TechDirt’s Mike Masnick gets it exactly right in covering Canada’s C-18 bill:
If you believe in the open web, if you believe that you should never have to pay to link to something, if you believe that no one should have to pay to provide you a benefit, then you should support Meta’s stance here. Yes, it’s self-serving for Meta. Of course it is. But, even if it’s by accident, or a side-effect, it’s helping to defend the open web, against a ridiculous attack from an astoundingly ignorant and foolish set of Canadian politicians.
And just generally points out the huge holes in Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez understanding from the Power & Politics Interview.
It would actually be pretty interesting if we could put them in control of that but in an automated standard way.
Just like there’s the snippets, there could be a thing built into the article that details the cost of doing more than showing the snippets with all the needed details.
Then the bots could parse through the content and big tech could throw their AI at it to decide their own cost benefit analysis and either they show the free content and the site takes its chance at a click through or the consuming site pays the fee to show the extra content and potentially save their user the click for whatever reason.
The news sites could even alter the costs in real time depending on how much traffic they think it would drive or be worth as news unfolds.