Bill C-18, aka the Online News Act, would require digital giants like Google and Meta (the owner of Facebook) to negotiate deals that would compensate Canadian media companies for linking, previewing, and republishing content on their own platforms.
In other words, it would force them to pay for the content they currently steal – particularly as websites like Facebook implement measures to ensure viewers stay on their website instead of following links outside it, limiting views and therefore monetary power for the original website and content creator. While Google is better designed to send people to the original link, when asked a question Google often provides a preview of the answer from one sentence among a whole article – and the searcher often takes that answer at face value, diving no further into the original website.
The bill passed the House of Commons in December and is set to be discussed by the Senate in the coming months. Meta responded to the bill last year by threatening to block off news completely on its sites, and now Google is following a similar path by actively blocking news links for under 4% of its Canadian users for about five weeks as a test of how they might respond should the bill pass.
Google spokesman Shay Purdy said in a written statement, “We’ve been fully transparent about our concern that C-18 is overly broad and, if unchanged, could impact products Canadians use and rely on every day.”
Paul Deegan, President and CEO of News Media Canada, responded, “This action is unbecoming of a leading global company and is disrespectful to consumers of trusted Canadian news sources.”
I agree with Deegan. There is a certain level of trust given to the websites we use as consumers, and certainly Google has gained a respectable level of that trust as something that will provide relatively accurate responses to a search. While Canadians can still go directly to a news site to search for the content, it puts the onus on the consumer to take extra steps never needed before – and this will mean many won’t bother and will be worse informed for it. Considering Google generates revenue thanks to creators making content that consumers want to seek out, Google deciding to actively block legitimate news sources as a slap back for not wanting to share that revenue puts that trust in a guillotine.
Laura Scaffidi, a spokesperson for Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriquez, has fortunately confirmed that they will not be swayed by such tactics: “This didn’t work in Australia, and it won’t work here because Canadians won’t be intimidated. At the end of the day, all we’re asking the tech giants to do is compensate journalists when they use their work.”
Google’s concerns that the bill does not set a baseline for journalistic standards, which could result in the proliferation of “low quality, clickbait content” over true journalism, and that it would favour larger publishers over smaller outlets, are legitimate concerns. As is, whether or not The Haldimand Press would see a profit from such a bill, or what that profit could be, is unclear to us at this time. And to their credit, Google has suggested it would be willing to pay into a fund that would compensate publishers indirectly as opposed to the current set up of the bill, which would see negotiations directly between the digital intermediaries sharing the content and the news outlets producing the content.
However, Google should be using their assets to inform Canadians of their concerns and encouraging them to put pressure on their local MP for a fair and efficient compensation system. They could put a big warning at the top of every search from a Canadian IP address that the quality of Canadian news is vulnerable to this bill, with a link to learn more and how to get involved – similar to how Wikipedia runs fundraising campaigns for its own website with bright yellow messages in times of need.
Instead, Meta and Google are posturing with threats to limit Canadians’ access to the news they rely on. They’re using their size to play the bully and push a reaction. It’s concerning that in an ultimatum for negotiating use of content and blocking links to Canadian sources altogether, that these companies may just flip us all the bird and block it.
As a media company (a small one at that), and as a citizen, the current situation feels like a lose-lose for us all, reliant on the government and big tech coming to a compromise. Here’s hoping that, however the coin falls, access to reliable and trustworthy journalism isn’t the price paid by Canadians.
