Post Tagged with: "meta"

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Salvaging Bill C-18: Government Upends Legislation To Bring Google Onside the Online News Act

The government has announced that it has reached agreement with Google on deal that will ensure that news links are not blocked on the search engine and that the company pays $100 million to support the news sector in Canada. To be clear, this is good news for all given that the alternative was bad for news outlets, the government, Canadians, and Google. Indeed, over the past few months in discussions with representatives of media outlets, the consistent refrain I heard was that there *had* to be a deal. The harm from Facebook and Instagram blocking news links was taking a significant toll with lost revenues, lost traffic, and lost deals, meaning that something had to be salvaged from Bill C-18.

It turns out the way to salvage the bill was essentially to start over by tossing aside most of the core elements in the bill in favour of a single payment by Google negotiated by the government on behalf of the news sector. What is left is a $100 million payment into what amounts to a fund to be managed by the news sector itself. Google has agreed to pay $100 million to a single collective (there will be a battle over which collective will represent the news sector) and the collective tasked with allocating the money based in large measure on forthcoming regulations.

The broadcast sector will remain the big winner, though speculation of the possible removal of the CBC from the system would increase the distributions to the remaining companies. Regardless, allocating the majority of the money to broadcasters presumably helps explain why the government announced a $129 million bailout that expands the available money in the labour journalism tax credit, for which only print and digital publications (known as Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations) are eligible.

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November 29, 2023 13 comments News
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A Reality Check on the Online News Act: Why Bill C-18 Has Been a Total Policy Disaster

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked this week about concerns with the implementation of Bill C-18, to which he responded that other countries are quietly backing Canada in its battle against tech companies. I posted a reality check tweet noting that Meta is not returning to news in Canada, the law’s regulation stipulating a 4% fee on revenues is not found anywhere else, and that Bill C-18 has emerged as a model for what not to do. With the House of Commons back in session, it is worth providing a more fulsome reality check on where things stand with the Online News Act. While the government is still talking tough, the law has been an utter disaster, leading to millions in lost revenues with cancelled deals, reduced traffic for Canadian media sites, declining investment in media in Canada, and few options to salvage this mess.

For those that took the summer off, Bill C-18 received royal assent in late June. Over the past three months:

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September 20, 2023 19 comments News
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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.

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September 6, 2023 4 comments News
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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.

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September 5, 2023 10 comments News
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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.

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August 25, 2023 9 comments News