Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
> digital news intermediary means an online communications platform, including a search engine or social media service, that is subject to the legislative authority of Parliament and that makes news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada
"Making available" includes just links. In other words, there is no qualifier in the bill what-so-ever that requires that previews and snippets be extracted and provided. A single link with no text or any other content whatever qualifies as "making available."
Here is the entire text of the bill: https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...
That sounds like a simple link wouldn't count?
> "Making available of news content (2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if
(a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or
(b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content."
So not only is there no qualifier saying that content needs to be reproduced, but (b) specifically says that "facilitating" access BY ANY MEANS counts as "making available."
Ranking seems harder to justify.
What if I create a search product that directs you to a site, based on information gleaned from another site?
Trivial example: a "Top 10 Topics in the News Today" list of Wikipedia links, based on scraping a news site's front page daily
On the one hand, "It's free info and scraping should be allowed." On the other hand, if everyone did that, it'd highjack all of the news site's visitors, depriving it of revenue and destroying the very resource it's built on.
Unless somebody loses a court case over hyperlinks, it feels extremely disingenuous to claim this law is going after hyperlinks when Google's content was blatantly more than hyperlinks (they provide excerpts).
Like, I can see Google pivoting to providing custom links and a script that runs in the users browser that will dynamically produce the snippets on the pages without the content technically going trough their servers...
1. Meta was the other "initial target." And so if we're in a mindset where we just dislike Google or "big powerful corporations that will stop at no end to ... whatever" then the application of the bill ALREADY hit a point where we can start to see how loosely the regulators will interpret Section 6. And according to the wording of that section, they just need to consider the "size" of the entity,"strategic advantage", and "prominent market position" in order to determine if they decide that the digital news intermediary has "a significant bargaining power imbalance."
2. With respects to what you think Google might do in order to try and "work around the law" ... I'm not a lawyer, but from what I've heard from lawyers, courts tend to be very intolerant towards people who try and apply a strict interpretation of the wording of a law in order to try and skirt around what it makes illegal. Common law, precedence and judicial interpretation really exists in large part to try and avoid that type of thing. Judges will look at things like the intent of the legislators, past court decisions and the intent of the accused in order to determine whether the accused is in violation.
In other words, Section 4 "Purpose", would be considered:
> Purpose 4 The purpose of this Act is to regulate digital news intermediaries with a view to enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contributing to its sustainability, including the sustainability of news businesses in Canada, in both the non-profit and for-profits sectors, including independent local ones.
As well as Google's intent. If the court were to gather that Google's intent was to try and work around the law, they go back to the Purpose, look at Google's actions and the EFFECT of their actions and will say "Sorry, you don't get to do shit like that to try and weasel your way out of the law. It still applies." And those types of actions can often be used as evidence of an intent to break the law, so any lawyer would likely advise their client to not even consider doing slimy shit like that.
I am however confused why you think the law being applied to the company having 91% of search in Canada is mission creep, you never actually say why claiming that Google has a "a significant bargaining power imbalance" is "loosely" interpreting the criteria....
And sure, the state might have a good chance of winning the court case about Google and Meta trying to avoid the law by not technically delivering the snippets themselves, but it'll take years for sure to go trough the courts. And why would you accept those several years where the damage the law is trying to prevent continues because you wanted the technical definitions to be narrow as when you already had criteria on company size.
I think you misunderstood my point.
I'm not talking about applying the law to Google, specifically. I'm not even saying that the government & regulators are "loosely interpreting the law." I'm saying that the criteria, as set out in Section 6 is itself intentionally loose to the point where it gives broad, sweeping and arguably arbitrary power to the regulators in order to decide who qualifies and why. That, if challenged in court, they only have to argue that a "significant bargaining power imbalance" exists because of some degree of consideration to "size" of the target, "prominent market position" and "strategic advantage." If that's not extremely broad and sweeping, I don't know what is.
