While the government is still talking tough, the Online News Act has been an utter disaster, leading to millions in lost revenues with cancelled deals, reduced traffic for Canadian media sites, and declining investment in media in Canada.
For those of you wondering if the government has managed to salvage at least something from the Bill C-18 debacle by satisfying Google, don’t hold your breath.
Over the past six weeks the news industry had a chance to prove how much the public values it. It has instead revealed the unsettling truth that most of it is nowhere near as fetching, nor as necessary, as the image it self-servingly sees when it looks in the mirror.
The U.S. hasn’t raised the issue publicly since last year and, although the United States Embassy in Ottawa has expressed specific concerns about the government’s online streaming bill, it would only say that it was monitoring the impact of the online news legislation.
The Hub announced today the launch of Hub Forum, a new email and online discussion feature that will be a venue for substantive discussion and debate about the important public policy…
This week’s Hub Roundtable discusses the implications of the newly-released regulations for the government’s online news law. We also talk about the Liberal government’s plummeting poll numbers and what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can do to pull out of this free-fall.
We thought we would have some fun with the government’s regulatory overview by imagining that the Online News Act was written for and in a different time.
There’s something odd about outsourcing responsibility for the government’s policy decisions to two private companies based on the dubious argument that they “owe” the Canadian news media for having come to dominate the digital advertising market.
There is a temptation among reporters to see any kind of pushback or criticism as an assault on our role in the democratic process. We should be careful about that.
Meta has comfortably passed the first test of ensuring that, in a crisis, it can still provide vital information without linking to news. This proves that the government’s assumptions about their online news legislation were and remain dead wrong.
FREE weekly email newsletter. Cancel anytime.
