The damage caused by the government’s Bill C-18 continues to grow as Meta has started to cancel its existing agreements with Canadian publishers. The move should not come as a surprise since any deals that involve facilitating access to news content would bring the company into the legislative framework and mandate payments for links. Indeed, Meta said earlier this week that its 18 existing deals “did not have much of a future.” When this is coupled with a reported “impasse” between the government and Google over its approach to Bill C-18, the risks to the Canadian media sector look increasingly dire.
This was entirely foreseeable, yet Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez never seemed to take the risks seriously. It raises the question of whether the government developed estimates of the cost of its legislation if Meta and Google chose to comply by stopping news sharing or linking. While there were estimates for the benefits of new deals that ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars, did it conduct a risk assessment of the economic costs that would come from Internet companies exiting the news market in Canada?
There are obviously costs that extend far beyond the economics that include reduced access to news, increased prominence of low quality news sources, harm to the Canadian Internet, and the reputational damage to a government that handled this about as incompetently as possible. But from a pure economic perspective, the risks were always understated as they extended beyond just the value of increased traffic to publishers from the links they were themselves posting. Both Google and Meta have deals with Canadian publishers reportedly worth millions of dollars. As Meta’s step to begin cancelling deals suggests, those agreements are unlikely to survive the decision to exit news in Canada.
The damage caused by this legislation and the government’s decision to ignore the potential consequences therefore run into the hundreds of millions of dollars for Canadian news outlets, effectively undoing years of public support for the sector. The government heard directly from some publishers who warned that losing the links could force them to shut down their businesses given lost links and cancelled deals. Yet it somehow decided it was comfortable putting those businesses at risk as if tough talk would somehow pay the bills.
Question: Looking back, do you think it was ultimately the plan of the govt to have this happen to further strengthen its iron grip on mainstream media in Canada via subsidies? It seems possible as a similar situation already played out in Australia.
Personally, I don’t think so. I suspect that the Australia situation prompted Google and Meta to start developing technologies that would allow them to perform this kind of geographic filtering for the next time that someone decided this was a good idea. As a result, due to the timelines involved they were more or less forced to negotiate agreements in Australia once they got the exemption. But by the time that C-18 reached the point where it would receive crown assent they were more or less in some of the final testing stages of the capability.
This government has generally, from what I have seen, been very willing to commit others to doing something which would give the government credit; if they wanted the mainstream media to be more dependent upon federal government subsidies this would mean they would actually be responsible for the subsidy, including deciding how to divvy it up. This would be contrary to what I’ve seen in the past. Granted there is the local journalism initiative, etc, but if I remember correctly the main responsibility that the government had for those programs was to pony up the cash; they left it to others (in one case the very companies that would potentially receive it) to decide how to divvy it up.
I think it’s a lot simpler than that.
Bell, Rogers, PostMedia, etc. saw what NewsCorp was able to do in Australia and decided this would be a good way to get some more money via lobbying – the one thing they are truly great at.
There’s a long history of Canadian governments doing what the telecom companies tell them to.
Why should I believe that the media that blindly ignored the risks of this Bill are capable of holding the government accountable? The risks were obvious, but all the media could see were dollar signs.
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Having followed the debate for C-18 from the beginning it astounds me how little our elected representatives understand about technology and how willing they are to bow to the pressure from certain lobby groups while shutting down debates from other interest groups. I didn’t expect it to get this far.
Some Canadians are also to blame for trusting politicians to understand what they were doing. When I tried to explain potential repercussions of the bill to a couple of people I got the impression that they didn’t care. It was supposed to protect Canadian media, wasn’t it? And surely those in charge knew what they were doing? I gave up.
Some Canadians are also to blame for trusting politicians to understand what they were doing. When I tried to explain potential repercussions of the bill to a couple of people I got the impression that they didn’t care. It was supposed to protect Canadian media, wasn’t it? And surely those in charge knew what they were doing? I gave up.
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In Western so-called ‘democracies’, citizens count for almost nothing when it comes to policy making. This has been proven in the US by the famous 2014 Gilens and Page study. We are the vicitims of a system that favors pressure groups and the status quo to the detriment of the reals needs of citizens.
You can either believe our polititians are total idiots, or that they deliberately instituted these policies against the will of the citizens purely for the benefit of the powerful interest groups that control them. In any case, the result will be the same – the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it (as the internet pioneer John Gilmore so famously said).
“You can either believe our polititians are total idiots, or that they deliberately instituted these policies against the will of the citizens purely for the benefit of the powerful interest groups that control them.”
I personally prefer the first option. Our politicians show a complete disregard for the well-being and requirements of their citizens. Their sole focus is on financial gain.
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