Personally, I don't want my government and it's regulatory agencies having that type of unconstrained broad discretion. It allows them to:
- selectively target certain entities over others
- while in doing so, has the potential to create an unfair market environment while claiming that their goals are to achieve fairness
- it gives them a very broad paintbrush with which to select these entities
In your follow-up point about legal cases and years and cost of going through the court system .. if any target of this law wanted to challenge being targeted by the CRTC ... that's the exact type of lengthy and costly legal process that they would have to go through in suing the CRTC for exemption. It would be incredibly costly for the entity targeted, while having virtually zero consequences for the CRTC and the government if the courts were to rule in the entity's favour.
Just imagine how open to corruption this law is. The CRTC can "punish" certain entities while giving "favours" to others by choosing to leave them be and not target them.
And it should be pretty obvious that this is the case. If your interpretation was correct, Meta would not have removed Canadian news sources entirely. They'd just have removed the previews (hell, the news companies could have removed the previews themselves; they already have the controls for that).
Meta's actions prove absolutely nothing. I could similarly say that Google didn't remove any news, therefore the law has zero effect?
Meta has, for months in advance of anything coming into force, embargoed Canadian news and replaced it with an appeal to the reader. That is political action, and it seems to have failed given that the government didn't blink. Now that Google has an agreement, it looks especially silly.
If Meta continues their embargo of Canadian news, personally I consider that a good thing. The Canadian public accepting that Meta is not a good source or "homepage" for news is a wonderful outcome of all of this.
> (2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if
> (a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or
> (b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.
Is that wrong?
Sure, google currently has previews, and a law could be written to target previews, but I don't think this law targets previews.
A better criteria is: what fraction of people does it stop from visiting the source (because they got the information they were looking for from the summary). Yes, yes that system has it's own problems, but it is more holistic that string.length().
I'm no fan of Google these days, but I wish they had played hard ball on this. This is a total joke.
That's not true, however. It is also often including a summary and an image, which is certainly republishing or reposting the content. In no way is it "web-illiterate/ignorant" to refer to it as such, because it is more than just a link.
Facebook, yeah, that's something else. One thing that is legitimately bad about that is the way the content can be posted on whatever wall and then a pile of unmoderated public comments put on it, that the publisher has no control over.
A union strikes not because they want to withhold work from their company, but because even though both the company and the union members want to work, the strike shifts the power balance.
Similarly, Canadian journalists could have gotten together to withhold links from Google & Meta until they got a better deal. They'd both be worse off during the duration of the strike, but negotiations could get a better long term deal. And in this metaphor, Meta is doing a pre-emptive lockout.
The biggest difference is that the government is helping journalists combat the defector problem.
They could have done this but now they don't have to.
Basically while Reuters or AP are "on strike", Drudge Report, Jacobin, or Fox News would step in and become the de facto news sources across all of social media.
I suppose the issue is more that there's too much competition for news, rather than google making the competition unfair.
People have found that certain sites, topics, and words will trigger an outright shadowban on that post - your friends never see it.
The idea that facebook should have to pay a fee each time a user decides to share a link to news is stupid.
With the rise of rage and clickbait, that might be a really good thing to disincentivize many of the bad ways that media is produced and presented.
That's what happened in Australia's law from a couple of years ago. The law was ratified, but doesn't actually apply to any company, so what the law said was totally irrelevant.
The idiocy here is that most of these publishers are likely customers of Google's ad networks anyways, and the clicks through to the articles are yielding ad revenue to them, and they likely are getting analytics and tracking that identifies exactly where the inbound traffic is coming from.
It feels like a shakedown by people who are in other parts of the business totally disconnected from the web content / publishing arms, who likely know better?
It's true that the links only increase the revenue/traffic to their website though, so they should really be supporting the referrers rather than blocking them.
But you wouldn't do that if you want the link to resolve. If you don't want it to work, why would you go to all of the trouble of creating the link in the first place?
