Crunch times in Canada for news access
Google and Meta have taken a stand against the new Online News Act in Canada. Facebook says it will withdraw news by the end of the year, when the Act is scheduled to come into force. Google has said it may also be forced to block access to Canadian news if its concerns can’t be resolved. This week, the Canadian government responded, as attention turned to a set of regulations that might persuade Google – if not Meta – to maintain access to Canadian news.
How does this compare to what happened in Australia?
The negotiations here reached their climax at the start of 2021 when Facebook pulled news for a week just before parliament enacted the News Media Bargaining Code. Google didn’t go that far, but it did post a pop-up on its search page that linked to a blog explaining its problems with the proposed legislation. All this led to a final round of amendments to the Bill, including the infamous trigger mechanism that activates the statutory scheme: a platform is now only subject to mandatory bargaining if it’s ‘designated’ by the Treasurer, and that will only occur if the deals it has struck with news businesses do not make ‘a significant contribution to the sustainability of the Australian news industry’.
The sequencing of the negotiations has been a bit different in Canada. The Online News Act passed last month, but the crunch time is now, as the Department of Canadian Heritage drafts the regulations to accompany the Act which will set out the criteria by which a platform might be exempted from the statutory bargaining process. The question now is whether the Department can draft the regulations in such a way as to maintain the integrity of the scheme, while also alleviating some of Google’s fears. The key part of the dispute is Google’s concern that the law exposes it ‘to uncapped financial liability’. Reports suggest the Heritage Minister is trying to address Google’s concern by setting a cap on the platforms’ contributions.
While Google has been outspoken on the Canadian scheme – it claims the Online News Act ‘breaks the way that the web and search engines are designed to work’ – Meta has been more definitive, saying ‘news availability will be ended on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada prior to the Online News Act (Bill C-18) taking effect’. It has even started testing the withdrawal of news content, blocking access to some sites for some people. And it appears that Meta is no longer in discussions with the government over the regulations; the government has announced it’s pulling about C$10 million in government advertising from Facebook and Instagram.
Meanwhile, publishers in Canada are nervous about losing the referrals they get from platforms. The editor-in-chief of Village Media in Ontario recently described the Online News Act as ‘flawed’, saying ‘We want Facebook to be chock full of our hyperlocal articles. We want Google News to feature our latest headlines.’
Canada is running about two years behind Australia in the implementation of the legislation, but there’s an eerie similarity to a looming showdown here. In the next year, the first round of deals with news businesses will expire, with Meta raising doubts over the renewal of those deals. For the last couple of years, Canada has been looking to Australia on the impact of the News Media Bargaining Code. Soon, we might be looking to Canada to see if their government finds a way to keep both platforms in the Canadian news game.
Derek Wilding, CMT Co-Director
This featured in our fortnightly Newsletter of 14 July - read it in full here or subscribe!
