Google And Facebook Flip the Digital Bird to Justin Trudeau
This is the logical conclusion when governments meddle in matters beyond their purview.
Remember the days when the internet was young, and news agencies around the globe were giddy with excitement at the prospect of millions of people having access to their stories? Ah, the innocence and excitement of those early days. Not only did newspapers have access to a platform that would drive traffic to their websites, but also one that would allow others to drive this traffic through link sharing - all essentially for FREE! And for a small fee, this platform would actively promote these links and drive even more traffic - traffic that would inevitably result in more subscriptions, interactions, and even advertising revenue. It seemed like a match made in heaven since both parties benefitted greatly from this arrangement.
Then, it became suspected that perhaps one of these partners was benefitting more than the others…
Enter Justin Trudeau, Supreme Leader and Friend of the downtrodden; Voice of the voiceless and Savior of all those in need of saving.
Thank the Good Lord of Boxed Waters and Climate Changes that this Eminent Canadian saw fit to force said platform to share some of its obscene profits with the hard-working legacy news media that have been having such a rough go as of late. And by “a rough go”, I mean that they received a mere 600 million dollars of our money last year, and in the case of the CBC, a bit north of a billion dollars from the public purse each year before that.
Yes, bill C-18 has been drafted and approved and given royal assent and now for the privilege of having our news disseminated to a wider audience than ever before (free of charge), Google and Facebook will now be required to pay these news providers for the privilege of offering this same service.
Welcome to Justin Trudeau’s upside down Canada.
Lest you think this sounds a little backwards, we are assured by our government that these tech giants like Google and Facebook have far too much money as it is, and therefore should be happy to part with a portion of it to help out the news outlets that they have already been helping out over the last few decades.
I wonder how this tactic would have played out in the 1980s if the phone book publishers were suddenly told by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney that they'd have to start paying people and businesses in order to include their phone numbers in the book. I have a feeling that those humongous tomes of vital information would have ceased to be, long before the internet hastened that process.
And this is an important distinction: technologies come and go, usually replaced by something better. Likewise with businesses. Those that refuse or are slow to adapt, are replaced by businesses that can see which way the wind blows. This is called “progress”. What is decidedly not progressive is when government gets involved and attempts to engineer these things artificially.
A couple of points on that:
It's not the government's job to control the dissemination of news in a democracy. This is generally frowned upon in the western world and conjures up pictures of totalitarian regimes in Asia.
Nor is it the government's job to prop up failing business models in a capitalist society. This has also been cause for many to look askew at political decision makers in the past (think bailouts - aka, corporate welfare).
The question of whether these tech companies are perhaps a bit too monopolistic is a relevant one, but this is a really stupid way to address that issue. The expression that comes to mind is “cutting off one's nose to spite one's face”. In this case I think there's much more than just a nose that's been removed.
Well over a year ago, Facebook was already telling the government that if this bill became law, they would be forced to disable news links in Canada. Their reason for this was pretty simple: their users would much rather watch cat videos than read the news so why the hell would they want to pay for that “privilege”?
Google is a bit of a difference story, since news is a big part of their platform. They were also up front about it early on, and the fact that they were (and now are) willing to give that up shows just how big a deal this is.
In light of this, it's rather humorous that Pablo Rodriguez (our Minister of Canadian Heritage) was so taken aback when Google confirmed as much last week:
"We cannot have tech giants with big lawyers and everything coming here and telling members of parliament and the government elected by the people, ‘This is what you're going to do.’ We can't accept that. We're a sovereign nation."
Well, Pablo, it looks like someone needs to go there and tell you guys what to do, because you obviously have no idea what you're doing.
It wasn't too long ago that this government passed bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, that attempted to tell us all what “Canadian content” really is (as if we don't know). Now they're trying to tell us how link-sharing works.
Michael Geist wrote a great piece on this last winter and made this great point:
Once government decides that some platforms must pay to permit their users to engage in certain expression, the same principle can be applied to other policy objectives.
That's a scary thought.
Also, this whole deal hinges on the perception that links have value. This is the reason Google is expected to pay for the privilege of using said links. If this is true of links to news sites, then surely it’s also true of the link to this substack. Or of the link to any other business with an online presence. If I go ahead and share the link to this article five thousand times, how much value does that have? And how much should Google compensate me for the time I spent spamming them?
