In this 13th instalment of the vlog, I talk about my interpretation of Bill C-18 and hoping I won’t get blocked.
Welcome to the 13th instalment of my vlog. Today, I talk about how I am currently interpreting Bill C-18 with respect to Google and Meta announcing that they will be blocking news links. In short, I don’t think I am eligible under the now called Online News Act and, as such, I don’t think I will be blocked. However, the big caveat is that it doesn’t matter what I think, but rather, how Meta and Google interpret things.
To check this video out, you can view it directly on YouTube or in the embed below:
With Bill C-18 passing and becoming law, everyone in the entire news sector is freaking out at this point. This is because Google and Meta have said that they will be dropping news links in response to what is now known as the Online News Act.
So, today, I go over my amateur legal interpretation and explain why I think I am not eligible and, as a result, won’t be blocked from Meta and Google. there’s no guarantee in any of this, but this is the interpretation I am going with and continuing on my nice 18 year long news writing career. If I’m wrong, my writing career pretty much comes to an end and there’s exactly squat I can do about it.
I mentioned that I’ll leave a link in the description about the text of the legislation, so here it is.
What I reference is Section 27 of this new law.
As I mentioned in the video, just because this is my interpretation of the law doesn’t necessarily mean that this is how Google or Meta is going to interpret things. In this case, they get to judge that and if they disagree with my assessment, well, bye bye news writing career. I don’t exactly have much choice in the matter. Still, at minimum, this is about managing stress for me, so I’m choosing to be optimistic on things here. Hopefully, you got something out of this as well as I’m sure there are a lot of questions being raised in all of this, so maybe my interpretation offers some insight for others asking those questions. Who knows?
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
