Meta Defies CRTC, Keeps News Blocking Strategy Under Wraps

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is refusing to publicly disclose details about its compliance with the Online News Act, a law that could require the company to pay media outlets for sharing news content.

While Google has already reached a deal and will pay news organizations $100 million per year in Canada, Meta held out and banned the sharing of news links on its platforms to comply with the law.

Essentially, Google and Meta engineers are smarter than legacy media when it comes to generating ad revenues, and old media cried to the feds saying they are losing their cut of ad revenue to big tech. Advertisers have flocked to Google and Meta to advertise, as they get better bang for their buck, leveraging big tech’s data-driven ad tech.

Now, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is investigating whether Meta still falls under its scope, reports CTV News.

In October, the CRTC requested Meta to outline its measures for compliance with the act, citing reports that Canadian news content was still being shared on its platforms, sometimes via workarounds like screenshots.

When someone tries to post a news article link on Facebook, for example, it won’t be possible. So instead of driving traffic to publishers like before (and letting them generate ad revenue on their news websites), users have resorted to just pasting text or screenshots as workarounds. This ironically means publishers don’t get paid.

Meta submitted a confidential response but declined to provide a publicly accessible version or justify its confidentiality in detail. This is not making the CRTC or the feds happy.

“It is in the public interest to maintain this information as confidential so users cannot use it to avoid detection of news that Meta would otherwise remove, thereby undermining the Act rather than ensuring compliance with it,” said Meta’s public policy director Dan Ball.

The CRTC deemed Meta’s justification insufficient, stating that public disclosure of the information could foster informed debate about Meta’s practices and their compliance with the law. Despite repeated requests, Meta maintained its stance, arguing that revealing its methods would undermine its ability to block news effectively.

Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge’s office criticized Meta’s actions, saying “They consider themselves above oversight in the public interest, legislation promised during elections, and even the smallest and most reasonable regulation,” while also calling Meta’s actions “troubling”.

The CRTC is now evaluating how to proceed and whether to make Meta’s submission public in the interest of transparency. Grab your popcorn, folks. This battle is far from over.