Last week Canada’s Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez restated his commitment to Bill C-18, otherwise known as the Online News Bill. ‘It's about the future of journalism in our country,’ Rodriguez said.
Bill C-18 is Canada’s version of Australia’s news media bargaining code, which passed into law early last year and makes digital platforms pay news businesses for news content. Google and Facebook hate C-18. According to Google, ‘It will ... have, at best, unpredictable outcomes for the evolving Canadian news ecosystem.’ Actually, some outcomes are eminently predictable. Judging from the Australian experience, Canadian news outlets are about to embark on a hiring spree following a significant cash injection.
What is unpredictable is the ongoing impact of the platforms’ algorithms on news distribution. As scholars James Meese and Sara Bannerman write in their impressive new book, ‘[Facebook and Google] use inscrutable algorithms to make significant decisions around the visibility of news on their service, which can affect people who want to access news and news outlets who want audiences to reach their websites. As a result, these technology companies ... have become critical gatekeepers. When they make decisions, there is often little that the media industry can do about it. Thankfully, platform regulation has started to become a policy issue.’
Fittingly, Meese is Australian, Bannerman is Canadian, and they know their algorithms.
On the weekend, soon after Rodriguez made his comments in support of C-18, Facebook said it might withdraw news from its platform in Canada. Déjà vu, anyone? In February last year, Facebook followed through on its threat to ban news in Australia, thereby also banning emergency services and community pages. The impacts were dramatic. Eight days later, after the government made concessions by amending its law, Facebook restored the news.
Australia’s news media bargaining code is far from perfect, but it was a positive step into tricky regulatory territory. The Canadian bill looks better. While the deals done under the Australian code are secret, the Canadian bill enacts transparency. Precisely the sort of transparency we don’t have here when it comes to how Google and Facebook’s algorithms distribute the news. Although it is worth remembering that if Google and Facebook are ever ‘designated’ under Australia’s code, they would be required to notify news businesses of significant algorithmic changes.
Sacha Molitorisz, Senior Lecturer UTS Law