Chances are, you’re reading this today on a platform that very soon you won’t be able to.
Canada, often smug about being the best place to live, is about to become one of the world’s worst democracies in which to consume news.
Facebook and Google, the two behemoths that dominate how news is delivered to Canadians, warned the federal government repeatedly that its proposed legislation to compensate media was an unacceptable blank cheque. They threatened to pull news from their platforms.
Last week the government steamed ahead and passed Bill C-18. It taunted Facebook and Google as arrogant and was certain they were bluffing. This week it found out they weren’t.
In recent days Google joined Facebook in pledging to chop news from its platform in Canada. Facebook began cancelling contracts it had negotiated to support news organizations, with Google presumably about to do so.
The catastrophe this will create is the exact opposite of what have been well-intentioned objectives by both government and the digital giants to help finance journalism. Rather than produce a substantial form of support, there will instead be a double whammy: no funding and the loss of the two platforms that deliver a majority of Canada’s readership to news websites.
In other words, what you are now reading thanks to those platforms you will only find if you can get to our website directly or through a different search engine or social media platform.
The reason this is happening is because Canada chose a unique route to compel Facebook and Google to compensate news organizations: a fee when they either carry or link to copyrighted material, a so-called link tax. The digital giants said that was like writing a blank cheque, a bottomless and unlimited and very vague journey into payments without end.
For years they have had several negotiated contracts with organizations (including Glacier Media) to support journalism jobs and provide training. They have said they would agree to a significantly larger fund that the industry could independently decide on how to disburse. But the government insists on the link tax and the two companies insist that’s a non-starter, and so here we are about to walk off the edge of the cliff.
Thus, consumers of news will soon wake up one morning and find that the Facebook page of the favoured media outlet is gone, that a Google search for a favoured topic yields no news source, and that neither they nor their Facebook friends can share a story from a site.
For the media outlets, they will spend resources to educate their audiences on how to find news beyond the two dominant platforms – on different search engines, different social media platforms, through an organization’s newsletters, or the old-fashioned way of bookmarking a site or making it a default home page on their non-Google browser. Presuming Google doesn’t close off the rest of the world to Canadian news, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to conduct searches abroad will be in vogue.
Now, those experienced in the dark art of negotiations will know that when we reach this point of seeming collapse and walk-away, there is always someone in the room who will say it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.
Until those Facebook and Google contracts stop delivering support, until the pages come down, until the searches no longer find, until the legislation and its regulations take hold, there is that cliché of the last-ditch, back-to-the-wall, give-it-one-more-shot opportunity to stave off what neither side wanted.
A quantified, negotiated, formulated, and if necessary arbitrated, arrangement between the creators and the distributors is there for the taking under legislation that sets aside the link tax. There would be political face-saving where there is now political face-loss. There would be no reputational damage to the digital titans where there is now that serious potential. And yes, to declare self-interest for a moment, there would be assistance to journalism and the recognition that even the platform’s free feed of our stories to the public requires their further funding – at least for the time being – to stay properly afloat.
In listening only to certain industry voices as it built Bill C-18, the government chose the wrong route. There is time, but not a lot of it, to course-correct.
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and executive editor of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
