Learning from others' discoveries

Others' idiocy can be a public boon, if the example serves as sufficient cautionary tale. 

In a world of wishful thinking, if one country's government moves first to try the really dumb thing and reap the obvious consequences, it's harder for others to delude themselves into thinking the dumb thing will have no consequence. 

Canada does the world a public service. So long as the rest of us don't ignore the lessons. 

A lot of people in a lot of places convinced themselves that, somehow, platforms were stealing from newsmedia companies by linking to them. A tax on platforms to fund news sounded obviously wonderful. Who could object? Certainly not politicians who value the favour of the media companies who'd believe they'd benefit from such payments. 

And then Meta stopped linking to news in Canada, to much complaint from the media companies who had previously asserted that links were theft.

And now Canada's looking at a unilateral move on a digital services tax rather than working through the OECD multilateral process. This is not a problem that is best handled unilaterally. It needs to be handled through cross-country agreement. But idiots in all kinds of places, NZ included, figure it's a wonderful idea. Sock it to those fat-cat multinationals. That'll show them. There'll be no adverse consequence, just free money and free votes for standing up to the Big Evil Companies. 

Indeed.

NZ had legislation that's passed first reading, suggesting NZ ought to go it alone, like Canada - albeit with a bit of delay. Hopefully the Bill is left to die quietly after the election and NZ sticks with multilateral processes.