Meta and Google won’t face unlimited costs to support Canadian media, Trudeau government says via torontostar
OTTAWA—Coming federal regulations aimed at making big tech giants fork over cash to Canadian media for linking and posting news articles will allow voluntary deals, count non-cash support such as training, and limit the number of smaller outlets they’d have to pay, the Trudeau government said Monday.
Cabinet will define in regulations what would constitute a “significant portion” of independent local news businesses, Indigenous news outlets, and official-language minority community news outlets under the law which imposes a binding arbitration process on the big tech companies. Rodriguez had suggested it was a David and Goliath battle, calling the tech companies “superpowers. They’re huge. They’re rich, powerful. Lots of big lawyers. They can be intimidating.”“Canadians will not allow themselves to be intimidated or bullied by American billionaires who simply want to undermine our democracy,” Trudeau said, adding “countries around the world are looking at what we’re doing here, and they will refuse to accept that kind of blackmail and those threats.
“I think what they’re trying to do is salvage this act, and trying to make sure that its quarry are captured,” Winsek said in an interview. “It seems to be a bit of an odd thing when you strike an act that has a particular quarry and they kind of slip the noose. So, I think what they’re trying to do is to make sure that they do everything we possibly can so that the companies that are the target of it will, in fact, accept … the authority of the act over them.
However Winsek says the dispute has shown “the extent to which the government’s hands are tied in these relationships. But it also suggests to me that the government is trying to revise the act in ways that will work, that address legitimate concerns that were raised in parliamentary proceedings about the act, especially that idea of uncapped liability tethered to news links.”
But in response to the passage of the Online News Act three weeks ago, Google and Meta — which argue they drive millions of readers to Canadian news media websites — threatened to remove Canadian news content from sites like Google Search, and Facebook and Instagram. Meta said it would also cancel its current deals with Canadian media, such as the Star and the Globe and Mail.
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