Stalemate Between Online Giants and Canadian Government Over Bill C-18 Continues
There appears to be no resolution in sight in the battle between Meta, Google and the Canadian Government over the latter’s recent legislative attempt to protect the financial interests of Canadian online news providers.
In response to the dwindling advertising and subscriber revenues experienced by domestic news outlets, the Canadian Government introduced Bill C-18 last year, which was passed in the House of Commons as “The Online News Act” in June: “The Bill introduces a new bargaining framework intended to support news businesses to secure fair compensation when their news content is made available by dominant digital news intermediaries and generates economic gain. It seeks to support balanced negotiations between the businesses that operate dominant digital news intermediaries and the businesses responsible for the news outlets that produce this news content.”
Ultimately, the new law forces large online media services, notably Google and Meta’s Facebook platform, to negotiate agreements with Canadian media companies for the news content they link to and preview on their own services. Both Google and Meta have forcefully opposed the legislation. According to Google, “We have been sharing our serious concerns about Bill C-18 for several months, including how it will result in the proliferation of misinformation and clickbait, and that the proposed framework is not actually focused on supporting local journalism, but will instead disproportionately advantage large players.”
The new legislation stands to come into effect in December 2023. In response, Meta has blocked Canadian news sources from its platforms. Google has threatened to do the same and has proceeded to do so on a limited basis thus far.
The appointment of a new Minister of Canadian Heritage, Pascale St-Onge, does not appear to have improved the situation. St-Onge stated she had positive discussions with Google and Meta and hoped a compromise could be reached, particularly after the release of Government regulations further detailing the scope of the Act’s application.
However, the draft regulations were released in September and failed to change Meta’s position: “As the legislation is based on the incorrect assertion that Meta benefits unfairly from the news content shared on our platforms, today's proposed regulations will not impact our business decision to end news availability in Canada.” Google has been said to be "carefully reviewing” the proposed regulations to determine if they address their issues.
Only time will tell if the parties are able to find common ground on this issue. It is difficult to envision the Canadian Government backing down from its position given the potential political repercussions if it is seen as “caving in” to American based businesses. As for Meta and Google, they may be using the smaller Canadian market as a test case to see how far they can push their interests before potentially having to wage similar battles in larger markets where they stand to lose much more (the Canadian Government and some Canadian media companies have pulled their advertisements from Facebook in protest of their blocking Canadian news content). It should be noted that this issue is not limited to Canada: the European Union and the Government of Australia have also battled the tech giants on a similar front, and it is far from clear that those disputes have been permanently resolved.
At the end of the day, Publishers of news content and their journalists will be entitled to some form of compensation, which in turn will require identification of the authors and publishers of the content and the extent of its use. These are processes that are no different from royalty distribution calculations made for creative works, for which the cutting edge QRS Montage service provides a ready-to-deploy, flexible and affordable solution that can be implemented anywhere in the world.
Montage provides customers with an end-to-end integrated suite of tools, from the ingestion and management of copyright data through to accurate royalty payments to rightsholders. Montage can handle customers’ revenue streams generated anywhere in the world, for any use such as digital (e.g., music streaming, user generated or uploaded content platforms like YouTube or TikTok, news content, social media, games), and traditional media uses such as radio, television, and live performances.
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