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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Assuming they decide to continue operating in Canada

Seems like it would be much easier for companies to just pull out of Canada and let their users operate by proxy. Well, maybe that's the harder option by the managerial logic of firing employees and watching numbers in a spreadsheet go down. But if I were Elon Musk, or similar, I'd tell Canada to pound sand, pull out, and then strategically not say anything about all the Canadians continuing to access my servers.

Probably Facebook and Google et al. will be happy for the excuse for censorship (as we discovered here in America) -- but if they wanted to, they could easily refuse to play ball, as they're doing over the News Act. Hell, 15 years ago this is what any normal tech CEO and workforce would have done, and exactly what several did.

Google recently agreed to pay the "link tax" and play ball, despite my initial hope that they would fight it more. So it's looks more likely now that they will continue to play ball. Kind of unfortunate in my view, since I think that an abrupt end to social media services operating in Canada would be an unintentional and extremely positive outcome from this whole thing.

This is already starting to happen on other issues. There was the famous link tax, where the Liberals passed a law requiring websites that link to news articles to pay for the privilege of doing so. Facebook just decided to block Canadian news articles from being posted.

What are the actual requirements for tech companies? Entirely possible compliance costs will be prohibitive.

Of course the tech companies can officially pull out of Canada, but then they can’t sell advertising to Canadian businesses, which is how Google and Meta make their money. Eg. Russian users who use Instagram now cost Meta money but don’t make any money, since Meta can’t sell advertising to Russians.

Not doubting this but do you have a source? Would be interested in reading more about the phenomenon.

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