But also, the technical solution to bookmarks and small-scale sharing between friends is quite obvious. You don't need referrers to solve that problem.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
Negotiations between Google/Meta and the news organization when defining the service contract can explore alternative options (access token, for example) should it be an imperative, for some reason, that the referrer still be inaccessible. People are allowed to talk to each other.
What about bookmarks? I don't think clicking on a bookmark on your browser is going to send any Referer header.
Now, each successful entrance into an article via allowable referrer would come with an access token to allow future access absent of referral. When sharing in the small scale, the news agency can simply allow these links to be shared. But if the reach grows wide, suggesting that a major tech source has picked up the link and should be using their contractually settled upon authentication mechanism instead, then the token can be invalidated.
The access token plan is workable, though still causes annoying linking problems.
Views don't pay the bills. They only want viewers who are willing to pay to play (even if by proxy). C-18 ensures that payment is made, else user access is restricted by legal force. Which is the same outcome if it were done by technical force. They don't care about the restrictions on users who are eschewing payment in either case.
Making them leave and half give up, half come back via a paying search engine or social media site, is not going to be the most effective use of them.
Maybe that was true in the days before big tech, venture capital and advertising monetized the internet, but the internet has been vastly changed by those three groups, and not always for the better. They certainly do make a bunch of money though!
I do wish there was more distinction between a link and content display. I think there’s a very real concern that summaries lower click-through rates, which Google has been pushing for years and will be turbo-charged with LLMs summarizing content in the future. It would be interesting to see if there might be some future nuance around that.
> (b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.
Holding Meta as the good guys is pretty tenuous as well. Long, long before Meta had to do anything, like a crying, gnashing baby they blocked every source of news, across all of their properties, with a callout to Canadians declaring why. I pray that they stick with it, but I'm going to tell you the reality that Meta is going to make a similar deal, probably within days.
Because they make enormous sums on the Canadian market. And they have always pulled (or been pushed), aggregated and summarized news because it makes them money. The frequent claims on here that it's some incidental thing, if not some grand benevolence, is rather detached from reality.
And with every passing day more Canadians are just turning away from Meta properties because of their embargo. Again, I pray they actually stick with it and become irrelevant here (it is a toxic company that can be trusted with nothing), but they won't.
To play off what the other guy said, it's a pretty bizarre position to hold Meta as the good guys. If they have a position on something, it's an extremely good indication that that position is not a good one.
> And they have always pulled, aggregated and summarized news because it makes them money.
Not even accurate as news companies actively provide this content in their meta data explicitly for Meta to use. If they didn't want their content summarized they could stop it any time.
>This is a very poor argument
What do you even think the argument was? I said that Meta's position is an indicator. Don't pretend I said anything more, or strawman a counterpoint based upon nothing.
>Not even accurate
What a picking at nits. While I was talking about both companies generally, Facebook basically became the "go to" back when they absolutely did scrape news, similar to Google. Publishers started directly pushing their content there because they had basically no protections from it being pulled (you know -- "open internet" and all) and Canadians were conditioned to hit the "news" tab on Facebook as the homepage for news.
Again, my greatest hope is that Meta sticks with it. No news on FB, Threads, Instagram or elsewhere. A total embargo. That'll show em!
And you consider that a good thing? Laws that target companies by name? Your argument is that the ends justify the means. But in this case the ends is one set of large companies (some with large American ownership) lobbying the government to force other large companies to pay them for nothing. It's a gross abuse of power. Utterly unnecessary and entirely the Canadian way. This is the kind of thing that keeps the oligarchy alive in Canada.
> Again, my greatest hope is that Meta sticks with it. No news on FB, Threads, Instagram or elsewhere. A total embargo. That'll show em!
In this we absolutely agree. I also wish Google didn't cave. Of course, they didn't really cave though, they just did a side deal so this law wouldn't apply to them. This whole thing is just stupid and wrong.
