Crying over Bill C-18

Why is there water all over the floor??

So Facebook is going to cut us off. Google too. Both have announced now that that Bill C-18 has received royal assent, they will be removing news content from their searches and sharing. A lot of folks like me — freelancers or contract workers who don’t have the luxury of a Postmedia job that might lay me off tomorrow — are at a loss to understand what this will mean for us. Will our content still pop up in Google? Where will we find our stories? How much does an IP blocker cost? Etc.

Commentary on Bill C-18 isn’t very creative or diverse. Pretty much every article mentions that ad revenue has tanked, there’s no money in media any more, there is a staffing crisis as companies like Bell and Postmedia hack their employees to bits.

Here’s a look at the range of reactions:

The Canadian Association of Journalists has taken the side of the government (which they have consistently done for years now on many issues): “Google & Facebook have shut out Canadian news orgs from their platforms and decided to be dictators of what information Canadians can search, discover and consume. This violates the very foundations of an open internet. Corporate selfishness is kneecapping Canadian democracy.”

Canadaland’s Jesse Brown responded to this statement like this: “One casualty of this debacle is that it's turned many journalists into propagandists for a very flawed government initiative. The job of journalism is to fairly cover Big Tech *and* government. I'm not bashing one in support of the other. The CAJ does not represent me.”

Press Progress’ Luke Lebrun: “I’m a member of the Canadian Association of Journalists and support their work, but: (a) I do not support Bill C-18; (b) Both corporate legacy media and tech companies have too much control over the flow of news and information in our democracy.”

Though the Globe and Mail’s Robyn Doolittle is, I think, where most mainstream journalists are at; desperately hoping that hiding under coats will save the industry: “A timely reminder that a digital subscription to the @globeandmail costs $8/month — aka: 3 medium double-doubles, 2.5 hours of parking in Toronto, or a small popcorn at the movie theatre. Subscribe to a newspaper if you can.”

(And hey, Dave Bidini has the right take: “I have empathy for media affected by this, but living on digital has many flaws, and this is where we're left. With print, google/FB have zero affect on the material. U buy it, u hold it in your hands, u read it. Support media that exists outside of this space @westendphoenix.” Indeed, I cancelled my Globe subscription when they decided to stop delivering to anywhere east of Montreal.

You can skip my own opinion if you’d like and just tap out here and read Paris Marx’s analysis. And/or keep reading.

Google and Meta go to war with Canada

Here are a few things that I don’t think are debatable, and they anchor this conversation —

Google and Facebook have business models that profit off the free and open supply of local news and steals advertising money from them.

Google and Facebook are too big have have too much power.

Google and Facebook are big enough to effectively mess with Canadian democratic decisions.

The Canadian government does need to act. They need to do something. But their stunning lack of vision and incapacity to do anything interesting is always going to trip them up. And so, we’re left with C-18 which expects that Meta and Google will pay for content that is shared on their platforms, followed by Meta and Google having temper tantrums.

I don’t like seeing these too-big foreign companies doing blackmail to influence politics (though hey, usually this stuff is all behind closed doors and politicians buckle before the public sees anything), but these companies do this because they know they can win. Government has refused to do anything for way too long — remember that the Facebook (Meta, I mean) was only forced to collect and remit tax on transactions (like Facebook ads) in 2021! They’ve been collecting HST as long as I have been!

Where’s the made-in-Canada search engine or web crawler? Where’s the Canadian news aggregator? Why is there no public intervention into this world? When radio and television first became a thing, governments deemed the airwaves public, regulated them and created public radio and television stations. And now, CBC (with all its flaws) is the backbone of what remains of Canadian media.

The vision that was on display nearly 100 years ago is where? Gone? The best we can do is a match of digital piss?

Where are the initiatives to decommodify news? Where is a guaranteed income for those of us who work as journalists but who are paid nearly nothing for our work? Why not increase CBC/Radio-Canada’s budget by $2 billion? What about pouring resources into keeping cooperatives afloat? An independent agency that manages a fund to help pay for news cooperatives wouldn’t be very hard to establish.

Canada needs a revolution in how we structure the media industry. Something I think about a lot is the campus media funding model — it’s levy based, with an elected publisher but independent editorial control. That’s one intervention that we need: pay for local news by creating public news bureaux paid for through a new utility fee.

But here’s the sticky problem: at the end of the day, there isn’t a single politician in Canada that would risk any of their political capital to actually help improve news in Canada. A more powerful news industry is bad news for politicians of any stripe. On top of that, anything that cuts into the meagre profits (or profit potential) of Bell, Rogers and the like is going to be aggressively opposed by the corporate world. And so, we’ll be subjected to a parade of half measures, silly measures, measures that don’t make sense or measures that will be backed down the second that Google and Meta retaliate.

But hey, as Facebook sucks more and more each day, who even cares if you can’t share news there any more?