It’s Stealing Their Money.

Governments around the world — Australia, France, Brazil, and now Canada —have fallen in love with the idea of creating a pseudo-copyright system that requires tech companies to pay license fees to news publishers when their users quote the news.

These governments start from the (correct) premise that a vigorous, independent news sector is vital to democracy, and the (likewise correct) premise that there’s something fundamentally crooked in how the tech companies operate, and then draw the (alarmingly wrong) conclusion that the way to solve this is with a “snippet tax” (or, more charitably, a “remuneration right”).

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