> Facebook basically became the "go to" back when they absolutely did scrape news, similar to Google.
If any of these companies violated copyright then by all means let the media companies sue them.
I'm not sure what's going on in Canada for Meta to be seen as the "good guy". Feels like rooting for Hitler to defeat Stalin.
Even this law, the government abused parliamentary process and the COVID situation to avoid having this law debated in parliament before it was passed. They don't care about democracy, they don't care about the rule of law, they don't care about anything, they just do what benefits them and their friends.
I hate Canada's politically connected elite, and honestly prefer facebook
Don't wanna sound like a conspiracy nut but it's like that basically everywhere. The rich need to get richer, the poor need to tighten the belt.
Democracy needs constant supervision (who watches the watchmen?) and checks and bounds with accountability, otherwise, leaders left unaccountable and democracy left unchecked slowly devolves into a kleptocracy.
Does one counter-example disprove the rule?
I'm likely just naive and my eyes are not sufficiently opened - but I don't see a lot of obviously corrupt activity here in New Zealand. Corruption seems fairly endemic in most other countries I have visited. It isn't just a size thing because the problem seems to be worse in smaller countries and larger countries. 5 million population might be necessary but it's clearly insufficient to prevent grossly obvious corruption (other ~5M pop country examples). I'm hoping not to discover that our new government is more corruption friendly: so far they are appearing a bit less moral than the previous one.
Granted, there are worse places to be in the world right now than Canada (most of Africa, certain parts of SE Asia, Russia, Eastern Ukraine, etc), but why I think Canadians are so loud(not Canadian BTW) is that they witnessed a steep drop of their living standards and purchasing power withing a much shorter timespan than most developed countries (the same phenomenon is happening everywhere in the west) so you feel let down and hopeless when you know those from just a few decades ago had it so much better than you, and you're stuck in a cycle of relative poverty by comparison despite busting your ass off, while those in leadership positions are favoring those already financially well off instead of the struggling little guy.
I know the feeling because a lot of Europe is in a similar boat right now, albeit less severe than Canada.
No, NZ is an outlier. Regularly rated the least corrupt country on earth. “Basically everywhere” still holds.
Also, whilst NZ may not have explicit corruption such as bribing police directly, the grandparent post suggesting that special interests affect govt is still true. Jacinda was supposed to be the one shining hope that many believed would bring in CGT and she admitted it would never happen. The wealthy property owners (including most MPs) wouldn’t let that happen.
CGT doesn't really help fix the problem of property prices appreciating. I like immigration, but I still recognize that 30% immigrants has a huge impact on property prices.
If you want to fix the problem of wealthy landowners then you need to look at a better solution than CGT.
Labour actually brought in some good policies that helped reduce inequality. And some crappy ones too (I saw the effects of their lending policies on friends trying to buy their first home).
My problems with CGT are:
1: it definitely screws up incentives for anyone to make NZ more wealthy as a nation. I know this personally: even with tax rates as they are, I've got fuck-all incentive to invest (in a business or otherwise). CGT actually screws the pooch because I would have more incentive to play the property Ponzi scheme because CGT dis-incentivises me to invest in business risks.
2: why bother starting a successful business if you just get penalized after you win the game. I'm in this position: I'm an average guy that helped found a company that brought millions into NZ and it seems you don't want me to keep the small percentage that is my fair reward (for the years of work I put in and the risks I personally took).
3: CGT seems like tall-poppy-syndrome. If you want to target intergenerational wealth then target that.
I have no love for National.
CGT is definitely no panacea to the problems caused by inequality.
Too many NZers want us to join the other failed states in the world where we can all be equally fucked.
I really don't think CGT has anything to do with corruption.
