In response to the Online News Bill C-18, the two web giants are threatening to block Canadian journalistic content. The aim of this draft law, which is due to come into force in December, is a fairer distribution of the advertising revenue generated by information content.

However, the Canadian government is not the only one that wants to stand up to the digital giants, emphasizes Jean-Hugues Roy, professor at the School of Media at the Université du Québec à Montréal, citing the example of the California Journalism Preservation Act (California Journalism Protection Act).

The California legislature is currently working on a bill more restrictive than C-18explains Mr. Roy in an interview with RDI.

If the California law passes, platforms like Google or Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, would have to pay journalist companies a percentage of the revenue they make from advertising alongside their news content. In particular, the platforms should report quarterly on the number of pages viewed with informational content.

The percentage that would be paid to the news media is still unknown. According to the California law, this will be decided in an arbitration process. Parliamentary hearings begin on July 11.

The California bill worries platforms even more than Canada’s bill, the media specialist explains.

Australia was the first country to crack down on digital platforms to help the news media. Australia’s Parliament passed legislation in 2021 requiring web giants to pay for news content.

France’s tax on web giants, passed in 2019, is also part of this balance of power that governments are trying to enforce, except that the French parliament wasn’t specifically aimed at helping the media.

international issue

In the showdown between the Canadian government and the web giants, the response came primarily from Meta Canada, rather than its headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

However, the fight soon took an international turn.

So far it has been on the Meta Meta Canada side that responded, that blocked, that was hostile, Mr Roy points out, but on the Google side […]it wasn’t Google Canada that announced the removal of informational content, but its headquarters.

” The battlefield is in Canada, but the issue is international, the prime minister and politicians must take it to an international level. »

Joining forces with other countries could allow the Canadian government to end the negotiations with honor, says Mr. Roy.

The removal of government ads on Facebook, announced Wednesday, loses Meta about CA$11 million a year. That metric is quickly forgotten when you compare Meta’s Canadian revenue of CA$4 billion in 2022.

Now the next step for [M. Trudeau] would be to call his European colleagues [et] the governor of California [Gavin Newsom, NDLR] to show that Canada is not alone in thisthe specialist suggests.