The Online News Act may be only days removed from having received royal assent, but the government’s plans to support the Canadian media sector have already backfired spectacularly. While it claimed its Bill C-18 would add millions of dollars to the sector and support struggling media companies, the reality has quickly intervened: blocked news sharing on Internet platforms with cancelled deals on the horizon, reports of direct corporate intervention in news departments, massive layoffs and regulatory requests to decrease spending on news, and now a nightmare merger proposal between Postmedia and Torstar. And that is just over the past week. Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has amply demonstrated that there is no Plan B, offering up the prospect of further dependence on government through more public spending to mitigate the harms from his massive miscalculations. Not all of this is the government’s doing, but having relied on empty assurances that blocked news sharing was merely a bluff, Rodriguez picked politics and tough talk over good policy and is now left with media chaos.
The media should not depend on private social networks to distribute their stories. They should share them using a decentralized open-source platform to protect themselves from greedy monopolistic companies!
I didn’t know what they could use… 😏
Don’t blame the shit happening now on a law that hasn’t even been applied yet. The job cuts didn’t happen because Meta blocked links a couple weeks ago and talks about a merger must have started months if not years ago (heck, they had traded some medias in the past).
Canada isn’t even the first country to adopt a law like this one and in Australia they Meta just gave up and came to an agreement.
