TORONTO – The federal government of Canada has obtained a first, historic result in the battle waged for almost a year against the giants of the web to force them to finance the Canadian media that publish news online effectively providing free professional journalistic content to search engines and to social networks: Google has in fact agreed to pay 100 million dollars a year “in exchange” for the contents that newspapers feed to the people of the web.
The turning point was announced today by the federal Minister of Heritage, Pascale St-Onge (in the pic below, from her Twitter page @PascaleStOnge_), who revealed the first details of the agreement, explaining that the internet giant will continue to share Canadian news content “produced” by various local media and, in exchange, Google itself will make annual payments to news companies in the order of $100 million.
The “Trojan horse” that allowed the government to pull off the “coup” is Bill C-18, entitled the Online News Act, which establishes a framework that would require digital giants Google and Meta to develop agreements with sites Canadian news companies to provide them with compensation for journalistic content published on their platforms.
When the bill was passed in June, both Google and Meta stood firm: instead of accepting compensation from media organizations, they announced they were blocking Canadian news from their platforms. Meta did so immediately and it is continuing to block (for six months now) the content of Canadian news platforms on Facebook and Instagram, despite political and public pressure to reverse course. Google had instead explained that, subject to adaptations to the proposed federal regulations underlying the new rules, it would follow Meta’s example by removing links to Canadian news from its search engines starting from the entry into force of the law, i.e. from next 19 December. The tech giant had expressed concern about “serious structural problems with C-18 that unfortunately were not addressed during the legislative process” and called the bill a “link tax” that “disrupts the way the web and search engines have worked for more than thirty years,” exposing them to “unlimited financial liability”. The federal government, in turn, had set the estimated “price” on how much Google would have to spend to compensate Canadian media annually at $172 million. Evidently a compromise was reached at the $100 million mark.
The criteria for the distribution of contributions among the various Canadian media remain to be clarified: on this aspect, the minister did not provide further details, as well as on the other front of the negotiation, the one with Meta (Instagram and Facebook) which according to the federal government should pay an annual amount of at least 62 million dollars. At the moment, as we write, our contents are still obscured, in Canada, both on Instagram and Facebook: we can “post” our articles on the two platforms but no one in Canada can see them anymore, while in the rest of the world they are visible. Will Meta join Google or will it continue its tug-of-war with the Canadian government (and the media) alone?
