Post Tagged with: "google"

Wrong Way by Jack Zalium https://flic.kr/p/7CxM1P (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Why the Government’s Draft Bill C-18 Regulations Don’t Work: The 4% Link Tax is Not a Cap. It’s a Floor.

The Online News Act has quickly emerged as one of the government’s biggest policy failures with Canadian news outlets facing lost traffic, lost revenues, and lost competition. The source of the Bill C-18 failure was the government’s seeming inability or unwillingness to game plan the potential outcomes of the law, rejecting criticisms and calls for a “Plan B” by instead relying on the hope that the policy measures would simply unfold as they did in Australia. That obviously has not happened, leading to the growing realization that Meta’s blocking of news links, which has already gone on far longer than it did in Australia, is not a bluff. With Meta out of news in Canada, the government is hoping to salvage the law by convincing Google to pay at least $172 million for news links. Unfortunately, the draft regulations released by Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge suffer from the same failures as the law, namely an inability to game plan the potential outcomes of the regulations. 

I’ve already written about how the draft regulations will do little to ensure more spending on journalism and how they are stacked against small, independent and digital first news outlets. But as I read analysis that suggests that Google got what it wanted – a cap on liability – I fear that the regulations are badly misunderstood. In fact, if you assess the competing policy objectives in the regulations and consider how they might actually play out, it becomes hard to avoid the conclusion that they don’t work and may well lead Google to walk away from news in Canada.

Read more ›

September 14, 2023 7 comments News
Full–Time Equivalent FTE by Alpha Photo (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/2og938P

Why the Government’s Bill C-18 Draft Regulations Are Stacked Against Small, Independent, and Digital-First Media Outlets

The problems with government’s Bill C-18 draft regulations involve more than just what amounts to a 4% link tax on Google and Meta alongside little effort to ensure the resulting revenues are used to support spending on journalists and news content. As noted in previous posts, the draft regulations put an end to the claim that the Online News Act involves compensation for news creation since the standards are now simply a function of Internet platform revenues, not news production costs.  Given the global implications of a 4% tax on revenues to support media, that approach likely further cements Meta’s decision to comply with the law by stopping news links and increases the chances that Google follows suit.

But the concerns with the draft regulations do not end there. Indeed, the regulations revive the frustration of many smaller, independent and digital-first news outlets who feared that Bill C-18 would harm them competitively by receiving less support relative to larger companies such as Bell, Rogers, the CBC, and Postmedia or be excluded altogether.

Read more ›

September 6, 2023 4 comments News
Journalists on duty on Yan Arief https://flic.kr/p/39u1L1 (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Why The Government’s Bill C-18 Draft Regulations Do Little to Ensure More Spending on Journalists or News Content

The government released its draft Bill C-18 regulations on Friday ahead of the Labour Day weekend, but ironically those regulations do very little to ensure that new funding will be allocated toward employing journalists. While the regulations establish what amounts to a minimum 4% link tax on Google and Meta if they link to news content, they set no minimum requirements to spend the resulting revenues on journalists or news content. In fact, the government specifically dictates to the CRTC that the legislative requirement that an “appropriate portion of the compensation will be used for the production of local, regional and national news content” will involve no minimum amount and the agreements need only reference that “some” of the compensation will be used for that purpose. As a result, in the best case scenario for the government in which the Internet platforms pay for links by reaching commercial agreements with news outlets, the big beneficiaries such as Bell, Rogers, the CBC, and Postmedia would be free to spend the vast majority of the money generated by those deals on executive salaries, debt repayment, or any other purpose.

Read more ›

September 5, 2023 10 comments News
Stand Google News Initiative by Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo https://flic.kr/p/KorcJ2 (CC BY 2.0)

A 4% Link Tax: Why the Government’s Draft Bill C-18 Regulations Just Increased the Chances of No News on Meta and Google in Canada

The government is releasing its draft regulations for Bill C-18 today and the chances that both Google and Meta will stop linking to news in Canada just increased significantly. In fact, with the government setting an astonishing floor of 4% of revenues for linking to news, the global implications could run into the billions for Google alone. No country in the world has come close to setting this standard and the question the Internet companies will face is whether they are comfortable with the global liability that would see many other countries making similar demands. The implications are therefore pretty clear: there is little likelihood that Meta will restore news links in Canada and Google is more likely to follow the same path as the Canadian government establishes what amounts to 4% link tax from Bill C-18 on top of a 3% digital services tax and millions in Bill C-11 payments. 

Read more ›

September 1, 2023 28 comments News
Urgent by Judith E. Bell https://flic.kr/p/o1mt5Q (CC BY-SA 2.0)

What Urgency?: CRTC Says It Will Take Years For Bill C-18 Media Bargaining to Begin

The Bill C-18 legislative process was marked by repeated warnings from the government that this was an urgent issue that justified its repeated efforts to cut off debate in order to fast track the bill into law before the summer break. In fact, in a late change, the bill was amended to provide that it would take effect with 180 days of royal assent, rather than the previously envisioned staged approach that would have resulted in a gradual development of regulations and implementation. That change has had enormous implications as the law can now take effect at any time but no later than December 19, 2023, which in turn led Meta to move to comply with the law immediately by blocking news links in Canada.

Notwithstanding the government’s plans, the CRTC apparently has other ideas.

Read more ›

August 25, 2023 8 comments News