The public broadcaster CBC / Radio-Canada will receive a maximum of 7% of the 100 million agreement between the search engine Google and the Government of Canada, or of any future compensation extracted from the Web giants for the media.
The Department of Canadian Heritage announced Friday that print media and broadcasters will stand alone when the time comes to receive financial compensation from Web giants provided for by the Online News Act. At least 70% of the sums must be directed to written media, the rest being able to finance radio and television journalists.
Radio-Canada / CBC stands alone, with its own ceiling of 7%. This means that it can hope to obtain from Google a maximum of seven million out of the 100 million agreed with the federal government as part of a recent agreement.
Last month, Quebec Minister of Culture and Communications, Mathieu Lacombe, asked the federal government to completely exclude the state corporation from this new funding model. The state-owned company has since announced substantial cuts to its workforce.
The Online News Act, adopted in June under the name C-18, officially begins to apply from next Tuesday, December 19. It initially targeted the two biggest web giants: Meta (Instagram and Facebook) and the Google search engine (Alphabet).
Meta quickly indicated that it would never comply with the spirit of the law, and that it was definitively renouncing the sharing of news on its platforms in Canada. A spokesperson qualified this position this week during a parliamentary committee, proposing a return of local news in exchange for an exception for it.
Google, for its part, reached a compromise with the government to increase its contribution to 100 million dollars, less than the 172 million hoped for by Ottawa, according to the calculation included in a regulation which was officially abandoned on Monday.
The regulations offer the possibility for platforms to enter into “multiple agreements” with a group of media, or individual “single agreements” with media that responded to an open call supervised by the CRTC. Compensation must be proportional to the number of full-time journalists hired.
In drafting C-18, the government had in mind to force the two largest players in online advertising to voluntarily come to an agreement with a whole range of news companies in the country, otherwise they would be subject to a potentially costly process arbitration. As things stand, only Google would be subject to the law for now, since Meta no longer makes news content available.
The government is giving him another six months to reach agreements with the media to distribute his millions. In the meantime, the CRTC must still conduct consultations to clearly establish how the Web giants can protect themselves from the risk of arbitrage.
More details will follow.