Canadian Senator Pierre Dalphond is making a call for Canadians to switch their search engine to Microsoft’s Bing, instead of using Google, in the wake of the federal government’s controversial Online News Act.
Also known as Bill C-18, the latter requires Meta and Google to set up financial agreements with Canadian news publishers in return for featuring links to their news websites. Google and Meta have responded to the bill by announcing it will remove links to Canadian news sites instead of negotiating deals.
This move has sparked Senator Dalphond to promote Bing as the preferred search tool for Canadians, encouraging a shift away from Google, reports PressProgress.
He stated his disapproval of what he sees as Google and Meta’s “bullying of Canadians”, echoing what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has stated. Dalphond believes that by Canadians moving their online activity to Bing, Google may be compelled to show more respect for the country.
On July 6, Dalphond tweeted, “Yesterday, I stopped using #Google as my search engine and switched to #MicrosoftBing. Let’s show Google that #blackmailingCanada does not work! #BillC18”. He linked to a paywalled news story from The Logic.
The irony? Microsoft’s Bing doesn’t pay for news or have any agreements in Canada, so the suggestion is puzzling.
Yesterday, I stopped using #Google as my search engine and switched to #MicrosoftBing. Let’s show Google that #blackmailingCanada does not work! #BillC18 https://t.co/od7zd1f4wS
— Sen. Pierre J. Dalphond, Canada (@DalphondPierre) July 6, 2023
Dalphond, a Senator from Quebec appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2018, praised Bing for its fair access to Canadian news content and its management’s respectful attitude towards Canada. He encouraged Canadians to demonstrate to big tech firms that their business model depends on active user participation.
Bing may not be required to pay for news under the new law, unlike Meta and Google. However, Dalphond clarified that if a large number of Canadians followed his lead and switched to Bing, causing it to meet the threshold, the act should then apply to Bing.
The shift towards Microsoft is already evident among some of Trudeau’s top staff, including Marlene Floyd, Microsoft Canada’s head of corporate affairs, and Kate Purchase, who now works in the office of Microsoft’s CEO.
Microsoft Canada remained vague about its steps to financially support journalism in Canada but expressed its intention to comply with applicable legislation. The company emphasized its support for a strong, independent news and media ecosystem.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) will determine the list of search engines and social media companies obliged to pay for news under the Online News Act. According to the CRTC, the list doesn’t exist yet and would depend on upcoming regulations.
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nobody is using bing. okay maybe 1% and thats corporate computers. you might as well use yahoo. Justin Trudeau is less and less appealing. definitively gone next term.
Sketchy argument that if more people used Bing, then they’d have to follow the same laws as Google / Meta – better to simply say, if you have working offices in Canada, you have to follow the laws. But hardly an opinion that is the fault of Trudeau. Especially at the Senator level.
Meanwhile, if not Trudeau, who? Certainly not suggesting that whiny, petty little Trump wannabe who caters to the worst of the ‘Freedom’ rally crowd and whose last real job other than professional Con was to be a paperboy for the Calgary Sun?
Is the Donald living in your head rent free? Look at the path Trudeau is taking us down spending public money like a drunken sailor while the Bank of Canada has just increased the cost of borrowing for the TENTH time in sixteen months to try and reign in inflation.
Give your head a shake.
Hey, gotta give reasons to print more money.
Like (I’m guessing) your friends the Cons never spent vast sums on dodgy laws and projects (there’s a multi-billion dollar gazebo with your name on it in Muskoka).
And some of that ‘drunken sailor’ money Trudeau spent probably saved your / your family / your friend’s a** over the course of the pandemic. Whereas Scheer & Co would have likely left everyone to fend for themselves – and just commented on how much they were ‘saving’ the country.
There is always Firefox, Bing is garbage and uses the same back end as Google Chrome (which is Chromium). There is also the Brave Browser as well.
I think you’re referring to Edge.
Your right, I mixed the two up i forgot bing was a search engine not a browser.
Brave is my go to, I really like it
While I occasionally use DuckDuckGo, my default is Startpage. Based in the EU, where consumer laws (privacy, use of user info, access by government agencies, etc) are considerably stronger than for those based in the US (including DDG).
Time may tell as to whether they will be required to pay for linking to news sources – not yet a law in the EU – though that’s exactly why Google / Meta are fighting Canada (they already lost in Australia), lest such laws become standard fare.
Seems multi-billion companies don’t want to pay those who actually do the work, and whose work attracts users to the sites in the first place.
Nice virtue signal there. What the Canadian government is currently doing, once more, is overreaching.
Bing now used GPT4 so it’s pretty amazing. But what’s weird to me is that the government doesn’t think Microsoft is a big enough company to pay for Canadian news? Weird to focus on only Facebook and Google. The gov is crazy to tax links though. I get asking for money for rewording news and presenting it as your own, but to tax just linking to a website? That’s nuts.