My column in the weekend Dom went through Canada's messes in trying to make Google and Facebook subsidise Canadian newspapers.
The Canadian Government passed Bill C-18, the Online News Act. And now, Canadians wanting to link to a news story on Facebook see this notice instead.
Earlier this week, I interviewed the University of Ottawa’s Professor Michael Geist about the problem. He’s the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law and has been following C-18 more closely than anyone.
Bill C-18 requires Facebook to pay whenever a user puts up a link to a news site. It is not a cost that Facebook can easily control or predict. It brings potentially unbounded liability.
News links are not particularly valuable to Facebook. If anything, links to news stories encourage users to click away from Facebook rather than stay on the site scrolling through pictures of relatives’ pets and children, and seeing ads delivered through Facebook while they’re there.
Facebook provided plenty of warning that they'd sooner stop allowing user links to news on their platform than be subject to unpredictable and potentially very large payments for allowing such links.
Willie Jackson says the NZ government will have legislation in the background in case Google and Facebook don't fork over enough money to NZ media companies. It would go to arbitration.
Listen to his interview, above-linked, and tell me this isn't a tin-pot shake-down. There can be defensible public-goods arguments for subsidising news production, but I just can't see why that ought to be funded by some tax or shake-down of tech companies.
It sounded like he figures that Google fronting up $50 million might cover it. Who knows.
But threat of going to arbitration with unknowable potential liability is what's had Meta pull news links in Canada. Listen to my chat with Michael Geist on it, or read his substacks.
From my column again:
Finally, on August 1, Facebook began pulling the plug. Canadian Facebook users will no longer see news links and content. It affects not just Canadian news sites but also international news for Canadian readers, because the Online News Act can also be read as requiring payment for links to international sites too.
The big newspapers are getting exactly what they asked for. They thought that Facebook was stealing from them by linking. It’s always been nonsense – even the report commissioned by New Zealand’s Ministry of Culture and Heritage found that “digital platforms provide considerable commercial benefits to news firms”.
But, like Trump, they’d convinced themselves that they could have something for nothing. They could have media funding and make Big Tech pay for it. And it’s worked out about as well as Trumps’s wall.
Professor Geist explained that some of the biggest losers from Bill C-18 have been small independent news sites that have relied on links from Facebook for traffic.
I hope that our Minister for Broadcasting and Media, Willie Jackson, is paying attention to Canada’s cautionary tale.
Extorting payments from platforms to meet the Government’s news funding objectives isn’t just thuggish. It also doesn’t work.
Will look forward to seeing the eventual legislation...
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