Will the CRTC accept the Online News Act arrangement Google has set up? We’ll have to wait a little longer for that.
When the Canadian government folded to Google, it meant the effective end of link taxes in Canada. With Meta predictably dropping news links on their platform, the Canadian government was faced with the very real possibility of wiping out the entire news sector in the country. Little wonder, then, that the government opted to just hand Google everything they wanted and call it a deal.
While some have tried to spin the $100 million price tag as a victory for the publishers, that perspective tends to hide a lot of critical details about the situation. For one, this is what Google had been asking for all along. For another, it completely buries the concept of link taxes in the first place. Further, a good chunk of that money isn’t even new money. Existing deals already inked got rolled into that fund model. All of this was in exchange for not dropping news links on Google services which would make the bankruptcy filled consequences of driving Meta out of hosting news links seem like a historical footnote by comparison.
So while the link tax chapter of the Online News Act is closed, it opened another chapter of the story. That partly involves how to fairly distribute that $100 million to various news organizations. While that funding won’t come anywhere near making up for what the media lost when they drove Meta to block news links, it’s, well, better than nothing… maybe. Either way, the ball is well and truly in Google’s court to figure out how to spend their money.
The choice for Google boiled down to two organizations: an organization controlled by the big media corporations and an collective run independently. Google, for their part, chose the independent collective so that funds could be distributed fairly among different news organizations of all shapes and sizes eligible for those funds. In response, the mainstream media in Canada threw a massive temper tantrum and demanded that the CRTC gut almost all expected administration costs for the collective. This, seemingly, in a bid to undermine the organization, stop it from functioning properly, and potentially forcing a decision to hand the money to the mainstream media controlled organization instead.
Those temper tantrums by the mainstream media carried on for the better part of a month where organizations wrote “news” articles claiming corruption among other conspiracy theories they attempted to push. While some would rightly point out that pushing such biased reporting undermines the mainstream media’s credibility, it seems that the mainstream media really stopped caring about journalistic integrity years ago and is now in the business of pushing talking points rather than reporting fact-based journalism. This well and truly is the world we live in now – where credible reporting is merely a suggestion for these outlets rather than the rule. On the plus side, at least you have sites like Freezenet who are willing to go through the trouble of continuously setting the record straight.
So, with the arrangements seemingly set up, the question is, will Canadian regulator, the CRTC, approve of it? Well, if you were hoping for an answer sooner rather than later, you may be disappointed. The CRTC has announced that it would be extending the deadline for submissions:
Further to Call for comments – Application for exemption from the Online News Act by Google, Online News Notice of Consultation CRTC 2024-143, 27 June 2024, the Commission received a procedural request from the Canadian Journalism Collective requesting an extension of time to complete and file the documents requested in question 10.
The Commission finds that agreeing to the extension would be in the public interest. It would help build a fulsome record while creating only minimal delay. The Commission therefore extends the deadline for the Canadian Journalism Collective to submit those documents to 15 July 2024. In order to ensure that other interested parties have sufficient time to examine and comment on those documents, the deadline for comments has been extended to 6 August 2024 and the deadline for replies has been extended to 19 August 2024.
So, the consultation on that process will be closed late next month (barring any further extensions of course). It’s expected that sometime after that that we would get a decision on whether to accept or reject this arrangement.
No doubt the mainstream media, knowing they won’t be able to corrupt the process of fund distribution, will scream bloody murder over this. It’s unclear if the CRTC will bend over backwards for them or just approve of the deal so they can move on to other things. Only time will tell on that one.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
This is a tempest in a teapot. The law requires the funds be distributed based on the number of journalists employed by eligible news organizations as defined by the tax act. Some news organizations could play little games over how they count eligible journalists, but that is a minor issue.
A lot of this could have been avoided if they had picked an independent administrator.