A few weeks ago, a Canadian parliamentary committee held hearings about Bill C-18, its version of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code. At the time, Sacha noticed an interesting Twitter thread from Jason Kint who posted video excerpts of Meta’s appearance, including some tough questions over Meta’s possible withdrawal from news in Canada if the bill goes ahead in its current form (see this very recent commentary from Columbia Journalism Review). The following week, I chaired a session at the IIC annual conference in Ottawa, with representatives from Google, Facebook, the CRTC (Canadian regulatory), AGCOM (the Italian regulator) and a Canadian digital news company, Overstory Media Group.
What surprised me about that session is that an independent fund to support public interest journalism now seems to be favoured by some platforms and news producers. This would be an alternative to the news code developed under competition law in Australia (and proposed in Canada) and to the copyright-based approach used in Europe. Searching for more detail, I found Google has made a written submission to the Canadian parliamentary inquiry, backed up by oral testimony to the committee on October 18 from Colin McKay, its Head of Public Policy and Government Relations in Canada. As an alternative to a mandatory bargaining and arbitration scheme, Google has advanced the idea of ‘platforms contributing to an independent fund in accordance with a predictable and transparent formula’. It outlines ‘a single pool of funds, gathered from services that earn revenue from news, with clearly established and objective eligibility, contribution and distribution criteria …’
Anyone who has followed our commentary on the News Media Bargaining Code will know that while we’ve expressed qualified support, we’ve also said from the outset that a more durable approach would be to require digital platforms, as service providers operating within the contemporary communications environment, to contribute financial support to a scheme that would distribute these funds according to established criteria.
We won’t hold our breath on this approach taking hold in Canada – by all accounts, Bill C-18 code is likely to pass the Canadian parliament, with amendments – but we’re glad to see the approach being considered as a public policy option. And we’re particularly interested in the view of smaller news providers that this would be more manageable than negotiations with digital platforms.
Derek Wilding, CMT Co-Director