Canada's Online News Act is doomed to fail
Why is Canadian news being pulled from Meta and Google? What are the implications?
You might have heard Canadian news will no longer be displayed on Facebook, Instagram and Google. It sounds insane, but it’s true. The Canadian government passed Bill C-18 (the Online News act) in June, and as a result, two tech giants will no longer be hosting news from Canadian outlets.
Why not? Here’s a more specific rundown on the situation, but to make a long story short, Canadian news media is struggling financially. People get their news from the internet these days, and the mainstream press hasn’t figured out a way to make up the revenue they once got from advertising and subscriptions.
The situation is dire. Small, local papers are all but dead in Canada. The big players have hit staff with wave after wave of layoffs. The country’s news media is running an unsustainable model, and if it keeps going this way, Canadian journalism’s quality, integrity, and ease of access will continue to dwindle.
The Trudeau Government, with their infinite wisdom, decided the best way to fix this was charging Google and Meta (Facebook’s parent company) a fee every time someone from Canada clicks a Canadian news link on the tech platforms. Those companies, with their infinite greed, basically said “get fucked” and have started to pull news content from Canadian users. Google remains at the bargaining table, but Mark Zuckerberg chucked the deuces and many analysts don’t see a future where Canadians will access news media from Facebook or Instagram again.
This is obviously not what anyone wants. The effects of Canadians losing easy access to online news will be devastating. We already have enough mushbrained anti-vax QPatriots in this country. Facebook taking away real news while continuing to show a steady stream of Belarussian psy-ops and white power memes won’t improve the situation.
C-18 will also be a financial kick in the ass for these news companies. Finding stats on how many people access mainstream news pages from Facebook and Google is hard, but it’s a decent chunk. Jeff Elgie, CEO of Village Media (a company who owns 25 community news websites) says he gets half of his traffic from Facebook and Google. Granted, that number is likely smaller for established dailies with print and/or broadcast circulation. Still, if the number was insignificant, they wouldn’t be asking the government to shake down the tech companies in the first place.
These media bigwigs are out to lunch if they think the average Facebook scroller will download a news app and “stay up to date with the latest stories”. Some might, but no one will be downloading multiple apps from multiple sources. The companies are going to be losing readers regardless — something they cannot afford. They aren’t coming down off their perch, though. Nearly all the major Canadian media corporations have publicly endorsed C-18.
Quite simply, the people who run these companies ARE out to lunch. They left for the patio at Hemingway’s in 2007 and never came back. Media conglomerates in this country are so used to government bailouts, back room deals and lax enforcement of anti-trust laws that they’re completely bereft of any ideas when it comes to running an innovative or competitive company. The little guys who actually navigated online journalism successfully are being smothered by CBC, Bell, Postmedia et. al. Those big boys are begging Trudeau to fire up the DeLorean and change the clock back to 1985 when everyone read the daily paper in the morning and watched the 6:00 news before supper.
I remember the head of my college journalism program assuring the students in 2009 that free internet news wouldn’t make much of an impact on the industry. “Democracy is too important”, he said. I wish I could go back and tell him money is more important, and none of the major players are in the business of running a charity — least of all the soul-sucking vampires from Silicon Valley.
Meta says in a statement regarding the bill that only about three per cent of the content on Facebook comes from news sites. Ol’ Zuck would gladly light the advertising money generated from hosting news on fire before paying a content creator every time someone clicks a link. Reimbursing Canadian media would set a precedent for not only governments of other countries, but anyone who makes popular content, to demand Meta pay them for link clicks.
The company can’t do that, and even if they could, they wouldn’t. Facebook thinks you should be grateful for the opportunity to draw dicks on wall of the internet’s biggest outhouse. They have revenue sharing agreements in place with many content creators, but they want to dictate the terms. They certainly don’t want to be legislated into doing it, and they don’t have to platform you if they don’t want to. Same with Google.
So the tech giants are taking their ball and going home instead of paying what they call a “link tax”. We’ll see what the government’s response is as the blackouts start to roll. This could be a big game of chicken like we saw in Australia a few years ago, but there are some key differences between C-18 and the legislation passed Down Under. The Canadian legislation, in short, is ham-fisted, allows for little wiggle room, and was constructed without much foresight.
Our government is sloppy, our media is stuck in the past, and tech companies are greedy. That dark triad of incompetence will almost certainly result in a massive blow to Canadian journalism. The media’s financial future has to change, but this approach is doomed to fail. It’s paradoxical.
All of Canada’s big news companies cite keeping democracy alive and healthy as the reason they support C-18. Well, someone smarter than me once said “democracy dies in darkness”. Now is not the time to turn off the lights.