The Liberals' Online News Act will destroy the news - and help elect the Conservatives
Every law has unintended consequences, and this one has a doozy
Google has thrown down the gauntlet: it will remove all Canadian news content from its search engine on or shortly after Bill C-18, known as the Online News Act, comes into effect on December 19. Meta already stopped showing links on Facebook months ago, but Google’s decision will have a “devastating” impact on Canadian media outlets, which depend heavily on it to disseminate their content.
The government assumed that, like in Australia, big tech would negotiate with the state to come to a resolution, rather than remove news content. They were wrong. Efforts to revise the Canadian regulations have so far proved fruitless. Google’s submission to the government states that:
“Unfortunately, while well intended, the act is built upon a fundamentally flawed premise yielding an unworkable framework and process that the regulations unfortunately do not remedy — and in certain instances, exacerbate.”
Those draft regulations proposed a formula that would see Google pay $172 million a year – or 4% of its Canadian revenue – despite the fact the company says that news content only generates a fraction of a percent of its overall earnings.
Nonetheless, the government is determined to get the tech giant to pay up. At the recent MINDS international news agency conference in Toronto, Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said:
“We need to put our foot in the door and start doing it… Even though it’s not perfect, even though some are not pleased with what we’re doing, but this new challenge is coming so fast that we need to address it as quickly as possible.”
Er, what challenge, exactly? The dominance of search engines? The death of the traditional news business? Bill C-18 isn’t addressing those, so much as it is enabling them. Critics justifiably accuse the Liberals of trying to destroy the press, democracy, and free speech with this bill.
But there is a bigger story here, one which people are missing, including the Liberals themselves. Bill C-18 doesn’t just damage traditional media: the Liberals lose too. Meanwhile, their Conservative opposition benefits, big time, in ways the Liberals should have foreseen – but didn’t.
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