Who's really doing the censoring here?
I've heard a number of people imply that Google and Facebook are the ones that are “censoring” the news and that bill C-18 is really just there to compensate news agencies for product they've created. I think these tech companies are simply making sound business decisions. These news agencies are presumably already being compensated for the product they created - in the form of people hearing about it and buying it, or by these same people landing on their web page and viewing the advertising that's there - in other words, because of the job that Google and Facebook are doing. Well, they were anyway. Maybe not so much anymore…
It's worth noting here that the news agencies affected will be "qualified Canadian journalism organization[s] or meet other statutory criteria that include operating in Canada and regularly employing two or more journalists."
These are the guys we won't be able to find with a Google search. But guess who we will be able to find: opinion writers, possibly self-employed journalists (if we're lucky), conspiracy theorists, other propagators of fake news - basically anyone who is not technically a “news organization” by the government's definition. Oh, and presumably American news sites and news from other countries. It's hard to see how this is going to help Trudeau's war on “misinformation”.
One bright spot in this darkness is the independant, self-employed journalists I mentioned. Also those bloggers who have their finger on the pulse and are attuned to current events. We may still be able to find them as long as the government doesn't change their definition of who qualifies as a news organization.
What about music - Spotify has to pay, don't they?
As a musician, I post videos on social media and YouTube all the time as a means of self-promotion. It's a way to get people to contact me for guitar lessons and also just to let them know I'm still here. Why would I want Google or Facebook to pay for that? It's much more helpful to me if other people see the post and share it. Sometimes I even pay extra to boost those posts so more people can see them. Are Pablo Rodriguez and Justin Trudeau really so dense that they can't understand how this works?
There is literally no comparison here at all, since Spotify is actually in possession of the digital recordings, which they then stream for profit. A much more salient point is how little they actually pay for the use of those recordings, but that's another matter.
In Google's case, they don't own or reprint anything - it's just a link. A link that really only benefits the owner of the link. Copyright laws might apply here, and evidently you are allowed to quote a snippet of any article without infringing on copyright, so I would think a link should be fair game even in that sense.
What the hell were these bird-brains thinking?
It's hard to understand the mental processes that went into the crafting of this bill, but really, that's par for the course with Trudeau and his ideologically driven team of narcissistic control freaks.
They seem to have this habit of assuming that if they think something is a great idea, then obviously everyone else is just going to agree with them. This would explain their continual state of shock and awe when things don't turn out as planned.
It's possible these guys actually thought Google was bluffing. At least, it seems they felt pretty confident in calling that bluff. If you don't much care for the poker analogy, you might say this was a pretty spectacular own-goal.
Regardless of your metaphor of choice, and notwithstanding the financial hit that Google is likely to take with this decision, it must be a wondrous feeling indeed to be flipping that double bird to the bumbling bird brains that brought us this boondoggle.
More BlogOfKen brought to you by the letter B:
The Big, Bad Three
1. “It's not the government's job to control the dissemination of news in a democracy. This is generally frowned upon in the western world and conjures up pictures of totalitarian regimes in Asia.”
In a democracy it’s a very good idea to have robust publicly funded news media that isn’t purely incentivized by profit for its survival. The BBC in the UK is a good example, and France’s news media is very socialized. The alternative is to let billionaire industrialists like Bezos and Murdoch write our news for us, which is far more reminiscent of those totalitarian regimes in Asia.
2. Nor is it the government's job to prop up failing business models in a capitalist society.
That depends on what we call a failing business model. Is the Police a failing business model? What about health care? Or the military? There are some areas of society where profit motives don’t provide the best outcomes. News media is such an essential pillar of democracy that it falls under that category to some extent. It’s also up to us what we do or don’t bail out. If an industry faces collapse, sometimes it’s better to bail it out than to let the market do its thing and cause even more damage. It’s usually the government’s fault for not regulating sufficiently to prevent the collapse in the first place.
You say several times that you don’t understand the government’s motivations / logic - “It's hard to understand the mental processes that went into the crafting of this bill”. But we know the Australian government did this exact same thing several years ago with great success. Google and Meta are basically monopolies, they’re powerful beyond comprehension, and they will thump their chest and make threats, but at the end of the day, their business model prevents them from following through on them. Australia showed how this works and I believe the UK and EU have drafted similar laws to Canada’s. I’m not sure why you didn’t mention that.