If you want to argue for CGT - argue why we should tax the billionaire Peter Jackson and why it is fair. An extrodinary success that has mostly benefited NZ (economic and non-economic wins) - obvious consumer surplus - low externalities - tax supported but NZ got paid back - clear export and local gains. He was born into a typical NZ family. "His property portfolio in 2018 was estimated at NZ$150 million" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Jackson
I couldn't agree more. The current gov went way overboard with this, and by Google caving they have just guaranteed more of the same. There's no incentive from everyday people anymore for politicians to care about this.
I'm usually pretty in-the-middle on issues, but in this case it seems ridiculous. Google is giving them a valuable service for free by sending traffic their way. If it wouldn't violate neutrality, they should pay Google not the other way around[1]. A quick logic check helps reinforce this: If appearing in the search results were a bad thing for them, then why would these companies hire SEO experts to bolster their search rankings?
[1]: Note this is regarding the "tax" for serving a link, not talking about a full preview or AI summary or something, on which I'm much more sympathetic to the site owners and think they have a legitimate case worthy of debate
As a Canadian, this is exciting to me. I agree strongly with the goals of the law (while holding nitpicks about the actual wording). I think the fact that Google came to an agreement shows that they don't have a fundamental issue with the law either (or they could've just withdrawn from our market, like Meta). It's a win for independent media in Canada, and thereby, for all Canadians.
Or they calculated that the agreement is the less expensive option. We're both speculating, of course, but it's possible that they figure that not linking to news in Canada would put them at a [even greater] competitive disadvantage which could potentially cost them more in lost business as Canadian users and customers seek alternatives.
Alternatives, I might add, that are not unfairly targeted by a law granting regulators arbitrary powers to target and penalize some companies over others.
I also want to point out that the conclusion that Google has no issue with the bill because of the agreement reached is another reason I'm disappointed... because of course that's how it will be interpreted by supporters of the bill, and they will hammer that message home with a very heavy hand: "Look! Even our victims support what we're doing to them!"
That's a strange thing to conclude.
If the grocery store wanted to charge me 10 cents per visit for the air I breathe, I would have fundamental issues with that, but I'd still probably pay. And I'm far more motivated by emotion than a publicly traded company.
> I agree strongly with the goals of the law
I like the goals too. But I think the method is terrible, and that matters.
Really? You'd just pay it? (maybe negotiate them down to 6 cents like google did then pay it?) I'd probably just stop going to that grocery store (eg like meta no longer serving Canadian media)
But I'm willing to pay an entrance fee. It's like Costco but dumber. I wouldn't change stores over such a small number.
What exactly do you agree with? This is clearly just a shakedown and they're making very little effort to disguise it. Are you a shareholder of the corporations that will benefit from this arrangement?
I think the US is f'd up, and I don't want to be a part of it. But I also don't want to be a part of the gross kleptocratic mediocracy that's been built here.
The BBC article from 2021 linked above even says "The law is seen as a test case for similar regulation around the world."
It's carriage drivers making the automobile industry pay them a fine for the crime of making them obsolete.
That's utter nonsense. If google is sending traffic to a site, then naturally they consider that site valuable in some way. Nothing about google makes news "obsolete", and in fact google is basically just a website for finding news articles (and other content). The Canadian implementation of this law, unlike the Australian one for example, gives google the option of excluding these news sites from search results entirely if they consider them unnecessary. That google has chosen to negotiate a deal instead demonstrates that google recognizes the value these sites provide.
I was mostly thinking of the lobbying groups in europe which very much didn't want to allow the "exclude from search results" opt-out.
In the regular world, people pay for links. Google had to ban the practice of paying for links because links are so valuable. And people still do it.
It is nonsensical to argue that links are a cost. So, this law was an attempt at a shakedown.
And it didn't work very well. Meta walked, and this deal with google exempts it from the law if it pays $100 million. All existing deals with the media were cancelled too.
Arguably it violates international agreements Canada has signed, as they essentially agreed to a level playing field for local and international firms.
[usual disclaimer: I work at Google but on nothing related to search or policy]
For example, with a current gov like Canada, I think they'd be more worried about government action than competitors, and that's plenty of an incentive to get them to pay the money.
