As Google and Meta prepare to remove Canadians’ access to news links on their platforms due to the recently passed Bill C-18, two broadcasting experts say the legislation is poorly composed and will harm media outlets instead of helping them.
“It’s a sad, somewhat tragic outcome of a very, very poorly composed piece of legislation that was based on an overwrought premise. Some of the premises had some merit, but overall, the structure was bound to get this outcome. And it’s unfortunate because ... better outcomes were possible,” Peter Menzies, a broadcasting and telecoms policy consultant and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, told The Epoch Times.
“It’s pretty much as close to a complete public policy meltdown as you can get.”
Meta also said on June 22 that Canadians would lose access to news on its social media sites due to Bill C-18. Meta’s Global Policy Director Kevin Chan told the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage on May 8 that the company would either have to “operate in a flawed and unfair regulatory environment,” or end the availability of news content in Canada.
Menzies, also a former CRTC commissioner, said Bill C-18 was flawed because it did not give Google and Meta certainty about how much it would cost them to assist news companies. “That’s the biggest thing for business, and there seemed to be no ceiling to this,” he said. “Certainly some assistance was possible, but [the federal government] got carried away in terms of their expectations, and it scared them off.”
According to Menzies, who spent three decades as a working journalist and newspaper executive, Meta and Google’s decision to block Canadians’ access to news links will be especially harmful to newer media outlets—such as the Western Standard and True North—that rely heavily on social media for revenue. He said these outlets will be forced to either invest in advertising on different platforms, or take federal subsidies to remain viable.
‘Incoherently Drafted’
Timothy Denton, a former national commissioner of the CRTC from 2009 to 2013, said Bill C-18 was “almost incoherently drafted” because it would force Google and Meta to engage in a process with undefined liabilities and obligations to pay “unknown-sized groups with very large and political demands.”“C-18 is more than just more than just a nuisance, it’s a legal liability mess,” he told The Epoch Times. “It has an uncontrollable number of parties, uncontrolled outcomes, and no sane lawyer would ever tell a company to agree to such measures. And all you had to do to avoid this legal horror show was to decline to pay for links.”
Denton said media outlets ultimately benefit from the sharing of hyperlinks provided by online platforms, and argued attempting to monetize the links in the wrong direction “mistakes the chain of value.” He also said Bill C-18 would essentially enforce a paywall system for Canadian news content, which is typically at the discretion of the users and media outlets.
“And you limit the value of the internet by shutting down sources of information. And it’s very much an anti-internet policy, but this government has been pursuing policies which are against the spirit of the operations of the internet,” he said.
Denton said regardless of government legislation, Canadian news media will continue to be in dire straits, as their economic structure is based around a model that is as “obsolete as a 1945 battleship.” Denton pointed out that newspapers used to rely heavily on advertisements, but now they have been forced to gain their revenues from subscriptions.
“[Traditional] broadcasting is on its way out, and a new medium of transmission and dissemination is the internet, and that has to be adapted to,” Denton said. “I don’t see what the government can do to reverse or change the inevitable economic transition to internet influence sources of supply and demand.”
