Canadian digital giants and media | Laying down the law in the Wild West

It was high time! After a decade of watching one media outlet after another fall, Ottawa has finally introduced a bill to force the web giants to negotiate a commercial deal with the media.

It is a matter of fairness. We cannot let Google and Facebook, which monopolize 80% of online advertising revenues in Canada, make their own law, like in the Wild West.

With this monopoly, they compete unfairly with Canadian media whose content they use on their platform without paying the price.

By flouting the rules of the free market, they undermine the newsrooms that produce quality professional information and that form a pillar of our culture and our democracy.

The results are alarming. Since 2008, nearly 450 news media have passed away across the country, including 63 since the start of the pandemic, the government calculates. And the bleeding continues.

We must therefore act. And quick.

To concoct its Bill C-18, he is happy that the government has taken inspiration from the Australian model which could cover up to 30% of newsroom costs, which would bring 150 million to the Canadian media. All this at no cost to taxpayers.

The beauty of the Australian model is that it simply aims to restore a healthy balance of power between the web giants and the media, following a non-interventionist philosophy that has everything to please the conservatives.

If the law is passed, the giants will have six months to reach an agreement with the media – a period that we would have liked to be shorter – failing which they will face a “baseball” type of arbitration.

In this type of arbitration, only one of the two offers is retained, in full. This clever mechanism forces both parties to put water in their wine themselves in order to prevent their offer from being rejected entirely because it is unreasonable.

Another key element: the bill will allow members of the media to negotiate as a group, to prevent the web giants from being more generous towards the biggest players and offering only crumbs to the smaller ones whose ability to negotiate is limited.

For society to win, all media must win. And not just one medium to the detriment of the other. It is the entire ecosystem that must be preserved in all its diversity.

We need a group solution, not à la carte agreements like those that the web giants have concluded – on their terms – with certain Canadian media recently.

Moreover, make no mistake: these agreements are far from being proof that the bill is superfluous. Before Ottawa threatened legislation, Google and Facebook had no intention of loosening their purse strings. And they could close it quickly if this threat disappeared, since the agreements are of short duration.

For the bill to be adopted by June, we now have to hope that it does not get bogged down in Parliament in a partisan game that would harm the democracy we are trying to protect.

But already, we can salute the efforts of all the parties that have rallied behind the Australian model. This is a good step forward for democracy, which is being shaken on all fronts, whether with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia or the assault on Capitol Hill by Americans refusing the results of the elections.

More than ever, we need strong media to protect our values ​​and our rights.

At a time when three-quarters of the population are concerned about the use of fake news as a weapon of disinformation, traditional media remain the preferred source of information for Canadians, who are three times more likely to trust them than social media, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.

It is imperative to ensure their survival. For all of our good. For democracy.