Canada refuses to give in to Google and Meta on news copyright

Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said on October 6 that the country will not give in to resistance from big tech companies to new legislation that would require companies like Google and Meta to pay publishers for using their news content.

Minister Pascale St-Onge expressed optimism that Google would change its stance on the issue, while Meta may continue to fight back. However, in a statement on the afternoon of October 6, Google continued to express "deep concerns" about the law and urged Ottawa to reconsider.

Canada's Network News Act was modeled on a similar law in Australia and is designed to support the country's struggling news industry, which has seen hundreds of publishers close in the past decade as advertising revenue dwindles.

Speaking to media leaders in Toronto, Minister Pascale St-Onge said the government saw two ways to respond to the law. Google was involved and coordinated throughout the process, while Meta, on the other hand, chose to ban news in Canada even though the law has yet to be implemented.

Meta argues that Bill C-18 is fundamentally flawed and has blocked access to Canadian news on Facebook and Instagram since August. Google has also spoken out against the law, which was passed in June, but has so far not responded, saying it will wait until December for the law to be implemented.

These two companies account for about 80% of online advertising revenue in Canada, worth an estimated billions of dollars.

The Canadian government estimates that the two companies would have spent a combined $230 million CAD ($170 million USD) if they had negotiated fair deals with Canadian news organizations to exploit the news and information shared on their platforms or taken the dispute to arbitration.

According to Minister St-Onge, Google does not want to have to submit the issue to arbitration while Facebook does not want to regulate content. Currently, the parties are trying to reconcile the issues, and other countries are also monitoring the situation to gain more experience in this completely new field.

Canada is the second country in the world to pass this law, after Australia.

For its part, Google believes that there are still many unresolved issues with the law. Google has proposed a number of requirements to make the law more enforceable, such as only applying to specific uses of news, not including article links or news excerpts.

Google also launched initiatives to engage willing news organizations in negotiations.