Meta, Google profiting from Canadian news outlets
By Lethbridge Herald on August 16, 2023.
The decision by Meta and Google to prevent Canadians from seeing news content created by Canadian journalists doesn’t just affect us in the media. It impacts you the reader of that news, as well.
It affects the charity running an event, the school publicizing the achievements of its students, the sports team which wins a big game. It affects everyone in every community across Canada.
The decision to block our content impacts you because you are an integral part of this community who relies on local news media to get your stories out. You are the reason we in the media do what we do which is to devote countless pages and countless hours of airtime each year to covering local news.
Facebook and Instagram are hugely popular with the public and generate huge amounts of advertising dollars for their owners whose platforms use our stories for free.
Google and Meta argue they are providing a platform for the media to use and are actually giving us free publicity.
But the reality is the popularity of those platforms has attracted enormous advertising revenues that once paid the salaries of journalists because advertisers see the huge exposure they can get on social media.
That advertising benefits the U.S. based tech companies greatly. But does not provide any real value to Canada or its economy. They don’t pay local reporters or ad sales people nor do they pay income tax on their profits.
Canada isn’t the first country to act upon this with legislation, as both Australia and Spain have already gone down the road we now travel — with differing results.
In Australia, Facebook also moved to ban all news content from its platforms in 2021, but it took less than a week for the parties to reach an agreement, with some amendments from Facebook.
Things didn’t go so smoothly — or quickly — in Spain. In 2014, the Spanish government introduced legislation that would have forced news aggregators like Google News to pay publishers for journalism. It took seven years for news to return to social media in Spain, and it came with an agreement to allow publishers to negotiate individually with Google. Now the Spanish government is investigating whether Google has been abusing its position with respect to that agreement.
Meta and Google are profiting enormously at the expense of Canadian news organizations because they have in social media a product that is appealing to the consumer.
We deserve better and so do you – the citizens of our community who have long relied upon local media to help promote your organizations and your events. Facebook doesn’t do that in itself – it manages to give an audience to you because it had our content on its platform.
And that platform has generated millions of dollars of revenue off the backs of Canadian media companies because advertisers know they have a captive audience.
Local journalism is a pillar of our society; we are the conscience of our communities because without us politicians would face no accountability, no questions.
We provide an avenue for our communities to connect and for millions of Canadians who connect with each other on Facebook and Instagram (and soon to be Google) that connection has been severed.
In the early days of the internet the exposure social media platforms provided media may have given Canadian news outlets some free publicity but as soon as advertisers saw the allure of huge markets, they turned to social media giants and away from Canadian media outlets.
They pour millions of dollars of advertising into companies whose owners aren’t your neighbours, don’t shop at your businesses or play soccer with your kids. And those owners are benefitting from that advertising at the expense of companies which contribute to our communities.
That affects us all.
19-18
”Government” writ large, has often shown itself to be untrustworthy or incompetent on large scale social and economic engineering – so as Google and Meta have expressed, the complete lack of clarity on the cost and implementation of Bill C-18 creates sufficient uncertainty that they can’t simply “wait and see” how bad it will be.
See the following link for a broader discussion of the concern on the part of Google: https://blog.google/canada-news-en/#overview
Regardless, news media has always reserved the absolute right to decide what they will or will not publish, and what they charge for advertising according to market forces.
Google and Meta are doing the same. They wish to set their own price for advertising and publication – just like Canadian News Media. Imagine the uproar if Ottawa passed legislation telling the Lethbridge Herald how much they were to charge for advertising…. and, perhaps, how much I should get paid for this publishing of my comment.
Newsmedia always has the ability to use paywalls to require payment fo access to their content – see the Globe and Mail for example.
Government should learn to do less, but better. This is just another Ottawa boondoggle that will mostly serve to further bloat and an already over-bloated bureaucracy in Ottawa.
I’m with Google and Meta.
Good one! “Governments should learn to do less, but better.” That could be a right-libertarian t-shirt: “we don’t need government … until we need government!”
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