The Online News Act hearings at the CRTC is now open. The deadline for submissions is April 12.
By all reasonable accounts, the Online News Act has been an abysmal failure. The objective, of course, was to get the two largest platforms to pay for links appearing on their services (links largely posted by the publishers themselves). Meta dropped news links altogether for Canadians on August 1st of last year. On November of last year, the Canadian government folded to Google, agreed to a $100 million fund model (that was originally asked for) in exchange for not dropping news links on their services.
The effective result is that the link tax is now dead. The media is operating at an overall net loss of $130 million (and that’s an optimistic number). The outcome of this being a disaster was incredibly predictable. The only “win” (if you really want to stretch the term to the biggest extremes) for the media was that they weren’t collectively going to go under overnight as a result of Google dropping news links. There were bankruptcies anyway, to be sure, but the bottom wasn’t going to fall out completely for the entire sector. Ironic that it was the very same large media outlets that spent so much time and resources spreading disinformation to get themselves into such a position in the first place.
Of course, the wheels of government will continue to turn. This is regardless of what last ditch efforts the Prime Minister and his colleagues have taken. Last month, we reported on the CRTC holding consultations on the Online News Act. Today, we checked in and found out that the consultations are, indeed, open. The CRTC consultation page can be found here and the page contains a link for anyone to make a submission.
Given the failure of the Act, the description seems rather quaint now:
We want to hear from you in order to implement the regulatory framework for the Online News Act. The framework will support fair commercial agreements between news organizations in Canada and the largest online platforms that distribute their news content. Share your thoughts on the process for bargaining, undue preference and information gathering.
The most immediate question many might have is: why even bother with this consultation process in the first place? Indeed, there doesn’t seem to be much left to discuss outside of how to divvy up the slush fund set up by Google for the large media companies. It’s basically a foregone conclusion that the slush fund will largely go to the largest players anyway. Smaller players, if they are lucky, will get the crumbs of a few dollars that doesn’t really make a difference to their financial situation. Many, however, will leave the situation empty handed. If smaller players weren’t convinced before that they are going to get the raw end of the deal out of all of this, what will inevitably come out of this will likely prove that to them as well.
Of course, the CRTC technically still has a large piece of legislation to implement. If Google or Meta were to inexplicably decide to go through with the bargaining process, technically speaking, the CRTC would have to be ready for that (even if that is highly unlikely at this stage). So, the CRTC has to go through the motions anyway regardless of how seemingly futile it all is in the first place. Yes, it’s pointless to close the barn doors long after the horse has escaped, but the CRTC is obliged to close those doors in the first place.
Still, if you want to make a submission to the CRTC about this whole sorry affair, you are technically able to do so if you are a Canadian citizen. Might be worth the hoot, right? You have until April 12th to do so.
