Mandated Payment for Links To Cover 35% of News Expenditures?: Google Responds to Bill C-18 By Testing Blocking Links to News Content
Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez thinks Google and Facebook are bluffing about blocking news content. They're not.
The battle between Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez and Internet giants Google and Facebook continues to head toward a seeming inevitable collision in which the government repeatedly says it will not be intimidated even as the two Internet companies block or reduce access to news content on their platforms in Canada. Reports last night indicate that Google is now testing blocking news links for a small percentage of Canadian users, with the company saying it needs to assess potential responses to Bill C-18. This follows earlier Facebook comments indicating that it would consider blocking news sharing on its platform if the bill is enacted in its current form.
The government’s standard line to these developments is that it won’t be intimidated by the companies with the belief that this is all just a bluff designed to influence the bill. As I argued months ago in the context of Facebook’s response, I think that’s wrong and I believe that if the bill passes largely in its current form, both companies will curtail linking to news in Canada. Bill C-18 is more than just a badly crafted piece of legislation that raises a myriad of concerns including risks to press independence, inconsistency with international copyright law, and harm to innovative digital news services that at best will receive a tiny fraction of any proceeds. There were better options for the government that would have supported journalism and avoided these harms, including establishing a fund for journalism backed by the Internet companies. But by creating a bill that effectively mandates payments for links and suggesting that the two companies alone could be held liable to pay for 35 percent of the news expenditures of Bell, CBC, Postmedia, Torstar, and hundreds of other outlets, the government has created a serious threat to the free flow of information online.
As the government trots out the bravado about not being intimidated, Canadians should keep three things in mind. First, Bill C-18 is fundamentally about paying for links. Last night, Rodriguez’s press spokesperson said “all we’re asking the tech giants to do is compensate journalists when they use their work.” But that isn’t what the bill does. The bill requires payments for “facilitating access to news”. That is a far cry from use as it instead covers links or inclusion in search results. The news articles themselves reside on the publisher sites and are not reproduced by either Internet company, yet I Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner has described this as theft. Bill C-18’s dangerous approach ascribes value to links where there isn’t any, regulates which platforms must pay in order to permit expression from their users, and dictates which sources are entitled to compensation. If you are a company that depends on links for all aspects of your business, establishing a precedent of payment for links is a non-starter.
Second, the government’s expectations for payment for links are massive, even if the companies involved weren’t in the process of laying off thousands of workers, including many Canadians. The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates the bill will require the two companies to pay $329 million annually for links. The government’s own estimate is slightly lower at $215 million. Either way, more astonishing is Senator Peter Harder, the government’s representative on the bill, told the Senate that the government expects that the mandated payments could cover as much as 35% of news expenditures. The bill covers hundreds of businesses (the House actually expanded to hundreds of broadcasters that don’t even produce news) including some of Canada’s most powerful corporations: Bell, Rogers, Shaw, Corus, Postmedia, Torstar, Videotron, and the Globe and Mail among them. If this involved full reproduction of the news, that would be high. But paying 35% of the news expenditures at the CBC, Bell, or Postmedia for just for links to the originating source renders linking to the content uneconomic.
Third, Google already has a history of stopping news services in response to government legislation. For example, Google shut down Google News in Spain for eight years after that country passed copyright laws that raised liability concerns for the inclusion of snippets. It conducted the similar testing of blocking news content in search in Australia. More recently, it stopped its Google News service in Czechia as a result of the local copyright law implementation. In other words, companies respond to legal developments. Where offering a service becomes prohibitively expensive or uneconomic due to those developments, they may stop offering the service. That outcome seems entirely possible in light of Bill C-18’s mandated approach to link payments and the government’s expectation that the companies will pay hundreds of millions of dollars for “privilege” of referring Canadians back to the publishers. Should that come to pass, cries of intimidation will be cold comfort to Canadians blocked from sharing news or to innovative news services who find their business models undermined due to the repercussions from Bill C-18.
Post originally appeared at https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/02/googletestsblocking
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