whole.
So, assuming that high quality journalism is essential to the survival of democracy (alone because journalism is vital in holding politicians and companies accountable), there are only a few options left:
1. the government pays for journalism and distributes it for free, either in the form of outright tax funding or via mandatory fees. This is the old "public broadcast" model, and it requires a lot of effort to keep it accepted as neutral by the general public, and it needs constant oversight to not become a government mouthpiece (an allegation that continues to rise in popularity in the case of the BBC, and something that has already happened in Hungary with disastrous effects). Also, independent media don't like it very much because obviously, they can't compete with "free and high quality".
2. the government bans or introduces strict licensing requirements to get foreign influence (such as propaganda content farms like in the Balkans [1]) under control. That raises serious constitutional issues in most Western democracies and legitimizes Putin doing the same in Russia.
3. governments go to those who actually make the money on the back of legitimate content creators and force them to hand over a part of the profit. Aka, a "link tax".
It's hard for me to sympathize with Google, one of the richest companies on the planet, and Facebook which has played a key role in tearing our societies apart by letting fake news and propaganda run rampant on their platform. Pay your goddamn bills.
Why not something like the fairness doctrine like existed in the US until the late 80s - at which point, inflammatory reporting become way more common?
Ok assume you are right through and through.
The tax isn't benefiting journalists.
Who does the tax go to?
Canadian big-corps?
What's the difference between them and google-meta-OmniCorps exactly?
Where is this thread of altruism or spirit of public service which this tax brings to the public?
Who does it really serve? The public? The media?
Governments are basically becoming organized crime syndicates who use their state monopoly on violence to enforce taxes on their subjects. Yes, they do some legitimate good at times, but even mafia gangs support their community and police it.
For those down voting, I will note the US Internal Revenue Service is amassing firearms and ammunition [1]. I will also note that civil forfeiture (your stuff did the crime, so we'll take it and you have to prove it was innocent) was practiced until very recently. [0]
Relevant quote:
In 2015, Eric Holder ended the policy of "adoptive forfeiture", which occurred "when a state or local law enforcement agency seizes property pursuant to state law and requests that a federal agency take the seized asset and forfeit it under federal law" due to abuse.[21] Although states proceeded to curtail the powers of police to seize assets, actions by the Justice Department in July 2017 have sought to reinstate police seizure powers that simultaneously raise funding for federal agencies and local law enforcement.[22]
It is horrifying and hysterical that the example of case law if simply titled "United States v. Forty-Three Gallons of Whiskey". We live in an insane age.
It's being downvoted because the idea that taxes == theft is both well trod and not directly relevant to the article. Clearly governments do bad things, my view is that this article describes one such thing and civil forfeiture is another, but you (assuming you're American) get to vote on those things. In the US the IRS is authorized to make arrests and cary guns as part of their duty to investigate crimes related to tax avoidance with some parts having a special focus on the illegal drug trade. It's weird that conservative circles are turning something that has happened since 1919 into some weird new menace.
I do hope that Civil forfeiture in the United States is vastly reformed, but again not really related to the idea that taxes == theft
It’s not exactly some kind of nefarious secret scheme. The IRS puts out a 50 page report each year on what the Criminal Investigations department is for: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p3583.pdf
It’s for pretty much what you’d expect: tax fraud, corruption, money laundering, and so on.
> Why do the country's accountants need guns or bullets?
If you've actually inspected a reasonable subset of the multiple sources you found on this, you'd understand that these are purchases for their Criminal Investigations Division, a division with a narrow remit which has been armed for over a century.
The only reason why this is suddenly shocking news is because right-wing media has been increasingly hyping this up as some unprecedented and dangerous overreach since ~2020, cynically playing into the enduring paranoiac belief that govt stormtroopers are just around the corner (yet somehow never actually materializing). You're dancing to the tunes that your echo chambers choose for you.
What’s remarkable about your comment is how precisely it identifies your media diet. There’s no way you could credulously repeat this unless you were exposed to it from far right wing propaganda outlets and you lack any exposure whatsoever to credible sources of information.
As for the substance of this claim, the IRS has always had an armed law enforcement role. I suggest researching the origins of the American colloquial word “revenuer”.
Alarmist claims aside, there are a lot of verifiable stories in the right-wing media bubble that are completely unknown to people in the left-wing bubble, and vice-versa. I really dig https://ground.news/blindspot just for giving some perspective on who's (not) getting exposed to what.
The Left side tends to miss a lot of trivia, although occasionally something meaningful or important - but knowing those things helps me have conversations with people in the right-wing bubble and know what they're talking about. The Right side tends to miss a lot of fairly serious stuff related to Trump's legal problems. I find it worthwhile to keep a finger on the pulse of that site, but it's not my primary news source.
You would have a fairly difficult time convincing me that some Trump grievance junk reported only by RedState and InfoWars, sourced from Twitter, would be worth spending any time pondering. Conserving one's mental capacity is really the entire benefit of filter bubbles.
I think we're talking past each other. I'm talking about what facts are reported, and I'm saying that facts about ongoing Trump cases are not reported by news outlets on the right. (Just as facts about ongoing Hunter Biden cases are not reported on the left).
I find it useful in my daily life to know what each side is focused on and what their blind spots are. Call it information arbitrage.
As someone who doesn't fall squarely into the corporate left or corporate right bins I'm used to being attacked for not getting my news from the approved corporate media organs.
How can people think that someone is producing free news and research without an agenda? Do you think Elon Musk gets his information from reading blogs and $2/month NYT subscriptions? Musk, and people like him, have teams that research current events for them, and Musk has a platform on which he can influence the free information that people get and manipulate them for his benefit.
I wonder how many people wouldn't love a chance to live on an organic heirloom farm in tune with the seasons, surrounded by old friends and family? The serfs also had about one third of their time off for feast and holidays.
Governments have always been the monopolized use of force; the only question is how benevolent that use has been. Clearly, in the West, we're heading toward authoritarianism everywhere.
Large media outlets (Rogers, Bell) are the ones who lobbied for this bill. And they do benefit from it, because smaller, independent outlets are the ones that get the most exposure from social media.
Canadas current administration trying to virtue signal on a bill that won’t pass?
It’s a strange math that someone there thinks an image of appearing to fight big horrible tech bullies is a better campaign strategy than actually fighting big horrible Arctic bullies.
The bill passed. Meta has already stopped allowing links to news on Facebook. This is just an announcement of the fee the government will be charging companies like Google and Meta for linking.
It’s not Google’s fault that Canadian media oligopolists have no interest in paying for good journalism. Their only interest is in continuing to profit from lackluster offerings while holding down the pay of journalists by ensuring they have very few employment options in the country.