Mike Masnick: Meta Begins the Process of Ending News Links in Canada

But the blame for this disappointing result needs to go fully on the Canadian government. This law is bad. The entire structure of it is an attack on the open web, suggesting that governments can force some companies to pay other companies for sending them traffic. That makes no sense in any world.

This has never made a lick of sense to me. The web is fundamentally about being able to freely link to other pages, and the idea that some sites need to pay in order to link to other sites is kind of absurd. It’s more ridiculous when it comes to companies like Meta and Google, as they are discovery engines that people use to get to these linked sites in the first place.

There’s this weird, dangerous, belief that because these laws “tax” Facebook and Google and lots of people (reasonably!) dislike Facebook and Google, so they must be good laws.

Another good thing to remember: something can screw over a company you don’t like, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.