The media have won a round in their fight to force Google and Meta to help fund news, but at what cost? As soon as Bill C-18 is passed, Meta announced that it would cut off the information tap on its platforms (Facebook and Instagram) for all of Canada, which could allow it to completely escape the new legislative framework. Google is, for its part, in reflection. The media was expecting a check? They will be promised a few months of turbulence.
The media, their representative associations and the tenors of the Trudeau government denounce in chorus the intimidation and the attack on democracy on the part of the platforms. True, but that’s only part of the story. If Meta and his ilk can behave in this way, it is because democratic nations unthinkingly embraced, 20 years ago, the concept of “net neutrality”, gradually hijacked by the digital commerce giants. In the hands of an oligopoly, neutrality has turned into a safe-conduct for non-interventionism and excessive deregulation.
The legislative reforms undertaken in Canada, first to reform broadcasting laws (C-11) and then to force Google and Meta to compensate the media for the circulation of their content on the platforms (C-18), are interesting but incomplete attempts to reverse a global trend of laissez-faire. If Meta can block news content, and Google thinks of doing the same, it is because their status as protostates allows them to float above the laws and cultural sovereignty of nations.
It is in this context that we must consider the standoff that is now beginning. It is as much a question of money as of principle for the platforms which have recently faced a headwind from states that are at the end of their tether. Proof that Canada is not an anomaly, even California, cradle of Silicon Valley, recently passed a law to force Google and Meta to compensate the media.
The duty has a particular appreciation of the legislative framework. We have publicly supported the bill, although over the years we have duly negotiated contractual agreements with Meta, Google, Apple and Microsoft. We deplored the tone of the message conveyed by the media and political world, according to which the platforms have “stolen” our content from us, while we knowingly choose to make it available on the various platforms, which are essential to meet the digital users.
We insisted on the importance of not sacrificing the relationship of complementarity and co-dependency between the platforms and the media. Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne introduced a belated amendment for the law to recognize the value that media get from using the platforms to increase their own traffic and revenue. His proposal was snubbed by the government.
Google estimates the value that the media derive from the referencing of their articles on the search engine at 250 million (which represents 3.6 billion annual visits to Canadian media websites), and at 2% the weight of news on its platform. Meta, for its part, estimates the value of news sharing at $230 million, and the weight of news at 3% on Facebook. The two giants have the luxury of modifying the algorithms as they see fit to make journalistic content more or less visible, depending on the agenda of the moment.
It was this imbalance in the relationship between the media and the platforms that made Bill C-18 attractive and that would have justified its extension to other digital platforms, including the emerging intelligence giants. artificial (AI). The passage of time demonstrates that C-18 is mostly a simple matter of compensation for lost advertising dollars. This is a bias towards business models based on free content and traditional broadcasters. Of the estimated 330 million royalties, 247 million would go to broadcasters, starting with Radio-Canada-CBC, which eats up all the funding racks without worrying about its impact in the media sector.
The media won against Google and Meta, but at what cost? This may all be a big Meta bluff, like in Australia. The future will tell us soon enough. With the rise of AI to generate discounted content and power search engines, the global fatigue with news content, the radical transformation of news consumption habits, the possibility that Google, and above all Meta, can do without journalistic content to achieve their ends is less far-fetched than it seems.