We don’t need you.
Google plans to follow Facebook in removing links to Canadian news stories after failing to receive the assurances from Canada about the Online News Act, Bill C-18.
image: Pymnts.com
GFace takes billions of advertising revenue out of Canada annually and sends it to the U.S.
In return, they offer a mediocre service. It’s a ripoff.
Their business model is all-too-clever. They paste links to news created by Canadian media outlets on their sites and collect the ad revenue. Someone else does the work and they benefit.
I need a business like that: I claim the work done by others and get paid for the claim.
Sure, GFace had reached a number of voluntary deals with Canadian news organizations to pay for using their content. It wasn’t out of generosity. It’s now obvious that the tech giants reached agreements only in an attempt to forestall paying a fair share to content producers.
Now GFace is telling publishers that it is cancelling those agreements at the end of July because of the Online News Act. The move includes the ending of news fellowships sponsored by Facebook with The Canadian Press.
We don’t need GFace to deliver the news.
The links which GFace profits from are freely available. They only exist because publishers have placed them there. Go to any publisher’s website and you’ll find them, laid out in way that doesn’t pretend to know our preferences.
Who needs the supposedly clever algorithms that GFace uses to deliver the news tailored just for us? I don’t need some stupid AI program deciding what news I should read.
The advertising algorithm that GFace uses repeatedly gets it wrong. After I’ve searched online for a product and purchase it, then I get ads for the thing I’ve already bought.
If GFace algorithms can’t tell what I want from what I bought, how can they know what news I’m interested in?
The news outlets that pay the reporters to dig up the news should receive the ad revenue rather than seeing it shipped to the U.S. to mega tech giants.
GFace is targeting Canada with aggressive measures as a signal to other countries.
The U.S. Congress and California are currently debating parallel legislation to the Online News Act. Like Canada’s legislation that would make GFace compensate news organizations for using their work. In Washington, the legislation has support from both Democrats and Republicans.
Danielle Coffey, president and chief executive of America’s News-Media Alliance, said Google and Facebook’s actions in Canada were being viewed south of the border as an effort to send a warning to U.S. legislators.
“It is safe to assume that every time the platforms have threatened to pull down news, they are thinking ahead. It’s to fend off legislation in other areas,” Coffey said.
The war against Canada is a no-contest.
Canada is globally seen as peaceful county and Canadians are seen as universally nice. GFace will lose the battle of the mean tech giants versus the nice people. If they are smarter than their algorithms, they will retreat and finally pay content producers a fair share.