After months of debate, the Trudeau government has passed Bill C-18, a controversial piece of legislation aimed at forcing tech giants like Facebook and Google to compensate media outlets for content shared on their popular platforms.
The immediate fallout was exactly as predicted: Rather than pony up, Facebook has promised to block all Canadian headlines from Canadian users, including the local news you read every day on this website. Google followed suit days later, announcing that links to all Canadian journalism would disappear from its search engine and news apps.
Village Media, the company that operates this news site, lobbied hard against Bill C-18 right from the start. Unlike many legacy media outlets — who insist that Facebook and Google “steal” their content, and should have to pay for that privilege — Village believes the opposite: that big tech has helped us build a strong and sustainable local news model, driving countless readers to our high-quality journalism who otherwise wouldn’t find us.
All told, Google and Facebook generate close to 50 per cent of visits to Village Media’s websites.
“These platforms are the best on-ramp to news that we have found, and we have tested many,” Jeff Elgie, Village Media’s CEO, told a Senate committee in May. “In the absence of either of them, sustainably launching new sites — or even sustaining recently launched sites — might no longer be possible.”
Michael Geist agrees. The Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Geist has been a vocal critic of the Online News Act, saying it will have “an incredibly damaging effect on many media outlets.”
He also says that in the lead-up to royal assent, the government consistently downplayed the possibility that Facebook and Google would actually block Canadian news.
“It’s astonishing,” Geist said, during a recent appearance on Village Media’s Inside the Village podcast. “The heritage minister, Pablo Rodriguez, has been repeatedly asked: ‘What is Plan B? What if they aren’t bluffing here?’ And he says: ‘Well, it’s a business choice, they can make the choice, we hope that they choose.’ But that’s not a plan, that’s just Hopium, and I think the concerns here are very real and they are going to escalate.”
You can watch the full episode HERE.
Hosted by Scott Sexsmith and Michael Friscolanti, the Editor-in-Chief of Village Media, Inside the Village is a news and current affairs podcast that provides a weekly window into some of the best local journalism from across our chain of Ontario newsrooms. Produced by Derek Turner, the program also explores bigger-picture issues that impact people across the province.
Every episode is available HERE. If you prefer the audio version, it is available wherever you find your favourite podcasts.
You can reach us at [email protected].
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