They took the wrong approach. The simple answer was to tax the companies you want to pay, and then give the money to the people you want to give money to. Instead they put together this rube goldberg machine and facebook is noping out.
Unfortunately in all countries (except one) Meta et all have no income on which to be taxed as the costs to support the operation in your country are oddly outweighed by the payment for using the name they have to make to the country where Head Office is.
Tax on ad revenue based on location of user rather than income then.
If you want to play nice with local companies, have it offset against income tax, so it's revenue neutral with respect to local broadcasters and billboards, but not for international companies that transfer price all their Canadian income elsewhere.
Do you have to tax income? Can't you tax social media companies $2 per user per year that have more than 1 million members or by any other metric you like?
The income generating event occurs where someone sees their ads.
There's a simple experiment that would prove this:
Prohibit Meta from displaying any adverts on any screens in Canada.
When they complain about loosing money, say; OK you can show the ads, but we're taxing you on that money/incone you said you were loosing.
>The simple answer was to tax the companies you want to pay, and then give the money to the people you want to give money to.
The problem is that they don't want to impose a general tax, and imposing a tax on social media companies only looks suspiciously like a shakedown, so they made this rube goldberg machine to launder it.
All the parties involved primarily make money with ads. Facebook is (in)famous for their privacy invading trackers. Why not leverage FB's creepy stalker tech to mandate revenue sharing for ads related to / shown near or around the news articles shared on FB?
It shouldn't be any technically different than affiliate marketing, but instead of a product being purchased, it's ads being viewed, and it triggers whenever someone shares a URL to one of the covered news agencies.
