Here’s a fun thing that isn’t getting much press- Zuckerberg is effectively now banned from entering Canada, and the heads of Google are likely to follow. How and why?
Canada is considering bill C-18 which is intended to make sure Canadian news agencies get paid when their content is scraped and used as news by Facebook and Google. Currently these services are reposting Canadian news content when Canadians do searches for news, without sending the person to the original content.
In response to the mere consideration of the idea of doing something about that, Google is now blocking news searches in Canada, and Facebook is blocking Canadian news content on their site. They’re basically saying, “That sure is a nice internet you have. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it”.
In response, the Canadian government has issued a summons for Zuckerberg (and Google execs are expected next). So what? Because Zuckerberg isn’t Canadian, his appearance for the summons is voluntary. The government cannot compel him as it could a Canadian citizen.
However (and here’s the good part) non-Canadians with an open summons can be detained at the border and brought to court when they attempt entry. Zuckerberg would not risk this hassle, which means he’s effectively banned from the country. He probably doesn’t care unless he has a vacation house (or seven) in Vancouver, but it still amuses me to know this.
In any case, they tried this game of tech chicken with Australia and several other places that enacted similar laws. It didn’t work there and it won’t work here.
