The lines have been drawn, and so have the sabres.
In keeping with threats previously made, tech titans Google and Meta have declared that no Canadian content will be available on their platforms beginning sometime this autumn. This is the direction the two companies are following after Ottawa’s “Online News Act” takes effect, legislation that compels the monoliths to strike deals with Canadian media companies for the sharing, posting, and previewing of content on their platforms that originated with those Canadian companies.
For the past decade at least, Canadian journalism and media has been overwhelmed and out-produced by advertising that has flowed to Meta’s Facebook and Instagram and to the Google family of products, most notably its search engine Chrome. The result has been a steady contraction of Canadian media as it withers on the vine when advertisers flock to the tech platforms in search of more eyes on product. The result has been massive layoffs in the Canadian news and media industry, threatening the Canadian media space and the development and production of Canadian content. Meta and Google, owing to their size, are literally squeezing the national media out of the picture, and sometimes out of existence.
If you know anything about Meta and Google, it’s that neither of these influential and wealthy giants has much of an appetite for any kind of regulation, and they’re also not big fans of anyone trying to tell them how to behave. They do what they want, because both have hundreds of millions of users world-wide, and millions of users in Canada alone who use their platforms and products on a daily basis. Both are counting on the premise that so many Canadians will be put off by their reaction to the legislation, that they will lobby en masse against the government and for the titans. So making it impossible for Canadian users to post links to Canadian content is the result.
It’s called playing hardball.
The two companies went down the same route in Australia before they were finally brought to heel by an Australian government that had the cahones to stand up to them and call their bluff. The Canadian legislation, patterned somewhat on the Australian law, is experiencing the same blowback from Zuckerberg et. al. that the Australians were subjected to.
The Canadian response has been, so far, to announce the immediate suspension of all federal government advertising on Facebook and Instagram, while Google, for the moment, is exempt as it’s felt that an agreement with that company is in the works, at least as far as Heritage Minister Pablo Rodrigues is concerned.
All this comes on the heels of Tuesday’s decision by the European Union’s top court that Facebook represents a monopoly of sorts in the information space that boxes out competitors, something very similar to their footprint in Canada. Specifically, it’s the tech giants’ practice of using personal data to deliver laser-focussed ads to users of their platforms that is seen as an unfair advantage in the world of advertising.
In Canada, the Liberals, NDP, and the Bloc Québécois are all on board with the legislation. Predictably, the Conservatives, who are against everything that smacks of maturity, are opposed, saying that it amounts to censorship. Of course the Tories will take that position because Facebook and Instagram, among others, are the primary means they use to spread their bile, their falsehoods, their deliberate misinformation, and their conspiracy theories. Cleaning up Facebook and Instagram would cut into the Conservative’s mandate of spreading anger and discord in Canadian society, particularly with respect to their visceral and compulsive hatred towards the prime minister, something that blinds them, and particularly their leader, to a fault.
And so it begins. A government trying to rein in two tech giants, two tech giants offended to the point where they have to intimidate and throw their weight around, and a government with intra-party support (except of course for the hapless Conservatives) to get into the ring with the bullies and trade punches.
Meta, Google, and the Canadian Conservatives all find themselves, once again, on the wrong side of history. In the United States, federal government agencies are looking into anti-trust levers to bring these behemoths to heel, same as in Europe, Australia, and now Canada. As for the Tories, who regularly hitch themselves to losing causes, maybe another thirty years in opposition may make them grow up eventually. And then again, maybe not.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 