OTTAWA – During another meeting of the heritage committee yesterday on Bill C-18, the Online News Act, witnesses indicated there are better ways to address the country’s journalism crisis and argued the bill will not help small news organizations.
Philip Palmer, president of the Internet Society Canada chapter told the committee a broader levy applied to social media platforms and search engines and an independent body to allocate funding would be a better approach to the problems facing Canadian news organizations than Bill C-18, which he said, “threatens the efficiency of news retrieval on the Internet and the ability of Canadians to access news content.”
The other witnesses were no more fans of C-18 than Palmer.
“I think C-18 is a very bad bill,” said Sue Gardner, McConnell professor of practice, Max Bell School of Public Policy, McGill University, former executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation and former head of CBC.ca.
She argued the bill “misdiagnoses the nature of the problem” by characterizing Google and Facebook having a large share of digital ad revenue as being unfair. The digital giants innovated and now provide a better way for advertisers to reach audiences – “that is not a fairness issue, it is not a moral issue, it doesn’t make them a villain,” she said.
Gardner also argued the bill “will not actually support quality journalism” and that it will have “significant unintended consequences” such as encouraging clickbait, incentivizing Google and Facebook to back away from news and enshrining in law that linking online is taking value.
Hal Singer (above), the managing director of Econ One who worked on the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) in the U.S. on behalf of the News Media Alliance, a collection of publishers, explained one of the things the JCPA does is grant an exemption to antitrust laws for news publishers enabling them to better coordinate their dealings with companies such as Google and Facebook.
An amendment to the act will ensure 65% of the funds collected pursuant to the act will be allocated to publishers “based on their pro-rata share of a newspaper’s spending on journalists,” he said. This means those who shed journalists would be punished. Singer later in the meeting added if the allocation is right, it will serve as an incentive for organizations to reinvest in journalists.
Singer advocated for C-18 to take a similar approach as he argued it would be a way to approach concerns about the quality of content distributed by those organizations benefitting from the bill.
The heritage committee will continue to hear witnesses on C-18 on Friday starting at 1 p.m.
