Federal Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge defended Canada’s Online News Act on Friday, stating that the rapidly changing media landscape necessitates immediate action.
“We need to put our foot in the door and start doing it,” St-Onge said at the MINDS international news agency conference in Toronto, reports The Canadian Press. She added that the government had waited too long to regulate digital platforms and that the law is a starting point for future adaptations.
Google, however, has expressed strong reservations about the act, which is set to be enforced in December. “We continue to have serious concerns that the core issues ultimately may not be solvable through regulation and that legislative changes may be necessary,” said Google Canada spokesman Shay Purdy. The tech giant warned that unless its concerns are addressed, it will remove news links from its search engine by year’s end.
The act aims to compel tech companies like Google and Facebook to compensate media outlets for news articles shared on their platforms. Meta Platforms, Facebook’s parent company, has already started removing news for Canadians on its platforms, a move St-Onge described as an “intimidation tactic.”
Google took issue with the draft regulations’ formula for determining contributions to media outlets. Federal officials estimated that Google would need to offer about $172 million per year to meet the threshold for exemption from the law. “This is well in excess of the economic value Google derives from news-seeking queries,” the company stated in its submission.
St-Onge encouraged other countries to stand firm against tech giants. “Don’t be intimidated. It’s our responsibility to protect press freedoms,” she said. She also mentioned that the government plans to introduce further legislation on artificial intelligence focusing on privacy and content identification.
According to Barron’s, St-Onge said Canada “will not back down” in its online news fight with Google.
Want to see more of our stories on Google?
P.S. Want to keep this site truly independent? Support us by buying us a beer, treating us to a coffee, or shopping through Amazon here. Links in this post are affiliate links, so we earn a tiny commission at no charge to you. Thanks for supporting independent Canadian media!
Cry me a river, search and social platforms have been minting it for years off the back of other people’s work. This is called theft. I hope the spigot gets turned off or these platforms pay their fair share. If not people will adapt and go directly to source. Better for the creators.
I have no sympathy for the search and social spyware companies, but the actual fact is they have been providing an extremely valuable service to news companies for free. Yes, they monetize on the back side and they do so in incredibly invasive ways, but the net result is only positive for the news companies.
One could argue they should be forced to pay users, whose data provides them their income, but there’s zero logical reason for them to pay the news companies for the privilege of providing them a valuable service for free. Would you pay someone to let you mow their lawn?
The problem with your idea of “turning off the spigot” is that people won’t go directly to the source. The media companies are begging people to exactly that through their constant ads, but it’s not working. People like news delivered to them, maybe even curated. They don’t want to go hunt for it.
Instead of a magical windfall for our media, they are losing their main source of income, ads, as page views continue to drop.
I don’t wholly agree. Search & social might have increased distribution but at a severe cost. That cost has been the complete hollowing out of local news services & local newspapers and massive consolidation. Small communities all over North America and Europe are essentially news deserts. This has lead to greater polarization and political extremism as the curation only occurs from the hubs whose views and news serve a narrow audience. Not to mention the opportunity for massive misinformation and disinformation has tremendously been amplified.
20 Years ago we had a paradigm before Google and Facebook went mainstream. I don’t buy the argument that people are too lazy to go to the source. If the content is relevant and serves the community they will go. The source sights have umpteen ways to monetize now. They are no longer as dependent on search & social for clicks. These companies are trying to scare everyone but I would stand my ground on this and see how the landscape develops for the next 5 years. Generational flux in gov has meant that regulators have caught on. They are not perfect but the current system is theft and LLM based AI will make it way worse.
Imagine that, instead of being fed the news google wants you to watch, you go directly to your preferred websites for *news*.
Most of the websites are unknown to most of us and Google has actually provided traffic for them.
I don’t see any press freedoms being violated and I am not having any difficulty reaching news sites.
The fact that Google is doing this means this act was required long ago. Way too big and out of control self serving. Kinda like Roger’s.
It’s all about incentives. The liberals will tell you that by eliminating a tax on house construction, MORE house construction will result. It’s an incentive. Well what happens when you create a tax on links? Less linking will result of course. It’s a disincentive. Not rocket science.
We’re talking LIbEral ministers here. They don’t understand rocket appliances, let alone rocket surgery.
AntiquatedAntelop = typical chickenshit lib. Flings his poo (downvotes) from behind a locked profile with a made up handle (there’s an E on the end of Antelope, in case you were wondering).
Aaaaaand, there’s another one. Fill out butthurt reports and send them in, both of you.
We need these LIbEral ministers to start wearing full clown makeup (with shoes) in public so they are easily identified