The best thing the government could do to save the media is to stop trying to save the media
It would be ironic, to say the least, if a bill purporting to save the Canadian news media were instead to hasten its demise. But that seems to be where we are heading with Bill C-18, the Online News Act.. How could you not? It has been pummelled into the public by a thousand media reports – the same media, as it happens, that had so strenuously lobbied for it.
But of all the lies we told ourselves and others, the most preposterous was the lie that “the platforms stole our content.” They didn’t steal it. For the most part, they don’t even use it. What they do is link to it. How does a link work? You click on it, and you are taken to the address embedded in it – that is, to one of. Far from stealing our content or our readers, the platforms have been sending readers our way by the millions, there to read our content and see our ads.
So it seems to have come as something of a shock to all concerned when Facebook and Google, accused of stealing our content and told they must pay a stiff fine every time they did, promised to stop. That is, they suggested they would stop linking to Canadian news stories, as they had done earlier in response to a similar shakedown attempt in Australia. Some Canadian users have already been blacked out. The rest will presumably follow now that the bill has passed.
But in the real world it appears it will not yield a dime in revenues for the publishers, at the same time as it deprives them of the millions of readers social media used to send them. Not that the platforms will stop posting links to Canadian sites altogether – just the ones to which the link tax applies, the “qualified Canadian journalism organizations”: the reputable ones, in other words. So to the list of the bill’s consequences, intended or otherwise, add promoting misinformation.
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