A story published this week by Press Gazette paints a picture of Tech Giants scrambling to respond to the federal government’s Bill C-18, The Online News Act.
Last week, Rachel Curran, Meta’s public policy manager for Canada, would not rule out the platform blocking news in Canada when asked a question during a House of Commons committee meeting.
In the story, Richard Gingras, vice president of news at Google, describes the Online News Act as “troubling” and “unfortunate”.
“I’ve engaged as best I can with publishers in Canada, with the Canadian government,” said Gingras. “We’re continuing to analyse the legislation in Canada. There are troubling aspects to it. It does include a link tax, which is unfortunate.”
Paul Deegan, president and CEO of News Media Canada, disagrees.
“It’s spin to suggest that C-18 is a link tax,” he is quoted as saying in the article. “This vital legislation simply allows Canadian publishers to negotiate collectively with platforms backed up by the teeth of baseball-style arbitration.
“With the prospect of the Trudeau government taking action, both Google and Meta negotiated content licensing agreements with several Canadian publishers. This legislation will allow more publishers to receive fair market compensation for their content, so they can reinvest in quality journalism.”
You can read the full piece here.
