During the debates over the Online News Act, I raised the concern that, under the Act, Meta or Google could provide training, technical support, technologies or technology licensing discounts as a form of "remuneration" to news organizations, rather than cash--deepening the integration of news organizations with digital platform data and technologies. Google/Meta could invest in specific projects, or encourage and/or incentivize certain types of content such as video content.
My concerns were amplified when, on May 3 Jason Kee, Governmental Affairs and Public Policy Counsel for Google Canada, told the Senate Committee that would like to count simple "in-kind programs, training and other kinds of programming and support" towards its exemption criteria for smaller publishers. This would leave small publishers particularly dependent on Google/Meta technologies and training (and big publishers also) - just the kind of thing that becomes a huge problem when Google/Meta decides to abandon news provision for the entire country. If news organizations are dependent on Google/Meta technologies and training, all of that first of all favours Googe/Meta's business model and data collection, all news organizations' investment goes down the tubes when Google/Meta stops providing news in Canada because it no longer suits their profit margins and global business strategies.
Last week the government announced a proposed regulatory scheme that would affirm that "non-monetary offerings to news organizations, such as training or other products, be included in the CRTC’s evaluation of exemption criteria." Discouragingly, this implies that non-monetary offerings would constitute "compensation" to news organizations. On the bright side, it also hopefully leaves the door open to public discussion or even disclosure of such non-monetary compensation by the CRTC in its decision-making.
Senator Paula Simons, former journalist, made note of the sorts of concerns I was raising in a speech to the Senate:
What happens if formerly independent Canadian news organizations become utterly beholden to Google and Meta for their survival? What happens if we give these two American behemoths even more control over what we read, watch and hear? We have already had a taste of this because, in an effort to head off Bill C-18, both Google and Facebook have been busy striking secret side deals with major publishers across the country. Read a story about Bill C-18 in the media right now and you will quite often see a little note at the bottom of the page informing you that the media outlet is already receiving some form of compensation through a private agreement with one of the big social media giants. It will then be left to you to judge whether that subsidy has had any impact on the way the story about Google or Facebook was reported.
She argued that:
Facebook and Google have already had a direct and detrimental impact on the way newsrooms present their stories whether it’s because Facebook enthusiastically insisted that newspapers pivot to video, which largely turned out to be a waste of time, resources and talent, or whether it was because Google led newsrooms to rewrite and torture ledes and headlines in a vain attempt to search engine optimize their stories.
There are two big problems:
1) permitting technology, training, and other non-cash options to stand in for "compensation" to news will deepen the problem of dependency already faced by Canadian media, and
2) under C-18, the transparency provisions in the Online News Act are not sufficient to guarantee Canadians, as specialists or general citizens, will be enabled to know and understand what kinds of non-cash influence Meta/Google may have in the news industry, as the compensation deals are private and public reporting of the details of individual bills - or even the broad sweep across the industry - is not afforded. The Independent Review by an auditor requires only extremely general industry-level information, and confidentiality provisions favour the privacy of both Google/Meta and news organizations. We will have to see how this plays out
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My June brief to the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications on Bill C-18, the Online News Act, has been posted on the committee's site here. My briefing makes the same points I outlined in my March 13 piece: "The Online News Act could give Google and Meta too much influence over Canadian news organizations."
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