Does this have the potential to reach the point where Facebook is required to carry news content even if they don’t want to while being forced to pay for it?
It feels like it might be approaching that based on this other article:
> If companies do not meet a payments threshold through voluntary deals, they may have to go through mandatory bargaining overseen by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
> Government officials in a briefing side-stepped questions about what would happen if companies blocked news on their platforms and did not participate in negotiations at all.
If the government of Canadia wants to transfer wealth from Facebook and Google to Canadian news companies, why not institute a tax on advertising revenue, and a subsidy to newspapers.
A tax on linking to news is clearly just asking for news to not be linked.
Australia is very interesting, because Canada’s plan here is somewhat derived from what Australia did (and Meta and Alphabet did get onboard there). Here’s the slightly different timelines that make all the difference. Australia:
- parliament drafts this legislation and starts debating it (public record)
- Meta blocks Aus news for 4 days and says “we have some changes we’d like to see if we’re going to play ball”
- bill is amended, Mets gets on board
- bill is passed
Canada:
- parliament starts debating the draft of the bill
- Meta says “we’d like some changes and we’ll stop doing Canadian news if we don’t negotiate this”
- Parliament passes the bill as-is
- Meta blocks Canadian news, as promised
- Parliament goes on holidays
- Media companies are sitting there going “oh noooooo not like this” as a significant amount of their traffic disappears
When an insanely profitable multinational company says “if you do X, we will do Y” to the parliament of a country of 35-odd million people, that government has to be insane or incompetent to think “they’re bluffing. Let’s call their bluff and go on holidays”
Important note on Australia - FB only made a deal with the biggest companies, Murdochs, who was using the government to apply the pressure. Independent publishers, etc got dropped like a hot stone.
They're saying Google derives a lot of revenue from having news and linking to news. So yes. Google can exit this market and stop deriving revenue from the work the newspapers do, or they can pay the newspapers for the work they do.
Facebook, in particular, has been trying to strangle/EEE news outlets for many years now.
Is Canada just trying to force Facebook out of the country? This whole debacle seems so stupid and pointless, I can't imagine what they're trying to accomplish, Canada really doesn't have the clout to strong-arm Facebook.
Seems like the fourth estate is being formalized and exercising taxation power. How likely will they be to want to anger government now, if government can cut them off?
That was always a risk with state supported media, but now that it will apply to all commercial media that appears on Facebook or Google news..
Many countries have tax funded public television. In many countries one could argue that public television (BBC,CBC,ARD,ZDF,NPR,etc) carry generally high quality programming and often hard hitting investigative features compared to private interests.
Government, as professional public service, does not have to mean executive branch and laws for separation of power exist
I don't know, my experience with my country's publicly funded media (which is in your list) is that they carry worthless regime propaganda while badmouthing anyone who questions prevailing orthodoxies.
You forgot Radio Free Europe. Notably none of those were operated by countries to inform their own population, so I am not sure why you would mix these into the term public television.
> If companies do not meet a payments threshold through voluntary deals, they may have to go through mandatory bargaining overseen by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
> Government officials in a briefing side-stepped questions about what would happen if companies blocked news on their platforms and did not participate in negotiations at all.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canada-says-addressin...