Or maybe they think the engineering work to maintain a whole separate search page, and revenue loss from not including links, is less than the amount they stand to pay.
---
This Act applies in respect of a digital news intermediary if, having regard to the following factors, there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news businesses:
(a) the size of the intermediary or the operator;
(b) whether the market for the intermediary gives the operator a strategic advantage over news businesses; and
(c) whether the intermediary occupies a prominent market position.
---
So a new search engine most likely won't initially have the size and market position necessary for the law to apply.
Google and facebook refused, and I think this is Canada's government and their media lobbyists bowing to a watered down money payment to save face after not getting what they actually sought for
Do you find this more valuable than the act of actually researching, writing, editing, and publishing the articles themselves?
If Google stops linking to news articles, media companies would be the bigger losers than Google would be. Admittedly Google isn't Facebook -- it's value to users comes from indexing everything. This is probably why they accepted this deal.
As a Canadian, I wish that they'd just gone ahead and blocked Canadian news.
Only on the margin. If all countries in the world simultaneously imposed this law, and google stopped linking all news articles world wide, then Google would be the bigger loser than media companies.
It's important to acknowledge the problem: Google extracts more monetary value from the news industry ecosystem than the the value it creates.
I am not entirely sure if forcing Google to pay that difference is the correct solution, or whether helping evil media companies in this way is the right thing to do, but the problem exists.
Large media sites would perhaps benefit from that but in general I don't think that's the case. I get almost all my news from link aggregate sites like Hackernews and Reddit. If I didn't get news links from those sites, I'd end up consuming less news. Especially local news.
> It's important to acknowledge the problem: Google extracts more monetary value from the news industry ecosystem than the the value it creates.
I don't think that's the problem. The problem is that news just isn't that valuable anymore. The only reason it was as profitable at all was local monopolies on distribution. Craigslist did more to kill media profitability than Google could ever do. Now you just have a thousand media companies all writing an article on the same current event and trying to capture a few eye balls mostly from being linked to elsewhere.
Those 1000 --media-- news companies have been created in part by Google. Google created a game, where the website with the best SEO would bubble up to the top of their news results - not the website with the best editorial standards. This was Google 'commoditifying its complement'. In the absence of Google (but even in the presence of social media like HN or Facebook), there would be far fewer news websites that would be rewriting/summarizing the work of the actual journalistic newspapers. And in such a scenario the fewer news companies would actually make enough to continue to do serious journalism.
This is a lot more apparent if you look at other languages, which are not indexed as much by Google. There the status of news companies is a lot better.
It's important to consider what someone would pay for news directly alongside the value that a healthy media ecosystem plays in a healthy society. It's not called the fourth estate because someone thought it would be fun.
It’s purely a cost of doing business thing, which is why I think the calculation is different for Meta. On Facebook there’s just so much content to fill the void that news isn’t such a big loss.
And who gets to distribute the revenue?
Nothing else I can think of works like this. Generally if you take the work of others without being allowed and use it to make money you'll end up in trouble.
Now, for most people the trade-off is worth it, but it should not be the default. It should be a quick opt-in using robots.txt.
If you put your site on the public internet, you are effectively opting in. In addition, robots.txt is trivially easy to configure if you really don't want your site to be crawled by specific parties' crawlers.
The news corporations absolutely want their sites crawled, to the point that if Google unilaterally stopped crawling their sites they would run to the courts to file lawsuits.
Both sides have a point here. I'm not sure where I end up on the issue myself.
Why would that be a problem? Open Graph was created by Meta exactly so that these news sites have editorial control over those details. And the Canadian news outlets have adopted Open Graph, so that is not an issue. If they don't like what is shown, they have full control to change it. The headline/blurb/image you see is what they have specified. That is what they want you to see.
The real problem is that reporting the news doesn't pay very well anymore and certain news players were on the hunt for a government subsidy to offset that reality.
