TheRecord looks like it is publishing a series of articles that are taking the usual technology giant suspects to task. Each article has a big, blue icon that states in capital letters: “DEFANGING BIG TECH”. There are two articles today and one last Saturday. The article on Saturday was by Daniel Tsai, a law and business lecturer at Ryerson. His article talks about the recent FCC decision in the U.S. regarding the “safe harbour” provision in their Communications Decency Act and the limited liability that content providers like Facebook and Google enjoy. Of course, Mr. Tsai completely misrepresents the conservative position – but what else is new for TorStar papers. Today, we have articles by Jeff Outhit and Alex Boutilier of the Toronto Star. Now I immediately have an issue with this type of reporting. If you have a subtitle of your article that boldly displays “DEFANGING BIG TECH”, is this now an opinion piece or a news article? Does “BIG TECH” have fangs like some wild predator that needs to be controlled? Well, if that’s the case, then these articles are opinion pieces and should be labelled as such. Outhit’s op-ed is basically a rehash of the current argument that some how tech companies like Google, Facebook, Instagram and others are stealing advertizing dollars from papers since they link to newspaper articles in Facebook and Google news feeds. I’ve gone over this nonsensical argument before and I’m not going to repeat myself again. Newspapers are dying because they are committing suicide. They should be thankful that online news aggregators like Facebook link to their articles. If they were worried about lost review, then they should simply put every online article behind a paywall. There – problem solved. Idiots. Alex Boutilier’s column under the “DEFANGING BIG TECH” byline talks about Facebook Canada trying to hire some people from Heritage Canada. Wow. Such big news. Of course, why Facebook would want to hire some bureaucrat from the Canadian government is unknown. I say hire them all.
