May 05, 2023

Bill C-18 creates a situation in Canada similar to that experienced between 2020 and 2021 in Australia. As happened there, Google and Meta threatened to block Canadians’ access to news if a text was approved that would require them to pay the media for the use of their content. On this occasion the leaders of the two firms recently verbalized it before a Senate committeebefore which they exposed the problems they see in the articles that entered processing in April 2022.

According Richard Grimass, vice president of news at Google, C-18 opens up the risk of incurring “unlimited financial liability” if you were to pay media outlets to link to them. And he hinted at the potential help this aggregation brings to the advertising business and media subscriptions, estimated at more than 3,600 million links last year.

His comments during the session were considered “conciliatory”, considering that Google tried in February to block access to news for up to 4% of Canadian users for weeks in response to this bill. The Prime Minister Justin Trudeau He later called the move a “terrible mistake”.

For her part, the head of public policy at Meta for Canada Rachel Curan He noted that Facebook sent 1.9 billion clicks in the 12 months before the bill began to be processed. By his estimates, that was $230 million in free marketing.and “a framework that requires us to compensate publishers for content they voluntarily put on our platforms is unworkable.”

The two companies are opting for the same strategy as in Australia, where they have finally changed the regulations governing relations with publishers.

The executive also indicated that less than 3% of what users see on Facebook is news and that more than 90% of views of this type of content occur on links that the media themselves have published on the platform.

C-18 is the Canadian government’s response to the demands of publishers who, since 2020, have been calling for a regulatory scenario similar to the one being developed in Australia. There, Google and Meta did their best to prevent the first version of the code of conduct that would require them to pay media from moving forward., to the point that Facebook declared an information blackout and Google alerted its users with a widespread message that the proposed legislation could harm them. Finally, the two got the changes that made this settlement less punitive.