Sure, and then some other news agency that does include more content in their metadata will be shared in the aggregator instead, because it will at least bring in a little revenue. It's a race to the bottom, and the outcome for the original reporter is the same: no payment for their work.
> The real problem is that reporting the news doesn't pay very well anymore
Well, yeah! That is the problem! Google is getting the money that used to go to the news agencies. This is one attempt at a fix.
What provisions are in this bill to ensure that the money ends up in the reporters' hands, and not the media agencies' hands? Without that then you still have the exact same "race to the bottom" scenario – with the reporter seeing no payment for their work.
What provisions are in this bill to ensure that the reporters are able to create their own brand to break free of the media agencies? If the intent is to see Google/Meta drive the traffic and also pay the reporters, the middleman agency serves no purpose.
An even weirder perspective: What if they didn't kill reader?
$100 million a year can incentivise some awful outcomes.
And all pre-existing Meta and Google deals have been cancelled. This $100 million is all there is.
The local CTV outlet still does (not sure about their wider brand, I only look for local news). They just can't link back to CTV's website anymore.
Or some other sort of club instead of a school.
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...
So just like in Australia, the applies to nobody. The text of the law isn't very relevant, the whole thing is intended as an elaborate shakedown.
https://www.thebeaverton.com/2023/08/read-our-letter-threate...
This. From the C-18 bill:
Requires the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (the “Commission”) to maintain a list of digital news intermediaries in respect of which the enactment applies.
Doesn't sound transparent to me. What does "fairness" mean? "Independent" of whom? "Recognized" by whom?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHOI-FM#Dispute_with_the_CRTC
[1] https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/crtc-delays-decision-...
There are some exclusions for foreign owned outlets.
news business means an individual or entity that operates a news outlet in Canada. (entreprise de nouvelles)
news content means content — in any format, including an audio or audiovisual format — that reports on, investigates or explains current issues or events of public interest and includes such content that an Indigenous news outlet makes available by means of Indigenous storytelling. (contenu de nouvelles)
news outlet means an undertaking or any distinct part of an undertaking whose primary purpose is to produce news content and includes an Indigenous news outlet or an official language minority community news outlet. (média d’information)
Eligible news businesses — designation 27 (1) At the request of a news business, the Commission must, by order, designate the business as eligible if it
(a) is a qualified Canadian journalism organization as defined in subsection 248(1) of the Income Tax Act, or is licensed by the Commission under paragraph 9(1) (b) of the Broadcasting Act as a campus station, community station or native station as those terms are defined in regulations made under that Act or other categories of licensees established by the Commission with a similar community mandate;
(b) produces news content of public interest that is primarily focused on matters of general interest and reports of current events, including coverage of democratic institutions and processes, and
(i) regularly employs two or more journalists in Canada, which journalists may include journalists who own or are a partner in the news business and journalists who do not deal at arm’s length with the business,
(ii) operates in Canada, including having content edited and designed in Canada,
(iii) produces news content that is not primarily focused on a particular topic such as industry-specific news, sports, recreation, arts, lifestyle or entertainment, and
(iv) is either a member of a recognized journalistic association and follows the code of ethics of a recognized journalistic association or has its own code of ethics whose standards of professional conduct require adherence to the recognized processes and principles of the journalism profession, including fairness, independence and rigour in reporting news and handling sources; or
(c) operates an Indigenous news outlet in Canada and produces news content that includes matters of general interest, including coverage of matters relating to the rights of Indigenous peoples, including the right of self-government and treaty rights.
Public list 29 (1) The Commission must maintain a list of eligible news businesses and publish that list on its website. An eligible news business is only included on the list if it gives its consent.
Most of the time it's not worthwhile though because few companies will pay, and at some point breaking the web starts losing you votes so politicians will back down first. Except when it's Google..
Canada: the best democracy, money can buy. /s
It’s still a bad law, and Google shouldn’t have capitulated.