Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez honored an important campaign commitment by introducing a bill [C-18, « Loi concernant les plateformes de communication en ligne rendant disponible du contenu de nouvelles aux personnes se trouvant au Canada » ] which will rebalance the balance of power between Canadian press publishers and web giants.
Posted yesterday at 2:00 p.m.
By comparison, after peaking at more than $4.6 billion in 2008, Canadian newspaper revenues were less than $1.5 billion in 2020. During this same period, Google and Facebook have saw their combined Canadian revenues grow from just over $1 billion to over $8 billion. Today, Google and Facebook earn more than 80% of online advertising revenue.
Under the proposed legislation, companies that earn revenue by publishing content created by Canadian news publishers will have to share a portion of their revenue with Canadian news organizations.
There are several ways to achieve this goal. Some have proposed that the government tax web giants directly and then redistribute the money to publishers. However, under this approach, the government would be involved in the distribution of the distributed funds, which is undesirable in the eyes of the publishers, since they are deeply committed to ensuring their complete independence.
Quite rightly, this bill is inspired by what the Australians have done. The Conservative government of Premier Scott Morrison introduced the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code in February 2021, a strikingly simple law. It addresses bargaining power imbalances between web giants and Australian media companies by allowing media companies to negotiate individually or collectively with digital platforms for payment for the publication of their content on online platforms and services. If the negotiation does not result in a fair agreement, an arbitration mechanism will ensure compensation for content creators.
The initial reaction of large US-based technology companies when the bill was introduced in Australia did not demonstrate a strong sense of corporate responsibility or even a deep commitment to customers. Indeed, Google’s response was: “That leaves us no choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia. Meta, meanwhile, said: “In Australia, individuals and news organizations can no longer post links to news sites, or share or view Australian and international news content on Facebook. Globally, the posting and sharing of news links from Australian publishers is also restricted. »
With the law passed, many Australian publishers, including smaller ones, have banded together to negotiate meaningful deals with Google and Meta. According to Robert Whitehead, head of the digital platform initiative at the International News Media Association, “there is no doubt that small and medium-sized publishers have been the surprise winners of the Australian media’s code of negotiation. The big three commercial players started the momentum… but it was the smaller players who gained the most relative to their size”.
Rob Sims, former chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), said the code had been “astonishingly successful” and estimated the deals had pumped in “well over $200 million a year in the Australian media industry. And the ACCC told us that the code had “created a robust employment environment for Australian journalists”.
Last year, seeing they had their backs against the wall in Canada, Google and Meta reached out to a number of the country’s biggest news publishers. As noted by William Turvill, of Press Gazettebased in the United Kingdom, “some data suggests that the threat of this legislation is already bearing fruit for Canadian publishers…Google, perhaps in anticipation of the Ottawa crackdown, has already begun offering more generous payments for registration to [Google] News Showcase”.
These deals clearly benefit large publishers, and that’s a good thing. However, these are believed to be of a nature to have rather short terms. If Parliament does not pass the law by the end of June, the renewal of these agreements may not be on such commercially favorable terms. Even more worryingly, without agreements, small community and ethnic publishers will wither due to their lack of advertising revenue. The resulting information deserts will fuel disinformation and fake news, which undermines social cohesion and our democracy.
All political parties in Parliament understand the value of local news. Everyone understands that the newspaper industry faces an existential threat. Everyone understands that there is an imbalance of power between big tech companies and Canada’s news publishers. All believe publishers should be allowed to bargain collectively with platforms and services.
We call on those same political parties to do the right thing by passing this essential bill in the House of Commons and the Senate by the end of June. Let’s show the world that Canada cares about a resolutely independent and commercially viable news publishing sector, where local community news thrives alongside an open and vibrant web.