Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault said the federal government will continue to push for legislation that would make major tech companies pay news outlets for posting content on their platform, even in cases of voluntary agreements like Google’s News Showcase.
However, the Liberal government wants to establish a blanket compensation system that covers “as much of the media sector as possible,” rather than just the companies that voluntarily enter into deals with tech giants.
Guilbeault said while some companies have partnered with News Showcase, “those same media entities are calling on me to act and table legislation.”
“They too believe we should have a robust system that is not contingent on what Google may or may not want to do,” he said.
Google spokesperson Lauren Skelly told the National Post that News Showcase “is not currently live in Canada,” but the company is in “active conversations with other Canadian publishers.”
Daniel Bernhard, executive director for the advocacy group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, told the National Post that he believes Google is “clearly trying to pre-empt” rules that would require them to pay “a higher, fairer price to more people.”
He noted the News Showcase program is also “predicted on content that keeps the user inside the Google ecosystem, where they can continue to generate data for Google.”
“No matter how appealing the French to some or the Australian to others models may seem, we have our own sets of laws, regulations, institutions, practices that are different, so we can’t just import a model,” Guilbeault said.
He noted that the Australian system is based on a regulator that doesn’t exist in Canada, while the French approach would have to account for Canadian copyright laws and international agreements like the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement.
The legislation for compensating news outlets is only a part of the Liberal government’s multi-pronged plan to regulate tech giants. In November 2020, Guilbeault introduced Bill C-10 which established the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to enforce Canadian content and contribution rules on streaming services. He has also promised a new legislation to curb online “hate speech.”
The government also expects to bring in more than $4.5 billion in new taxes on tech giants, and will impose sales tax on foreign digital services starting on July 1, 2021. The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated Wednesday that measure will bring in $1.34 billion over five years, reported the National Post.
