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Notes -
I'm not laughing, because it's happening here in Canada.
The federal government banned free news posts on large websites (literally just Facebook and Google). Facebook decided it didn't want to pay some unknown hundreds of millions of dollars to host paid links, so it chose to not be a Digital News Intermediary under the new regime and was therefore required to block all news links. Google negotiated an exemption for itself in exchange for $100M/yr paid to the Canadian Journalism Collective, so there are literally zero companies covered by the Online News Act.
The end result? News as a whole is worse in Canada, with smaller outlets (particularly ones that won't get funding from the CJC) hit the hardest.
They had the gall to complain about Facebook harming Canadian journalism by "not paying their fair share" and "unfairly profiting". Now that Facebook is drawing zero profit and their fair share is consequently zero, the journalists are still complaining about how harmful the ban has been. Of course, they blame Facebook for following the regulations rather than the Federal government for creating them.
Yup: "(8)...the groups wants 70% of news costs paid for government or through government regulation." If that had actually occurred, then Canadian journalists would barely have had to provide anything, nevermind anything of real value.
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